Really? I think its more a testament to just how well NASA over-engineers and builds everything for the absolute worst case scenario that we get so much extra use out of these things. I mean look at how long Voyager has lasted way the hell out in the cold depths, that's a tough built ship right there.
But this is why I've always supported the robotics space exploration programs, with our current tech "meatbags in spaaace!" really doesn't make much sense. I mean when you figure in what it would take to get a crew of five to mars and back its just insanity, I remember seeing a video where they did the math and for a 3 month stay on the ground and round trip from here to there you'd have needed a ship bigger than the empire state building just to carry all the consumables and fuel needed, I don't even want to know how much it would cost for a stay as long as these rovers have had there. At the end of the day we can just get more done with the machine than we can with the man, our tech just isn't good enough right now to make "meatbags in spaace!" viable.
The only thing WebM has going for it is Google money, and we haven't seen any indication they are willing to put their money where their mouth is. As far as technical merits...what is wrong with Theora and Drac? I tried them both and they run nicely, Drac is better IMHO as it doesn't seem to need as many CPU cycles as Theora but both of them seemed to work decently.
But frankly I'll take any damned thing you have to offer over H.264, its a fricking pig. You take any video and without hardware acceleration to give it a way to cheat H.264 will suck more CPU cycles, more memory, and more bandwidth, especially when you compare it to Flash using VP6 which it is supposed to be replacing. I have found you can take a 2GHz Sempron single and run VP6 encoded flash just fine, the exact same video in H.264? It'll be a jerky slideshow on anything less than a dual core.
When you have to build hardware support in just for the damned thing to run without sucking cycles like a drunk sucking down a free mini-bar? Its not a good format folks. I have a feeling the reason H.264 was chosen is nothing but how many patents they have, it makes for a nice high barrier to entry for competition, and if its one thing we have seen over and over its these corps fricking hate having competition.
This is why I railed against H.264 in HTML V5, as MPEG-LA made it VERY clear when Mozilla tried dealing with them that there will NEVER be any license that covers downstream, ever.
The sad part is thanks to them being villains with good PR Apple will ram so much nasty shit through with HTML V5 its gonna be a corporate wet dream, but because so many devs dream of iMoney they won't say boo. Look at how many actually tried to excuse having HTML V5 stuck with H.264 over WebM or Theora or Drac with "Its open!". Bullshit, its a patent troll, and now its built in to the future of the web and I have no doubt Apple will get the DRM rammed through as well.
I feel a rant coming on..To all the guys that said "Anybody but M$!" that bought Apple products to stick to teh man? You deserve this, the point was to replace MSFT with something better NOT with something worse. The sad part is how many buy the bullshit, H.264 is worse in EVERY SINGLE METRIC over the Flash that its supposed to replace, worse in CPU, memory,bandwidth, and of course while Adobe let you package Flash with anything and even let there be a FOSS spinoff without so much as a C&D you're gonna replace it with a patent troll, because St Steve of Cupertino said it should be so. Did anybody ever think, for even a second, he just MIGHT have an ulterior motive? Like how Flash would let anybody host apps and games without going through his appstore?
What is fucking sad and pathetic is for the first time in history we have made truly insane amount of CPU power affordable to the masses, computers like something out of Dick Tracy you can throw in your pocket that can do just incredible things, and this huge web of knowledge that opens up everything, music, video, the world, yet we are gonna hand the whole damned thing over to the suits because they are good at the bullshit and they make shiny hipster toys...fuck! Wake the fuck up people, these are NOT nice guys! How many lawsuits have we seen from MPEG-LA in the past 5 years? How many from Apple? You are replacing a bumbling hamfisted company like MSFT with one that can actually pull off their nasty plans, doesn't anybody think this is a bad idea? Don't replace one master for another guys, that is just insanity.
Look up the first gun laws friend, hell look at how they demonized the Saturday Night Special...do you know who the #1 customer of that particular gun was? Blacks. I found out about it when watching a history show on guns and they had the head of the rainbow coalition talking about how for over a century every single gun law was nothing but "feared of an armed negro" because you can't lynch somebody that can defend themselves. This was followed by the pictures of the ones that brought this or that gun law to the floor and quotes by them that was....wow. It was amazing how many ways they had for saying nigger without actually saying the word, from "ghetto thugs" to "armed urban threat".
Not to mention the whole thing ignores the elephant rotting in the corner, that old Monty makes anybody working on MariaDB sign over their code so he could pull the same trick twice and sell it out from under them just as he sold MySQL.
Now don't get me wrong, I think Monty has big brass balls to be able to pull what he did last time and get away with it, he made them think they were actually buying a product in MySQL and in reality all they got was the name and the website, he ended up walking away with the code AND the customers, how he got them to buy without a do not compete I don't know but it took some big brass ones to pull it off.
But like the old saying goes "fool me once.." what is to stop Monty from pulling the same game with MariaDB? Nothing that I can see, he still has it set up so no matter who works on it HE owns the code, which means he can do whatever he wants with it. Now maybe he scammed enough off the last sale that this won't be appealing, maybe not, would you really want to take that chance?
Well anybody who has followed me here knows I'm quick to call out bullshit where i see it and saying "X is bad" because X can be used badly while ignoring that A-Z can likewise be made to run piss poor code? Bullshit.
And maybe I should have made myself more clear, when i think of server backends i think of one or more X86 units doing the job whereas the big iron is a completely different story. Sure it CAN be used as a generic server backend but considering how much those suckers cost that wouldn't be the brightest thing to do, last article i saw said the biggest growth for the mainframe were in these huge MMOs and military simulations, jobs where you would need such a huge pile of X86 units it just wouldn't be practical.
Waste mod points all you want but name ONE TIME, just one, in human history where the entire planet was sent backwards by anything OTHER than religion. Religion is the ONLY thing that can give a man the God like powers to ultimately destroy pretty much everything, be it the math revolution in the Arab world or the centuries of knowledge built up by the Romans, religion is the ONLY way to gain enough power over enough people to completely wipe everything out like that until the invention of the atomic bomb.
Now if you want to argue its not the fault of the religion itself, but the assholes in charge of it? Fine but I would argue that you are splitting hairs as throughout history religion ALWAYS gets taken over by the assholes, from the Catholics burning anything and anyone they didn't agree with to the mullahs having anything that didn't say Allah destroyed it always ends up in the hands of major douchebags, but unlike politics this is not something one can have an opposition for easily because "You are against God you heathen" and so on and so forth.
There is a good reason why religion has been called "the opiate of the masses" you know, its because it allows a handful to have control over large populations in such a way that only drug addiction comes close.
Yeah this is a giant fail because the whole point of "Ask Slashdot" is to ask solvable problems that are too geeky for your usual places, stuff like "How can I record securely in my car" or like the problem I had with a customer whose computers kept getting hacked i asked in the comments where it turned out his router had been compromised, its for questions which can actually be ANSWERED.
Whether Yahoo can pull off a come back or not should really be under general, not under Ask Slashdot. As for the question itself, if they continue to not be MSFT? Its possible, I've been making countless Yahoo accounts for customers pissed off at MSFT killing Live Messenger and Hotmail so they could pick up those users and run with them as long as they don't shit all over the UIs like MSFT does.
It reminds me of an interview I saw where one of the guys that worked on drone tech was laughing about that shit. He said he was brought into a meeting with the brass and they asked "how much would it cost to build this?" and they handed him...a picture of the T-800 from Terminator. He said he laughed and laughed...until he realized they were serious and then he REALLY laughed. They honestly thought you could just build a T-800 if they threw enough money at it. The same thing happened to the director of Blue Thunder who said he phone was swamped for 6 months after the movie was released from different military and SWAT forces all wanting to know "How much for the chopper?". he was pissed though as he made a movie against too much power in the wrong hands and the same powers thought it was a tech demo.
I'd say this just shows how much of a bubble those guys live in compared to reality when they can see something in a movie and think they can just wave their magic pen and make that shit work. Not only is this impossible from a practical sense as the gun would be more likely to fail than it would be to work but frankly it is also a little racist when you think about it since this would raise gun prices to the thousands per handgun and a LOT of the past gun laws can be summed up as "fear of an armed negro". Hell look up the history of gun laws, for nearly a century going back to the very first gun laws they can be summed up as that, and I don't even want to know how much putting all that tech into a gun would cost even IF you could somehow make it functional.
Not unless tumblr lets you create communities around particular subjects. I haven't used the thing but from what I was told it was more like Twitter than Geocities. With Geocities say you liked "Buffy TVS" you could then go to a Buffy site and it would have links on the left to all the other affiliated Buffy sites and then that would be broken down to various actors,spinoffs, future and past story arcs, you could land on a single page and from there find out pretty much everything there was to know about a subject with no more than 3 clicks.
But isn't that true of ANY language? I mean you name the language and I could find bad examples of code done in it, again its not the language's fault, its the coder. I have seen beautiful VB and I've seen piss awful C++, doesn't make one better than another, just meant the one writing in VB was better than the coder writing in C++.
But again it all comes down to using the right tool for the job, Java seems to work well on server backends, COBOL works well on mainframes, VB was good for GUIs for local DBs, as long as you don't try to force it to do a job its not good at I really don't see the problem.
What always fascinated me about history is how we would go through cycles when it came to tech, it seems we would advance to a certain point, some religion would come along and burn everything that didn't have (insert name of Deity) on it, the tech would be lost, only for us to slowly build ourselves back up.
I mean look at ancient Rome and Greece, you had theater, take out, taxis that charged by distance, steam power (mainly used for toys and tricks because slaves were cheaper) and they even used lithium for mental problems by sending them to the baths which had lithium dissolved in the water.
Sadly though as we have seen time and time again all it takes is the rise of a religion to wipe out centuries of tech, look at what Christianity did to the Roman Empire or what Islam did to the Arab world which frankly hasn't recovered to this very day. Neil Degrasse Tyson in one of his lectures points out how much of our advanced mathematics and astronomy came from the Arab world only for all innovation there to be wiped out in less than a century thanks to one of the mullahs declaring advanced math was "eeeevil!", probably because he couldn't understand it.
I think its pretty obvious why they want to sell, they lost 12 million bucks last year and there really is no way to monetize the users without them all just leaving. That is the whole problem with all this "social" aimed crap in a nutshell, any attempts to monetize them will result in a shittier experience and the users walking away.
But yeah opportunity cost is a good way of looking at it, if these companies buy one too many stupid companies when that smart company that might actually be a good fit comes along they may either be short of capital or the board will be seriously reluctant to spend the money in light of previous failures. I mean if a perfect fit for HP came along that cost say 4 billion how likely do you think the board will be to bite when they've had to write off over 10 billion from previous deals? And this one is insanely stupid, spending 92% of their cash on a single company that hasn't even turned a profit yet?
if I didn't know better I'd be wondering if this CEO is a plant designed to lower the value thus making it easier to buy Yahoo out, but sadly more likely just another incompetent rich CEO that will make a ton of money no matter how stupidly or badly they do their job. The rich get richer is one of the few constants in the universe it seems.
Oh bullshit, malware is a billion dollar business for crooks and they have ALWAYS gone where the money is, period the end. In case you haven't kept up with current events, more clueless people than ever have smartphones and tablets that are frankly more powerful than Windows was when it first got malware, so guess what their next big target is?
Oh and just FYI but android will hit one million malware infections any day now so keep up with the bullshit, the article proves that Linux (which the community was quick to claim Android as their own) is just as big a haven for malware as everything else. Surprise surprise, a modern OS can get pwned, who would have thought.
Watch me get hate for even saying it but I'm tired of so many making him out to be a hero when all he is is a junkie that skipped out on a murder charge.
I mean lets just look at what we know to be facts, FACT 1- he bragged about doing a highly dangerous drug in large quantities (bath salts) that is known to cause paranoia, violence, and feelings of persecution. FACT 2- He also bragged about his rather large gun collection and was known to often carry guns on his person, FACT 3- The ONLY person that they reported having any beef with the deceased was McAfee, with them getting into several heated arguments about all the shit going on at his compound...now if YOU were running the police, who would be YOUR prime suspect in this case?
We are talking about a guy that is a proven and known liar, who in his Q&A with Slashdot talked about how he had been "clean and sober for 15 years" when his own blogs from 6 months before the incident were filled with his rantings about how bath salts gave him massive boners that allowed him to keep up with the 16 year olds he was banging at the compound. We are also talking about a guy that paid others to dress and act like him when the cops were looking for a suspect in a murder case that was known to have firearms and thus could have easily gotten one of them killed...this is NOT a nice guy folks, its really not.
People seem to forget there is a family that now mourns and the only real suspect the police had obstructed an investigation and skipped town. Would anybody be cheering this guy if the man he was accused of killing was on US soil at the time? would anybody be cheering if it was the opposite and a man in the USA had been murdered and he skipped to Belize?
When you break it down the sad and ugly truth is a lot of the arguments for this guy end up coming down to racism and nationalism, like any crime that happens in South America "doesn't count" because they can't be trusted to run even a single murder investigation and they MUST be corrupt, which if that were true being rich would have given him MORE of an advantage as he could have just bought them off. The whole thing just stinks and with pricks like this running around and people cheering this sociopath you can see where the phrase "Ugly American" comes from, I just wish more people had as much feeling for the dead guy as they show for this douchebag.
Hell go to Amazon and you'll find dozens to choose from under a hundred bucks, stuff like WDTV Live, hell if all he wants is to stream local content there are a ton of Chinese players that can do that under $80.
So I really don't see what the selling point of this is, surely there aren't enough Google fanboys out there willing to shell out to make this thing profitable, see the player that Google and Logitech put out (revue i think?) for an example.
You know I never understood the hate for this or that language as the way I always saw it all the complaints about this or that language could be boiled down to "using it where it doesn't belong" whereas if you just would have stuck with using it where it made sense all would be chocolate and puppies.
Take VB for instance, you want to see a "real programmer" go foam at the mouth just mention VB in their presence, but if you just stuck with what VB was good at, which is building GUIs for local DBs quickly and easily? Then it was fricking great, nothing IMHO comes close to VB for that particular task.
So I just don't get the hate, i really don't. Sure the old "If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" rule applies when it comes to using this or that language where it doesn't make sense but that is true of ALL languages. I bet the old COBOL guys here can probably name 3 or 4 use cases where COBOL just works brilliantly and I say good for them, you should use the right tool for the job no matter what is hip or happening today.
They aren't MSFT? Seriously that is it, I can tell you that I have had to set up countless yahoo accounts for my customers in the last 6 months as the switch from Live Messenger and Hotmail to Skype and Outlook (which most of their users I talked to frankly thought was inferior) ran off a LOT of customers.
Now one would argue that if that was the case why didn't they go to Google but the answer is simple, the way Google treats everything like a chat turns off a lot of the users, and with MSFT shitting all over its customer base trying to be Apple that left only Yahoo. So the fact that Yahoo suddenly got a big bounce really doesn't surprise me, you had a LOT of people that were using Hotmail and Messenger that bailed when MSFT started to force the switch and really Yahoo was the only alternative that was in any way similar to what they had.
Actually you may laugh at me but geocities actually served a function which Yahoo promptly shat all over and ruined. What Geocities was in reality was the first "fan driven" web, from fanfics to fanpages it was a magnet so people that liked a particular subject could get together and discuss that subject and you'd be surprised how well it worked for that. Hell there was several times that Whedon and Mutant Enemy would go to these to not only get fan reactions but to see where the fans thought things should go and the same was true of the writers of Star Trek and several other sci-fi and horror of the time, it gave the fan community and the writers an easy way to interact and for that it worked quite well.
So yes I would say losing Geocities was a "loss" because despite all the jokes it gave people a centralized place where they could discuss their favorite works, learn of other works in a similar vein, and to discuss where they thought the works should be heading.
Bingo! Give that man a ceegar! The problem with spending any real money on these things is that the users have zero brand loyalty and can just disappear like a fart in the breeze, we have seen this time and time again, from MySpace to Flickr, you try overloading the place with ads to try to get your money back and the users bail and you are left with a ghosttown...how much did Yahoo pay for Flickr or Geocities?
The sad part is this CEO is not only doing something insanely stupid, they don't even seem to realize WHY Yahoo has had that sudden growth all of a sudden, as somebody in the trenches I can tell you why....MSFT backlash. Trying to force all their users into a "MSFT Ecosystem" by killing Live Messenger and Hotmail for Skype and Outlook ran a LOT of the users off and since they don't like the "everything is chat" style of Google, guess where they went?
Yahoo is betting the farm on people actually liking the brand when in reality they just hate the other guy THAT much, but the loyalty just isn't there which they are gonna find out the hard way when they try to get a ROI on this, not to mention as others have pointed out your pension funds and the like aren't gonna want to invest in a porn company and that pretty much is what Tumblr is used for, porn clips.
You know, I have heard that argument several times and i just don't think it holds up to logic, its the same one that MSFT apologists use when explaining away why all their failed acquistitions don't matter but just because they have a LOT of money does not mean they have INFINITE money, and one can only throw around a billion here and a billion there before as they say in Washington it becomes "real money".
Can Google, Apple, and MSFT piss more money away with zero ROI? Sure they can. does that mean it isn't gonna hurt them over time? That would depend on how much positive cash flow they can keep coming in and whether or not spending that money on stupid shit costs them an opportunity down the road that could have actually worked.
Actually IIRC there were several patents in WWII that were given out in secret by the government for tech that the government deemed to much of a risk to allow to be filed publicly, they kept those patents on ice until they were no longer cutting edge military tech and then allowed those that had secretly filed them to profit from those war time inventions. IIRC a lot of them were early computer designs and things to do with computers that they were afraid the Russians would be able to copy after the war.
Nope sorry, because you are ignoring the fact that he made one of the most blatant cardinal sins of any bad guy which is lampooned even today, so sure by his time he would have actually read a book or seen a film and known that was a bad idea, which was you NEVER assume your plan is gonna work so you at the very least have a backup plan.
I mean we are talking about the complete wiping out of his home planet and everyone he has ever loved for piss sake, you do NOT leave that much up to chance! I mean you go ask anybody who hasn't seen the movie what they would do and they will ALWAYS give you the same answer "Warn everybody", when every person comes up with the same obvious answer and your bad guy doesn't do that with ZERO explanation? I'm sorry but that is a plothole you can drive a truck through, right up there with Picard going back in time 3 minutes when if he would have went back 2 weeks he would have saved his family, the research station AND got the bad guy.
the only way for that plot to work would be if the guy is completely batshit or a drooling moron and he never struck me as either of those so I'm gonna chalk it up to shitty writing. Lets face it most time travel in ST has been piss poor at best, but this is "I have no time to explain!" while setting in a time machine level of stupid in my book.
I don't know if you are joking or not, if not it was established several times that one of the reasons the federation didn't trade tech was that "That replicator that can give you food can just as easily give you a gun" so once they had the template (which again was stated was in their database which was how the Vulcan made it) they could have cranked that thing out like flapjacks.
So this isn't even an "it would be immoral" like using Saron's sun exploder tech that Picard found to take out the home system of the enemy, this is a gun that would give your troops a HUGE advantage against an enemy that is bred in tanks to be disposable (and thus you should feel no guilt in wasting, as they are programmed to obey their "gods" and can't be reasoned with) so the only reason NOT to use this tech would be the leaders are retards.
This of course isn't even getting into the fact that the federation knew how to use time travel which meant that when it looked like they were gonna lose the war all it would have took is sending back a single ship to before the Dominion ever came through and closing the wormhole. Any way you slice it the federation comes off being like Chuck at SFDebris described the republic in the prequels "who deserve to lose because its just run all stupid".
Thank you. this is why I refuse to watch ANYTHING by Bay or Abrams in theaters, because at least when I play it on a PC I can use the player to tone down the bright flashing bullshit so I don't end the evening with a skull thumper from hell. My Ex GF used to complain about that so i said "Fine, Transformers 2 is playing at the theater, lets go" and sure enough after walking out she said "Okay I get it, now my eyes hurt and my ears are ringing"
This is coming from somebody who LOOOVVVVVEEESSS Action and Sci-Fi, hell I went to see the original Predator and First Blood like half a dozen times each just so I could enjoy the big screen, but Abrams and Bay are like being assaulted by the movie, Abrams with a billion damned flashing lights and lens flares and Bay with blasting sound effects and jump cuts making shit look like it was shot by an epileptic. I'm sorry but that is not pleasant and NOT what Star Trek was about, watch Wrath or Undiscovered again and see what the difference a decent director makes.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? I think its more a testament to just how well NASA over-engineers and builds everything for the absolute worst case scenario that we get so much extra use out of these things. I mean look at how long Voyager has lasted way the hell out in the cold depths, that's a tough built ship right there.
But this is why I've always supported the robotics space exploration programs, with our current tech "meatbags in spaaace!" really doesn't make much sense. I mean when you figure in what it would take to get a crew of five to mars and back its just insanity, I remember seeing a video where they did the math and for a 3 month stay on the ground and round trip from here to there you'd have needed a ship bigger than the empire state building just to carry all the consumables and fuel needed, I don't even want to know how much it would cost for a stay as long as these rovers have had there. At the end of the day we can just get more done with the machine than we can with the man, our tech just isn't good enough right now to make "meatbags in spaace!" viable.
The only thing WebM has going for it is Google money, and we haven't seen any indication they are willing to put their money where their mouth is. As far as technical merits...what is wrong with Theora and Drac? I tried them both and they run nicely, Drac is better IMHO as it doesn't seem to need as many CPU cycles as Theora but both of them seemed to work decently.
But frankly I'll take any damned thing you have to offer over H.264, its a fricking pig. You take any video and without hardware acceleration to give it a way to cheat H.264 will suck more CPU cycles, more memory, and more bandwidth, especially when you compare it to Flash using VP6 which it is supposed to be replacing. I have found you can take a 2GHz Sempron single and run VP6 encoded flash just fine, the exact same video in H.264? It'll be a jerky slideshow on anything less than a dual core.
When you have to build hardware support in just for the damned thing to run without sucking cycles like a drunk sucking down a free mini-bar? Its not a good format folks. I have a feeling the reason H.264 was chosen is nothing but how many patents they have, it makes for a nice high barrier to entry for competition, and if its one thing we have seen over and over its these corps fricking hate having competition.
This is why I railed against H.264 in HTML V5, as MPEG-LA made it VERY clear when Mozilla tried dealing with them that there will NEVER be any license that covers downstream, ever.
The sad part is thanks to them being villains with good PR Apple will ram so much nasty shit through with HTML V5 its gonna be a corporate wet dream, but because so many devs dream of iMoney they won't say boo. Look at how many actually tried to excuse having HTML V5 stuck with H.264 over WebM or Theora or Drac with "Its open!". Bullshit, its a patent troll, and now its built in to the future of the web and I have no doubt Apple will get the DRM rammed through as well.
I feel a rant coming on..To all the guys that said "Anybody but M$!" that bought Apple products to stick to teh man? You deserve this, the point was to replace MSFT with something better NOT with something worse. The sad part is how many buy the bullshit, H.264 is worse in EVERY SINGLE METRIC over the Flash that its supposed to replace, worse in CPU, memory,bandwidth, and of course while Adobe let you package Flash with anything and even let there be a FOSS spinoff without so much as a C&D you're gonna replace it with a patent troll, because St Steve of Cupertino said it should be so. Did anybody ever think, for even a second, he just MIGHT have an ulterior motive? Like how Flash would let anybody host apps and games without going through his appstore?
What is fucking sad and pathetic is for the first time in history we have made truly insane amount of CPU power affordable to the masses, computers like something out of Dick Tracy you can throw in your pocket that can do just incredible things, and this huge web of knowledge that opens up everything, music, video, the world, yet we are gonna hand the whole damned thing over to the suits because they are good at the bullshit and they make shiny hipster toys...fuck! Wake the fuck up people, these are NOT nice guys! How many lawsuits have we seen from MPEG-LA in the past 5 years? How many from Apple? You are replacing a bumbling hamfisted company like MSFT with one that can actually pull off their nasty plans, doesn't anybody think this is a bad idea? Don't replace one master for another guys, that is just insanity.
Look up the first gun laws friend, hell look at how they demonized the Saturday Night Special...do you know who the #1 customer of that particular gun was? Blacks. I found out about it when watching a history show on guns and they had the head of the rainbow coalition talking about how for over a century every single gun law was nothing but "feared of an armed negro" because you can't lynch somebody that can defend themselves. This was followed by the pictures of the ones that brought this or that gun law to the floor and quotes by them that was....wow. It was amazing how many ways they had for saying nigger without actually saying the word, from "ghetto thugs" to "armed urban threat".
Not to mention the whole thing ignores the elephant rotting in the corner, that old Monty makes anybody working on MariaDB sign over their code so he could pull the same trick twice and sell it out from under them just as he sold MySQL.
Now don't get me wrong, I think Monty has big brass balls to be able to pull what he did last time and get away with it, he made them think they were actually buying a product in MySQL and in reality all they got was the name and the website, he ended up walking away with the code AND the customers, how he got them to buy without a do not compete I don't know but it took some big brass ones to pull it off.
But like the old saying goes "fool me once.." what is to stop Monty from pulling the same game with MariaDB? Nothing that I can see, he still has it set up so no matter who works on it HE owns the code, which means he can do whatever he wants with it. Now maybe he scammed enough off the last sale that this won't be appealing, maybe not, would you really want to take that chance?
Well anybody who has followed me here knows I'm quick to call out bullshit where i see it and saying "X is bad" because X can be used badly while ignoring that A-Z can likewise be made to run piss poor code? Bullshit.
And maybe I should have made myself more clear, when i think of server backends i think of one or more X86 units doing the job whereas the big iron is a completely different story. Sure it CAN be used as a generic server backend but considering how much those suckers cost that wouldn't be the brightest thing to do, last article i saw said the biggest growth for the mainframe were in these huge MMOs and military simulations, jobs where you would need such a huge pile of X86 units it just wouldn't be practical.
Waste mod points all you want but name ONE TIME, just one, in human history where the entire planet was sent backwards by anything OTHER than religion. Religion is the ONLY thing that can give a man the God like powers to ultimately destroy pretty much everything, be it the math revolution in the Arab world or the centuries of knowledge built up by the Romans, religion is the ONLY way to gain enough power over enough people to completely wipe everything out like that until the invention of the atomic bomb.
Now if you want to argue its not the fault of the religion itself, but the assholes in charge of it? Fine but I would argue that you are splitting hairs as throughout history religion ALWAYS gets taken over by the assholes, from the Catholics burning anything and anyone they didn't agree with to the mullahs having anything that didn't say Allah destroyed it always ends up in the hands of major douchebags, but unlike politics this is not something one can have an opposition for easily because "You are against God you heathen" and so on and so forth.
There is a good reason why religion has been called "the opiate of the masses" you know, its because it allows a handful to have control over large populations in such a way that only drug addiction comes close.
Yeah this is a giant fail because the whole point of "Ask Slashdot" is to ask solvable problems that are too geeky for your usual places, stuff like "How can I record securely in my car" or like the problem I had with a customer whose computers kept getting hacked i asked in the comments where it turned out his router had been compromised, its for questions which can actually be ANSWERED.
Whether Yahoo can pull off a come back or not should really be under general, not under Ask Slashdot. As for the question itself, if they continue to not be MSFT? Its possible, I've been making countless Yahoo accounts for customers pissed off at MSFT killing Live Messenger and Hotmail so they could pick up those users and run with them as long as they don't shit all over the UIs like MSFT does.
It reminds me of an interview I saw where one of the guys that worked on drone tech was laughing about that shit. He said he was brought into a meeting with the brass and they asked "how much would it cost to build this?" and they handed him...a picture of the T-800 from Terminator. He said he laughed and laughed...until he realized they were serious and then he REALLY laughed. They honestly thought you could just build a T-800 if they threw enough money at it. The same thing happened to the director of Blue Thunder who said he phone was swamped for 6 months after the movie was released from different military and SWAT forces all wanting to know "How much for the chopper?". he was pissed though as he made a movie against too much power in the wrong hands and the same powers thought it was a tech demo.
I'd say this just shows how much of a bubble those guys live in compared to reality when they can see something in a movie and think they can just wave their magic pen and make that shit work. Not only is this impossible from a practical sense as the gun would be more likely to fail than it would be to work but frankly it is also a little racist when you think about it since this would raise gun prices to the thousands per handgun and a LOT of the past gun laws can be summed up as "fear of an armed negro". Hell look up the history of gun laws, for nearly a century going back to the very first gun laws they can be summed up as that, and I don't even want to know how much putting all that tech into a gun would cost even IF you could somehow make it functional.
Not unless tumblr lets you create communities around particular subjects. I haven't used the thing but from what I was told it was more like Twitter than Geocities. With Geocities say you liked "Buffy TVS" you could then go to a Buffy site and it would have links on the left to all the other affiliated Buffy sites and then that would be broken down to various actors,spinoffs, future and past story arcs, you could land on a single page and from there find out pretty much everything there was to know about a subject with no more than 3 clicks.
But isn't that true of ANY language? I mean you name the language and I could find bad examples of code done in it, again its not the language's fault, its the coder. I have seen beautiful VB and I've seen piss awful C++, doesn't make one better than another, just meant the one writing in VB was better than the coder writing in C++.
But again it all comes down to using the right tool for the job, Java seems to work well on server backends, COBOL works well on mainframes, VB was good for GUIs for local DBs, as long as you don't try to force it to do a job its not good at I really don't see the problem.
What always fascinated me about history is how we would go through cycles when it came to tech, it seems we would advance to a certain point, some religion would come along and burn everything that didn't have (insert name of Deity) on it, the tech would be lost, only for us to slowly build ourselves back up.
I mean look at ancient Rome and Greece, you had theater, take out, taxis that charged by distance, steam power (mainly used for toys and tricks because slaves were cheaper) and they even used lithium for mental problems by sending them to the baths which had lithium dissolved in the water.
Sadly though as we have seen time and time again all it takes is the rise of a religion to wipe out centuries of tech, look at what Christianity did to the Roman Empire or what Islam did to the Arab world which frankly hasn't recovered to this very day. Neil Degrasse Tyson in one of his lectures points out how much of our advanced mathematics and astronomy came from the Arab world only for all innovation there to be wiped out in less than a century thanks to one of the mullahs declaring advanced math was "eeeevil!", probably because he couldn't understand it.
I think its pretty obvious why they want to sell, they lost 12 million bucks last year and there really is no way to monetize the users without them all just leaving. That is the whole problem with all this "social" aimed crap in a nutshell, any attempts to monetize them will result in a shittier experience and the users walking away.
But yeah opportunity cost is a good way of looking at it, if these companies buy one too many stupid companies when that smart company that might actually be a good fit comes along they may either be short of capital or the board will be seriously reluctant to spend the money in light of previous failures. I mean if a perfect fit for HP came along that cost say 4 billion how likely do you think the board will be to bite when they've had to write off over 10 billion from previous deals? And this one is insanely stupid, spending 92% of their cash on a single company that hasn't even turned a profit yet?
if I didn't know better I'd be wondering if this CEO is a plant designed to lower the value thus making it easier to buy Yahoo out, but sadly more likely just another incompetent rich CEO that will make a ton of money no matter how stupidly or badly they do their job. The rich get richer is one of the few constants in the universe it seems.
Oh bullshit, malware is a billion dollar business for crooks and they have ALWAYS gone where the money is, period the end. In case you haven't kept up with current events, more clueless people than ever have smartphones and tablets that are frankly more powerful than Windows was when it first got malware, so guess what their next big target is?
Oh and just FYI but android will hit one million malware infections any day now so keep up with the bullshit, the article proves that Linux (which the community was quick to claim Android as their own) is just as big a haven for malware as everything else. Surprise surprise, a modern OS can get pwned, who would have thought.
Watch me get hate for even saying it but I'm tired of so many making him out to be a hero when all he is is a junkie that skipped out on a murder charge.
I mean lets just look at what we know to be facts, FACT 1- he bragged about doing a highly dangerous drug in large quantities (bath salts) that is known to cause paranoia, violence, and feelings of persecution. FACT 2- He also bragged about his rather large gun collection and was known to often carry guns on his person, FACT 3- The ONLY person that they reported having any beef with the deceased was McAfee, with them getting into several heated arguments about all the shit going on at his compound...now if YOU were running the police, who would be YOUR prime suspect in this case?
We are talking about a guy that is a proven and known liar, who in his Q&A with Slashdot talked about how he had been "clean and sober for 15 years" when his own blogs from 6 months before the incident were filled with his rantings about how bath salts gave him massive boners that allowed him to keep up with the 16 year olds he was banging at the compound. We are also talking about a guy that paid others to dress and act like him when the cops were looking for a suspect in a murder case that was known to have firearms and thus could have easily gotten one of them killed...this is NOT a nice guy folks, its really not.
People seem to forget there is a family that now mourns and the only real suspect the police had obstructed an investigation and skipped town. Would anybody be cheering this guy if the man he was accused of killing was on US soil at the time? would anybody be cheering if it was the opposite and a man in the USA had been murdered and he skipped to Belize?
When you break it down the sad and ugly truth is a lot of the arguments for this guy end up coming down to racism and nationalism, like any crime that happens in South America "doesn't count" because they can't be trusted to run even a single murder investigation and they MUST be corrupt, which if that were true being rich would have given him MORE of an advantage as he could have just bought them off. The whole thing just stinks and with pricks like this running around and people cheering this sociopath you can see where the phrase "Ugly American" comes from, I just wish more people had as much feeling for the dead guy as they show for this douchebag.
Hell go to Amazon and you'll find dozens to choose from under a hundred bucks, stuff like WDTV Live, hell if all he wants is to stream local content there are a ton of Chinese players that can do that under $80.
So I really don't see what the selling point of this is, surely there aren't enough Google fanboys out there willing to shell out to make this thing profitable, see the player that Google and Logitech put out (revue i think?) for an example.
You know I never understood the hate for this or that language as the way I always saw it all the complaints about this or that language could be boiled down to "using it where it doesn't belong" whereas if you just would have stuck with using it where it made sense all would be chocolate and puppies.
Take VB for instance, you want to see a "real programmer" go foam at the mouth just mention VB in their presence, but if you just stuck with what VB was good at, which is building GUIs for local DBs quickly and easily? Then it was fricking great, nothing IMHO comes close to VB for that particular task.
So I just don't get the hate, i really don't. Sure the old "If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" rule applies when it comes to using this or that language where it doesn't make sense but that is true of ALL languages. I bet the old COBOL guys here can probably name 3 or 4 use cases where COBOL just works brilliantly and I say good for them, you should use the right tool for the job no matter what is hip or happening today.
They aren't MSFT? Seriously that is it, I can tell you that I have had to set up countless yahoo accounts for my customers in the last 6 months as the switch from Live Messenger and Hotmail to Skype and Outlook (which most of their users I talked to frankly thought was inferior) ran off a LOT of customers.
Now one would argue that if that was the case why didn't they go to Google but the answer is simple, the way Google treats everything like a chat turns off a lot of the users, and with MSFT shitting all over its customer base trying to be Apple that left only Yahoo. So the fact that Yahoo suddenly got a big bounce really doesn't surprise me, you had a LOT of people that were using Hotmail and Messenger that bailed when MSFT started to force the switch and really Yahoo was the only alternative that was in any way similar to what they had.
Actually you may laugh at me but geocities actually served a function which Yahoo promptly shat all over and ruined. What Geocities was in reality was the first "fan driven" web, from fanfics to fanpages it was a magnet so people that liked a particular subject could get together and discuss that subject and you'd be surprised how well it worked for that. Hell there was several times that Whedon and Mutant Enemy would go to these to not only get fan reactions but to see where the fans thought things should go and the same was true of the writers of Star Trek and several other sci-fi and horror of the time, it gave the fan community and the writers an easy way to interact and for that it worked quite well.
So yes I would say losing Geocities was a "loss" because despite all the jokes it gave people a centralized place where they could discuss their favorite works, learn of other works in a similar vein, and to discuss where they thought the works should be heading.
Bingo! Give that man a ceegar! The problem with spending any real money on these things is that the users have zero brand loyalty and can just disappear like a fart in the breeze, we have seen this time and time again, from MySpace to Flickr, you try overloading the place with ads to try to get your money back and the users bail and you are left with a ghosttown...how much did Yahoo pay for Flickr or Geocities?
The sad part is this CEO is not only doing something insanely stupid, they don't even seem to realize WHY Yahoo has had that sudden growth all of a sudden, as somebody in the trenches I can tell you why....MSFT backlash. Trying to force all their users into a "MSFT Ecosystem" by killing Live Messenger and Hotmail for Skype and Outlook ran a LOT of the users off and since they don't like the "everything is chat" style of Google, guess where they went?
Yahoo is betting the farm on people actually liking the brand when in reality they just hate the other guy THAT much, but the loyalty just isn't there which they are gonna find out the hard way when they try to get a ROI on this, not to mention as others have pointed out your pension funds and the like aren't gonna want to invest in a porn company and that pretty much is what Tumblr is used for, porn clips.
You know, I have heard that argument several times and i just don't think it holds up to logic, its the same one that MSFT apologists use when explaining away why all their failed acquistitions don't matter but just because they have a LOT of money does not mean they have INFINITE money, and one can only throw around a billion here and a billion there before as they say in Washington it becomes "real money".
Can Google, Apple, and MSFT piss more money away with zero ROI? Sure they can. does that mean it isn't gonna hurt them over time? That would depend on how much positive cash flow they can keep coming in and whether or not spending that money on stupid shit costs them an opportunity down the road that could have actually worked.
Actually IIRC there were several patents in WWII that were given out in secret by the government for tech that the government deemed to much of a risk to allow to be filed publicly, they kept those patents on ice until they were no longer cutting edge military tech and then allowed those that had secretly filed them to profit from those war time inventions. IIRC a lot of them were early computer designs and things to do with computers that they were afraid the Russians would be able to copy after the war.
Nope sorry, because you are ignoring the fact that he made one of the most blatant cardinal sins of any bad guy which is lampooned even today, so sure by his time he would have actually read a book or seen a film and known that was a bad idea, which was you NEVER assume your plan is gonna work so you at the very least have a backup plan.
I mean we are talking about the complete wiping out of his home planet and everyone he has ever loved for piss sake, you do NOT leave that much up to chance! I mean you go ask anybody who hasn't seen the movie what they would do and they will ALWAYS give you the same answer "Warn everybody", when every person comes up with the same obvious answer and your bad guy doesn't do that with ZERO explanation? I'm sorry but that is a plothole you can drive a truck through, right up there with Picard going back in time 3 minutes when if he would have went back 2 weeks he would have saved his family, the research station AND got the bad guy.
the only way for that plot to work would be if the guy is completely batshit or a drooling moron and he never struck me as either of those so I'm gonna chalk it up to shitty writing. Lets face it most time travel in ST has been piss poor at best, but this is "I have no time to explain!" while setting in a time machine level of stupid in my book.
I don't know if you are joking or not, if not it was established several times that one of the reasons the federation didn't trade tech was that "That replicator that can give you food can just as easily give you a gun" so once they had the template (which again was stated was in their database which was how the Vulcan made it) they could have cranked that thing out like flapjacks.
So this isn't even an "it would be immoral" like using Saron's sun exploder tech that Picard found to take out the home system of the enemy, this is a gun that would give your troops a HUGE advantage against an enemy that is bred in tanks to be disposable (and thus you should feel no guilt in wasting, as they are programmed to obey their "gods" and can't be reasoned with) so the only reason NOT to use this tech would be the leaders are retards.
This of course isn't even getting into the fact that the federation knew how to use time travel which meant that when it looked like they were gonna lose the war all it would have took is sending back a single ship to before the Dominion ever came through and closing the wormhole. Any way you slice it the federation comes off being like Chuck at SFDebris described the republic in the prequels "who deserve to lose because its just run all stupid".
Thank you. this is why I refuse to watch ANYTHING by Bay or Abrams in theaters, because at least when I play it on a PC I can use the player to tone down the bright flashing bullshit so I don't end the evening with a skull thumper from hell. My Ex GF used to complain about that so i said "Fine, Transformers 2 is playing at the theater, lets go" and sure enough after walking out she said "Okay I get it, now my eyes hurt and my ears are ringing"
This is coming from somebody who LOOOVVVVVEEESSS Action and Sci-Fi, hell I went to see the original Predator and First Blood like half a dozen times each just so I could enjoy the big screen, but Abrams and Bay are like being assaulted by the movie, Abrams with a billion damned flashing lights and lens flares and Bay with blasting sound effects and jump cuts making shit look like it was shot by an epileptic. I'm sorry but that is not pleasant and NOT what Star Trek was about, watch Wrath or Undiscovered again and see what the difference a decent director makes.