The slashdot account you used to post that message is supported by the same "broken" revenue model. Do you really think the internet would be a better place if slashdot switched to a for-pay model?
I, for one, don't use adblock, because I prefer using google, slashdot, digg, etc. without paying. I'm pleased with the services these sites provide me with, and am more than happy to compensate their owners by displaying their ads.
Repeat after me: "It is my computer. It is my browser. If the web site operator doesn't want me to view the content for free, then they should not place it on the web in a public location."
Ironic that you'd post this using a free account on a site that's made all its revenue via advertisements for years. Oh, and you have a free gmail account. Whaddya know.
Guess how your slashdot account and gmail account are funded? Advertising. If a majority of users on both sites follow your example and start blocking ads, these sites are going to have to find alternate revenue streams. That probably means either marrying advertising even closer to content -- e.g., more "slashvertisements" then you can shake a stick at, or more intrusive measures such as forcing you to view an ad and then answer a question about its content before you're granted access to content ("Before you read this next email, watch this ad and tell us: What color were the Adidas Ape(TM)'s shoes?") -- or switching to a subscription model.
In fact, those flash/DHTML pop-overs we all hate so much? They probably wouldn't have been invented if pop-up blockers hadn't become so prevalent. The more ads blocked, the more intrusive advertising becomes.
This "everything on the web is free" thing *only* works because of advertising, and adblocking only works because it's only done by a minority of users. If that minority ever becomes a majority, "everything on the web is free" fails. I don't think anyone *really* wants that.
Hit the "start" button at the bottom. Open "Programs > Accessories > Console" (yes, this thing has a fake version of cmd.exe, limited to basic navigation and file copying)
You start in the "root directory". Run "del Applications", "del Documents", "del Pictures", and "del System".
Your root directory is now empty. There are no "files" on your "drive". The "desktop" doesn't crash, nor does it update in any way, nor does the start menu change, but all the shortcuts on the desktop stop working if you double click them; instead you get some sort of "file not found" error.
Seems like they may have actually implemented some sort of pseudo-filesystem. Sort of.
MDB2 is probably preferable to PDO in at least some situations, since it's a PEAR package, as opposed a PECL module, which should make installation easier on cheap webhosts.
Another existing method of generating secure random numbers, used by the java VM, is starting and stopping threads and gathering statistics about how the OS allocates time to those threads, which has been shown to be fairly unpredictable.
Given the flaws with the method outlined by other posters... sounds like this really doesn't offer anything better than what we already have.
You may also be interested in the mud-dev mailing list. Schubert and others contributed to the original list, the archives of which are available from Raph Koster's site
The archives cover a lot of interesting ideas that largely have yet to find their ways into mainstream MMOs.
One of my personal favorites was genmud, which featured a completely procedurally generated world, in which NPC populations battle each other for survival. By contrast, modern MMOs generally still use static "spawn points" to determine where new creatures enter the game world, which are usually inserted by hand by developers/level designers.
the best games were first-party titles developed internally by Nintendo. This is for a number of reasons (including that Nintendo developed games are generally very good)
Nintendo also took a long time to get dev kits out to 3rd party developers, at least for the Wii. Nintendo probably had at least a one year head start on any 3rd parties.
I'm still a PC guy on the desktop side, hands down, essentially for the reasons you stated, as well as price -- mac desktops don't compete all that well on price.
I'm just a mac fanboi in the laptop realm. Obviously, hardware customization isn't really an issue for notebooks: none of them really support it.
Parent: Free?! It's only free until you get your pay stub.
FTFS: EarthLink spokesman Jerry Grasso said that EarthLink was willing to work with San Francisco but had decided that it 'was not willing to work in the business model where EarthLink fronts all the money to build, own and operate the network.'
Earthlink's website: No financial commitment by the City, taxpayer burden, or risk for the design, deployment, operation, maintenance or support of the network
The free users (at 300kbit) were supposed to be paid for by users paying $20/month (for 1 megabit). No tax dollars involved.
That's not the iPod's halo effect. That's the Vista Black Hole of Suck effect.
In my case, that really was the driver for choosing a mac. The last couple of laptops I'd owned were crappy HPs, the last of which died in the week after Vista's release. I spent some time online, but the prices at dell.com, etc. aren't much better than they are over at Fry's, so I went to Frys. I wanted a laptop for about $1k that didn't run Vista, with somewhat decent graphics card, that was relatively well built (meaning, not another cheap HP). Since just about every halfway decent laptop in the store ran Vista, the only option that actually met those specs was the macbook. So I picked up an OEM copy of XP Home for $99, and a macbook.
Please correct me where I have misread, but in all your verbosity you seem to have made two statements:
- One cannot quantify the sysadmin job
- You're better at it than some
To my (non-MBA) eyes, these two appear in contradiction. If one cannot measure/quantify how well a sysadmin is doing his/her job, then one cannot claim that one is doing a better job than the other.
I think the point to be made is that it can't be quantified *well*. You can can use certain metrics to attempt to quantify a lot of things, but that doesn't mean that they're really good indicators of reality.
How would you quantify a lawyer's ability? Number of cases won? To some extent, doesn't that *really* measure the lawyer's ability to pick easy wins, and reject cases that are actually difficult? In fact, this very sort of problem is likely to keep you from getting a much needed surgery: surgeons are judged based on number of failed surgeries. As such, some are refusing to take risky surgeries because it might sully their stats. Think about that -- because of a broken stat-reporting system, you may die in intensive care waiting for a surgeon with the balls to operate on you.
Witness also the various arguments about the ability of IQ to measure intelligence. IQ is only a small part of the picture, as demonstrated by Savant Syndrome. So we don't really have an accurate way of measuring a lot of things; the lack of an accurate metric, however, does not mean that some people aren't obviously more intelligent than others, or better lawyers, surgeons, or sys admins.
Solo in A New Hope brags that the Falcon made the Kessel Run in "less than twelve parsecs", referring to his ability to move the ship closer to the Maw's black holes and therefore cut the distance traveled.[6] On the A New Hope DVD audio commentary, Lucas comments that, in the Star Wars universe, traveling through hyperspace requires careful navigation to avoid stars, planets, asteroids, and other obstacles.[7] Since no long-distance journey can be made in a straight line, the "fastest" ship is the ship that can plot the "most direct course" through space, thereby traveling the least distance.[7] Solo's twelve-parsec Kessel Run is depicted in Rebel Dawn by A. C. Crispin.[8]
Personally, I think Troll and Flamebait are useless and just cause trouble. They provide nothing but hurt feelings and arguments, when overrated, offtopic, wrong or unfunny would suffice./. really does need wrong and unfunny moderations though.
Spoken like someone who doesn't read at -1. There's plenty of legit trolling and flamebait on slashdot.
Go here, set troll, flamebait, redundant, and offtopic to +6 each. Set the rest to -6. Then hit a thread like this one. I don't think I see a single post in that thread that didn't deserve the moderation it got.
I was shocked to learn recently that my Nintendo Wii has a wireless controller! And that my "Wii" game collection is actually just pirated Gamecube titles repackaged for the Wii!
In all seriousness, for the first couple of months I owned my Wii, I didn't know that it didn't play DVD movies. I knew the PS3 could play Blu-ray and DVD, and I knew the XBOX 360 could play DVD and HD-DVD if you spring for the external drive. But I'd just assumed that the Wii could play DVDs too. I mean, hell, the PS2 and original XBOX did.
Wasn't til I read a digg post that I found out I was wrong.
I gotta say, as clunky as Azureus has been, they've obviously been working hard on the thing, because it works so much more smoothly now. Even with a few torrents running, I don't get huge CPU grabs like I used to, and the overall feel of speed is definitely improved.
Similarly, I've been able to play WoW without any noticable slowdowns with Azureus running in the background on my macbook. I preferred uTorrent on my windows box before I switched to the macbook, but Azureus has been good enough that I haven't been really tempted to look for other alternatives.
Games started to add voice - I recall King's Quest V being the first adventure game I've played that had hi-res graphics and voice. How's that bad?
The history of voice in games starts long before CDROMs hit the market -- Wolfenstein was the first game to include voice (although poorly).
Later, Wing Commander II shipped a "Speech Pack" add-on for the game in the early nineties, which shipped on a couple of 1.44 MB floppies. In retrospect, I'd guess it was probably encoded at near telephone quality bitrates, which isn't that bad for voice.
Granted, CD made it easier to include lots of high-bitrate audio, but the point is, the innovation itself is separate from the media games shipped on. And as #20082573 points out, a lot of the stuff people started throwing in games just to make them "CD games" and "multimedia" did nothing to really enhance gameplay.
I remember the time - but I fail to see the bubble.
As others have mentioned, the phenomenon was not accompanied by run-away stock speculation like the web bubble was, and I agree that alone is a good reason *not* to apply the term "bubble". But there was one thing the "golden age of CD", or whatever you want to call it, shared with the web bubble: irrational exuberance, and the application of new technology were it wasn't needed. Sure, there were great things that came from both, but for every Amazon.com, there were a dozen avocados.com's, and for every Encarta, there were a dozen games with tacked-on MPEG2 cutscenes that took ages to load and added nothing to the game.
To give those who may not remember a bit more of an idea of what the "CDROM bubble" was like (not that I think that's really a good name for it), in the mid nineties, "CDROM games" were their own category in stores -- you had action games, strategy games, puzzle games, and CDROM games. As if the media a game shipped on somehow defined it.
CDROM encyclopedias were all the rage -- Encarta was a household name for maybe 5 years.
"Mutlimedia" was the buzzword of the period. Genearlly, it meant adding (relatively) high-res images and video clips to products that may or may not have really needed them.
In short, having your application on CD was a end in and of itself, for a few years.
Wide availability of home broadband (wikipedia replaced Encarta) and falling prices of CDs and CD drives killed the "bubble", as CD was increasingly treated as what it really was -- just another medium for storing data.
expecting sex to be some magical experience with your soul mate is really setting yourself up for disappointment.
I lost my virginity to my wife two years before we got married. I wasn't disappointed in the least. And I've never once regretted the fact that the only sexual experiences I've had have been meaningful and fulfilling.
One day you're going to meet someone you love and respect and want to stay with forever. You want to "sow your wild oats" before that, or you'll spend the rest of your life wondering what sex with other women would be like. It's a lot easer to know you've made the right choice when you've tried a few of the other options.
Once you've made love with someone you truly love for a few years, the act itself becomes increasingly less important, in my experience. It's not about the sex, it's about sharing the experience with someone who I'm very close to. Sure, at a very base, primal level, I'm curious about sex with other women. But then I realize that sex without the love that my wife and I share could never be as fulfilling, period.
I understand that not every guy is like that. Some guys will spend their whole lives sowing their wild oats. Different strokes for different folks. I won't judge those people for living their lives the way they see fit. I just ask that you return the favor.
you get to management by who you know and social skills...
Most geeks (and I do mean geek) who've spent a few years in the industry are well aware that being a "business guy" is both incredibly valuable and necessary to the success of business, and requires all kinds of social skills which we're probably not equipped with.
Some of us don't *want* that job. We *like* being the geek. Personally, I'd *hate* being the business-guy.
want proof? WOZ is a rich geek but never was upper management.
And I'm sure that was by choice. I'm willing to bet Woz wouldn't do anything different, if he could do it all over again.
Simpler then that... Teenagers with low IQ normally are not left alone to do what they will. Because parents don't trust them to do the smart thing because they arn't, combined with the fact they get usually get extra adult help means less exposure with other kids, and the oposit sex feels guilty about sexual activity with that group, so combined that will make a lower rate.
High IQ teens stop and think and realize that risks of Sex as a teenager (STD, Pregnacny) will get in away with their life plans being with higher IQ society expects more from them with their life plans so they stay away from such risks. Basicly I am not going to let a Baby get in my way to become a doctor. After I get my degree and a steady job then I may focus on having a family, Logical reasoning by people with higher IQ.
Teens in the middle are not pressured to become a Doctor or whatever so they have less ambitions for life and figure it may be worth the risk. Combined with the fact they may not think things fully out and let biological pressures take over what people say they should do.
Given the poor spelling, random capitalization, and generally dreadful grammar, I can draw only one conclusion: You must have gotten tons of action in high school.
Slashdot Mirror
The slashdot account you used to post that message is supported by the same "broken" revenue model. Do you really think the internet would be a better place if slashdot switched to a for-pay model?
I, for one, don't use adblock, because I prefer using google, slashdot, digg, etc. without paying. I'm pleased with the services these sites provide me with, and am more than happy to compensate their owners by displaying their ads.
Ironic that you'd post this using a free account on a site that's made all its revenue via advertisements for years. Oh, and you have a free gmail account. Whaddya know.
Guess how your slashdot account and gmail account are funded? Advertising. If a majority of users on both sites follow your example and start blocking ads, these sites are going to have to find alternate revenue streams. That probably means either marrying advertising even closer to content -- e.g., more "slashvertisements" then you can shake a stick at, or more intrusive measures such as forcing you to view an ad and then answer a question about its content before you're granted access to content ("Before you read this next email, watch this ad and tell us: What color were the Adidas Ape(TM)'s shoes?") -- or switching to a subscription model.
In fact, those flash/DHTML pop-overs we all hate so much? They probably wouldn't have been invented if pop-up blockers hadn't become so prevalent. The more ads blocked, the more intrusive advertising becomes.
This "everything on the web is free" thing *only* works because of advertising, and adblocking only works because it's only done by a minority of users. If that minority ever becomes a majority, "everything on the web is free" fails. I don't think anyone *really* wants that.
Try this:
Hit the "start" button at the bottom. Open "Programs > Accessories > Console" (yes, this thing has a fake version of cmd.exe, limited to basic navigation and file copying)
You start in the "root directory". Run "del Applications", "del Documents", "del Pictures", and "del System".
Your root directory is now empty. There are no "files" on your "drive". The "desktop" doesn't crash, nor does it update in any way, nor does the start menu change, but all the shortcuts on the desktop stop working if you double click them; instead you get some sort of "file not found" error.
Seems like they may have actually implemented some sort of pseudo-filesystem. Sort of.
MDB2 is probably preferable to PDO in at least some situations, since it's a PEAR package, as opposed a PECL module, which should make installation easier on cheap webhosts.
The grandparent post is nearly as clueless as the "script kiddies" he attempts to call out.
Linux already uses hardware entropy sources like hard drive seek times and peripheral input to generate secure random numbers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/random
Another existing method of generating secure random numbers, used by the java VM, is starting and stopping threads and gathering statistics about how the OS allocates time to those threads, which has been shown to be fairly unpredictable.
Given the flaws with the method outlined by other posters... sounds like this really doesn't offer anything better than what we already have.
You may also be interested in the mud-dev mailing list. Schubert and others contributed to the original list, the archives of which are available from Raph Koster's site
The archives cover a lot of interesting ideas that largely have yet to find their ways into mainstream MMOs.
One of my personal favorites was genmud, which featured a completely procedurally generated world, in which NPC populations battle each other for survival. By contrast, modern MMOs generally still use static "spawn points" to determine where new creatures enter the game world, which are usually inserted by hand by developers/level designers.
I bought an HP laptop from Fry's a bit over a year ago for $900, and was told there was a $100 rebate.
At the register, I was told that they didn't have the rebate form, and that I'd receive one in the mail.
3 copies in separate envelopes showed up in my mail several *weeks* later. Weeks after the rebate period had expired.
Nintendo also took a long time to get dev kits out to 3rd party developers, at least for the Wii. Nintendo probably had at least a one year head start on any 3rd parties.
I'm still a PC guy on the desktop side, hands down, essentially for the reasons you stated, as well as price -- mac desktops don't compete all that well on price.
I'm just a mac fanboi in the laptop realm. Obviously, hardware customization isn't really an issue for notebooks: none of them really support it.
The google plan for SF and the earthlink plan were one and the same. The two companies were working together on this project.
https://home.feather.net/sanfrancisco
The free users (at 300kbit) were supposed to be paid for by users paying $20/month (for 1 megabit). No tax dollars involved.
In my case, that really was the driver for choosing a mac. The last couple of laptops I'd owned were crappy HPs, the last of which died in the week after Vista's release. I spent some time online, but the prices at dell.com, etc. aren't much better than they are over at Fry's, so I went to Frys. I wanted a laptop for about $1k that didn't run Vista, with somewhat decent graphics card, that was relatively well built (meaning, not another cheap HP). Since just about every halfway decent laptop in the store ran Vista, the only option that actually met those specs was the macbook. So I picked up an OEM copy of XP Home for $99, and a macbook.
I think the point to be made is that it can't be quantified *well*. You can can use certain metrics to attempt to quantify a lot of things, but that doesn't mean that they're really good indicators of reality.
How would you quantify a lawyer's ability? Number of cases won? To some extent, doesn't that *really* measure the lawyer's ability to pick easy wins, and reject cases that are actually difficult? In fact, this very sort of problem is likely to keep you from getting a much needed surgery: surgeons are judged based on number of failed surgeries. As such, some are refusing to take risky surgeries because it might sully their stats. Think about that -- because of a broken stat-reporting system, you may die in intensive care waiting for a surgeon with the balls to operate on you.
Witness also the various arguments about the ability of IQ to measure intelligence. IQ is only a small part of the picture, as demonstrated by Savant Syndrome. So we don't really have an accurate way of measuring a lot of things; the lack of an accurate metric, however, does not mean that some people aren't obviously more intelligent than others, or better lawyers, surgeons, or sys admins.
Watch MTV, or listen to the radio, and you'll have your answer. The exact censorship technique varies by song and artist, long story short.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessel_Run#Kessel_Ru
Spoken like someone who doesn't read at -1. There's plenty of legit trolling and flamebait on slashdot.
Go here, set troll, flamebait, redundant, and offtopic to +6 each. Set the rest to -6. Then hit a thread like this one. I don't think I see a single post in that thread that didn't deserve the moderation it got.
In all seriousness, for the first couple of months I owned my Wii, I didn't know that it didn't play DVD movies. I knew the PS3 could play Blu-ray and DVD, and I knew the XBOX 360 could play DVD and HD-DVD if you spring for the external drive. But I'd just assumed that the Wii could play DVDs too. I mean, hell, the PS2 and original XBOX did.
Wasn't til I read a digg post that I found out I was wrong.
Similarly, I've been able to play WoW without any noticable slowdowns with Azureus running in the background on my macbook. I preferred uTorrent on my windows box before I switched to the macbook, but Azureus has been good enough that I haven't been really tempted to look for other alternatives.
The history of voice in games starts long before CDROMs hit the market -- Wolfenstein was the first game to include voice (although poorly).
Later, Wing Commander II shipped a "Speech Pack" add-on for the game in the early nineties, which shipped on a couple of 1.44 MB floppies. In retrospect, I'd guess it was probably encoded at near telephone quality bitrates, which isn't that bad for voice.
Granted, CD made it easier to include lots of high-bitrate audio, but the point is, the innovation itself is separate from the media games shipped on. And as #20082573 points out, a lot of the stuff people started throwing in games just to make them "CD games" and "multimedia" did nothing to really enhance gameplay.
As others have mentioned, the phenomenon was not accompanied by run-away stock speculation like the web bubble was, and I agree that alone is a good reason *not* to apply the term "bubble". But there was one thing the "golden age of CD", or whatever you want to call it, shared with the web bubble: irrational exuberance, and the application of new technology were it wasn't needed. Sure, there were great things that came from both, but for every Amazon.com, there were a dozen avocados.com's, and for every Encarta, there were a dozen games with tacked-on MPEG2 cutscenes that took ages to load and added nothing to the game.
To give those who may not remember a bit more of an idea of what the "CDROM bubble" was like (not that I think that's really a good name for it), in the mid nineties, "CDROM games" were their own category in stores -- you had action games, strategy games, puzzle games, and CDROM games. As if the media a game shipped on somehow defined it.
CDROM encyclopedias were all the rage -- Encarta was a household name for maybe 5 years.
"Mutlimedia" was the buzzword of the period. Genearlly, it meant adding (relatively) high-res images and video clips to products that may or may not have really needed them.
In short, having your application on CD was a end in and of itself, for a few years.
Wide availability of home broadband (wikipedia replaced Encarta) and falling prices of CDs and CD drives killed the "bubble", as CD was increasingly treated as what it really was -- just another medium for storing data.
I lost my virginity to my wife two years before we got married. I wasn't disappointed in the least. And I've never once regretted the fact that the only sexual experiences I've had have been meaningful and fulfilling.
Once you've made love with someone you truly love for a few years, the act itself becomes increasingly less important, in my experience. It's not about the sex, it's about sharing the experience with someone who I'm very close to. Sure, at a very base, primal level, I'm curious about sex with other women. But then I realize that sex without the love that my wife and I share could never be as fulfilling, period.
I understand that not every guy is like that. Some guys will spend their whole lives sowing their wild oats. Different strokes for different folks. I won't judge those people for living their lives the way they see fit. I just ask that you return the favor.
Most geeks (and I do mean geek) who've spent a few years in the industry are well aware that being a "business guy" is both incredibly valuable and necessary to the success of business, and requires all kinds of social skills which we're probably not equipped with.
Some of us don't *want* that job. We *like* being the geek. Personally, I'd *hate* being the business-guy.
And I'm sure that was by choice. I'm willing to bet Woz wouldn't do anything different, if he could do it all over again.
Given the poor spelling, random capitalization, and generally dreadful grammar, I can draw only one conclusion: You must have gotten tons of action in high school.
The reader comments on STR are pretty sad. Apparently your average blog reader is too dim to grasp satire.