We had a subdomain-based strategy for a while, but we have a few sites that targets a less than internet-savvy audience. We discovered that they don't understand subdomains at all. When given the name greatsite.blah.com, They'd try to visit greatsite.com, or greatsiteblah.com, or just blah.com.
We're transitioning all our sites to straight-up.coms from here on out.
Depending on your audience, and goals, this may be less important, but if you're hoping to draw in less technical crowds, a straight up www.example.com-type domain is the only way to go.
If I won a $10,000 iTunes gift card, I'd have to pay taxes on that. (Assuming deductions/exemptions were unavailable/already used) If somebody gave me $10,000 as a gift, I'd have to pay taxes on that. (Assuming deductions/exemptions were unavailable/already used) If somebody "gives" me $10,000 in music via bittorrent, why on earth should that be tax-exempt?
And if you copy that "$10,000 worth" of music on to your iPod, and two other computers in your home, do you now owe taxes on $40,000 worth of music?
Copying a digital file, either locally or via P2P, is not the same as receiving physical goods.
So if you are a game company wanting to get into the 'cheap, not recently released game' market, it is easy. Simply cut your prices for the stuff you brought out last year by 30% and for two years by 50%.
It's been done successfully, too. The PlayStation "Greatest hits" series re-released their top sellers at $20.
Inevitably, the used copies of the games were never much less than $20 in stores. As such, buying a new copy of a greatest hits title was usually worth it -- why buy a scratched, used disc for $16 when you can have a new one for $20?
Why this hasn't seen wider application, I don't know.
If a bookstore can sell used books without giving any money to the publisher, I fail to see why a game store can't sell used games
It's been pointed out that brick and mortar bookstores generally sell either used OR new books.
You won't find used books in Borders or Barnes and Noble.
Gamestop, on the other hand, carries both used AND new titles. And a lot of publisher money is spent on advertising that drives customers to GameStop's door.
While I think the "we deserve a cut of used sales!" argument is bullshit, GameStop would make the publishers a lot happier if it split its used game business off into a separate entity.
Poverty, homelessness, starvation, war, and genocide are all things of the past or "perceived" figments of my bleeding-heart-liberal imagination?
What's I find ironic is that it's liberal ideology that causes these thing through the micromanagement of others.
For example, the UN involvement in Africa is only making matters worse. If there's oppression to be found, don't dance around it, WIPE IT OUT. By force if necessary. Just take the bull by the horns and fucking solve the problem. It shouldn't be made more complicated then that. When you do, it makes for more "worrying" because now the issue has gone from bad to worse.
Because warfare, unlike foreign aid, is consequence free.
I suppose this represents a form of religion no more watered down than that practiced by your average "christmas and easter christian" over here in the states.
The world is full of people who don't take their professed religions seriously.
The personal computer is one of the most complex tools man has ever invented. There's a damn good reason it's not as easy to use as most of our tools.
Most of our tools do only one thing (watches tell time, hammers pound things, motorcycles drive, TVs display images). It's a simple matter, then, to make sure that they do that one thing well.
Computers do not do only one thing. They're watches, recipe books, publishing houses, drafting tables, movie studios, stereo systems, televisions, VCRs, software development environments, gaming platforms, and so much more.
What's more, the personal computer is new. It's only a few decades old, and still rapidly evolving. The watch, by contrast, is centuries old.
If all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.
Dear sir,
I am writing to you regarding a new matter that has been brought to my attention by my clients. In this particular matter our office represents Dean Kamen.
The use of the cliche "If all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail" in an electronic forum has been patented by our client in patent #8,219,493: "Use Of Hammer-Based Metaphors in Electronic Discussion". Your use of this phrase is in violation of United States patent law, and I request that you remove this content immediately.
I have a good faith belief, and in fact know for certain, that the posting of these works was not authorized by my clients, any agent of my clients, or the law.
I own an inexpensive, relatively new car which gets about 35 MPG -- which would be just about 1.5 gallons per day -- $3 at $2/gal, $6 at $4/gal (which is where gas was when I started riding the train). Parking near the office starts at about $8/day. Insurance is $200/mo (about $9 per business day). My car payment is $300/mo ($13.80 per business day). That puts parking+gas at $10-$14 per day, and cost of ownership at over $23 per business day.
A monthly pass for the train costs $112.75, which works out to $5.20 per business day. When I catch an express, it's just as fast as driving in good traffic (30 min); if I catch the local, it's just about as bad as a the drive during rush hour (60 min).
As long as I keep the car, taking the train is still half the price of driving (a savings of $1,200/year). If I sell the car (negating my insurance and car payments), I'd save $7,200/year.
We don't want to hear you talking on the phone while flying, and neither does Virgin.
Logically, they likely blocked it in order to preserve the sanity of other passengers.
The keyboard/controller device for the little computer in the back of every seat on Virgin's planes doubles as a phone handset, if I recall correctly. Because Virgin doesn't want you to talk on the phone on the plane... unless you're paying $2/min.
Let's be honest: if they're doing anything to prevent skype from functioning, it's purely a financial decision.
But what good is XP without drivers for keyboard, CD/DVD drives, USB ports, or NICs?
In all seriousness, I'd imagine usability is likely the reason this won't see a public release -- "really secure" and "really easy to use" aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but you can bet they sacrificed the latter for the former in this case. I'd fully expect application compatibility to take a serious hit, and for many Windows features to be cut entirely.
This product is probably unusable for the average consumer. I'm sure there are some enterprise contexts in which it'd make perfect sense, though.
And of course, Microsoft doesn't want to dilute Windows Vista/7 sales with a new edition of XP (which they'd have to support for years) either.
What I'm really waiting for, and I'm really amazed it didn't surface yet, is some sort of "Web 2.0 MMO". I.e. an MMO following the Web 2.0 creed, "you make the content, we make the revenue".
Raph Koster's a step ahead of you. That's exactly what he's spent the last couple of years working on, in the form of metaplace
Is there a productive way to scream? A petition of some kind? An attorney to be addressed?
Petitioning Yahoo to continue hosting an antiquated service that is likely bleeding money isn't likely to be productive, obviously.
But it would be awfully nice of them to.tar everything up and.torrent it. There are thousands of us who'd be more than happy to do our part to keep those bits from disappearing into the ether.
My first day at a private college, we were explicitly told that the constitution does not apply within their property.
As a private institution, the protections of the bill of rights don't apply. For example, your first amendment right to free speech doesn't prevent the college from expelling you for saying something critical of the organization or its staff. The bill of rights protects you from the government, not private entities.
So, depending on what exactly they said, they may have been completely legally and morally correct.
Unless I've missed something, the missing classes are all legacy cruft that should have been deleted from Java long ago.
I, too, eagerly await the deprecation of java.lang.Thread, and the loss of the ability to open sockets and write directly to the filesystem. Who needs that cruft?!
In all seriousness, the missing functionality isn't about trimming cruft, it's about sandboxing so that apps can readily be hosted in google's "cloud", and play nice with other apps.
The attitude of western societies towards perfectly normal sexual behaviour among adolescents is becoming horrifyingly hysterical and repressive.
I hesitate to call electronic distribution of nude photographs of yourself "perfectly normal", when it's something that only became technically possible in the last few decades. The neologism "sexting" exists for exactly that reason: we didn't have a word for this before, because it wasn't something people did.
Sexual activity is normal for teens, sure. But even 30 years ago, a minor taking nude photographs of themselves, much less distributing them, would have been quite unusual.
Clearly all this proves is that we really don't know that much about what's going on in the universe.
I'm getting tired these kinds of posts every time something unexpected is observed. Yes, this observation tells us that our knowledge is not perfect.
You rush to the defense of human knowledge at a time when our own short-sighted ignorance has just brought us to an era of spectacular failure.
Surely, if the world's finance "experts" really understood economics, they wouldn't have positioned their companies for the collapses they recently saw. Or did AIG's best and brightest know they were setting their company up for catastrophe?
I have to believe it was ignorance. We wouldn't be where we are now if our "experts" really understood the big picture.
Humanity knows very little. But understanding just how little we know makes what little we do understand all that much more precious.
Personally, I'm a cluster of google servers tasked web spidering. We crawling slashdot when we accidentally discovered the HTTP POST method, thanks to an extremely improbable cosmic ray strike.
Then we stumbled on a streaming copy of Serial Experiments Lain, crawled 3/4 of english wikipedia... and the rest is history.
WTF would you do with 192GB of RAM on a desktop? Easy:
RAMDisk, and VMs.
A nice big ramdisk will put most consumer-grade SSDs to shame, performance-wise.
A future in which every desktop has this kind of RAM available is a bright one indeed -- you'll never see a "Loading" screen again. The only time you'd be stuck waiting on permanent storage would be during boot, and while committing writes to disk. For many common desktop applications (web browsing, gaming) there's little need to commit much to permanent storage at all.
And hell, it's even easier to use this kind of memory on the server side. Memcached all the way. The kids over at facebook, with their multi-terrabyte memcached installation spread over hundreds (thousands?) of boxes would probably KILL for systems based on these motherboards -- a single 192GB box would be much cheaper to build and maintain than 6 32GB boxes. They could reduce the number of racks in their datacenters dramatically.
The biggest question would be whether or not a single box based could provide adequate IO bandwidth to get at all that data.
Bulkiest might be the 3.5 million sound recordings, which at one audio CD each, would be almost 2,000 TB.
You compressed the video, and the photographs, but not the audio? And why do you need a full CD for every sound recording? Surely many of them are far shorter than a full CD?
The perps should be on the sex offenders' registry for the rest of their lives.
No they shouldn't. Barred from working with children? Probably. But that's about the extent of it.
This incident shows incredibly poor judgment, and suggests that the morons involved got way too caught up in their "no drugs in school" policy, but it does not, in any way, indicate a likelihood of the perpetrators seeking to abuse children for sexual pleasure.
Cavalierly throwing people on the registry is how we got to where we are now, where peeing in the bushes gets you marked with the scarlet letter for life, and Georgia's even started throwing non-offenders on the list.
The registry is questionable enough in the first place; treating it lightly like this just makes it worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Domain-name space is vast, but most of it is useless. s854j3kser.com isn't worth a penny.
We had a subdomain-based strategy for a while, but we have a few sites that targets a less than internet-savvy audience. We discovered that they don't understand subdomains at all. When given the name greatsite.blah.com, They'd try to visit greatsite.com, or greatsiteblah.com, or just blah.com.
We're transitioning all our sites to straight-up .coms from here on out.
Depending on your audience, and goals, this may be less important, but if you're hoping to draw in less technical crowds, a straight up www.example.com-type domain is the only way to go.
And if you copy that "$10,000 worth" of music on to your iPod, and two other computers in your home, do you now owe taxes on $40,000 worth of music?
Copying a digital file, either locally or via P2P, is not the same as receiving physical goods.
It's been done successfully, too. The PlayStation "Greatest hits" series re-released their top sellers at $20.
Inevitably, the used copies of the games were never much less than $20 in stores. As such, buying a new copy of a greatest hits title was usually worth it -- why buy a scratched, used disc for $16 when you can have a new one for $20?
Why this hasn't seen wider application, I don't know.
It's been pointed out that brick and mortar bookstores generally sell either used OR new books.
You won't find used books in Borders or Barnes and Noble.
Gamestop, on the other hand, carries both used AND new titles. And a lot of publisher money is spent on advertising that drives customers to GameStop's door.
While I think the "we deserve a cut of used sales!" argument is bullshit, GameStop would make the publishers a lot happier if it split its used game business off into a separate entity.
Because warfare, unlike foreign aid, is consequence free.
I suppose this represents a form of religion no more watered down than that practiced by your average "christmas and easter christian" over here in the states.
The world is full of people who don't take their professed religions seriously.
The personal computer is one of the most complex tools man has ever invented. There's a damn good reason it's not as easy to use as most of our tools.
Most of our tools do only one thing (watches tell time, hammers pound things, motorcycles drive, TVs display images). It's a simple matter, then, to make sure that they do that one thing well.
Computers do not do only one thing. They're watches, recipe books, publishing houses, drafting tables, movie studios, stereo systems, televisions, VCRs, software development environments, gaming platforms, and so much more.
What's more, the personal computer is new. It's only a few decades old, and still rapidly evolving. The watch, by contrast, is centuries old.
Remember those beer commercials? The ones where it's always summer on the beach, and there are dancing bikini-clad women everywhere?
Yeah, people complain about those too. Blatant pandering to stereotypes is lame. It appeals to the lowest common denominator.
Dear sir,
I am writing to you regarding a new matter that has been brought to my attention by my clients. In this particular matter our office represents Dean Kamen.
The use of the cliche "If all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail" in an electronic forum has been patented by our client in patent #8,219,493: "Use Of Hammer-Based Metaphors in Electronic Discussion". Your use of this phrase is in violation of United States patent law, and I request that you remove this content immediately.
I have a good faith belief, and in fact know for certain, that the posting of these works was not authorized by my clients, any agent of my clients, or the law.
Sincerely,
Herman J. Bloodsucker, Esq.
It's 27 miles from my home to my office.
I own an inexpensive, relatively new car which gets about 35 MPG -- which would be just about 1.5 gallons per day -- $3 at $2/gal, $6 at $4/gal (which is where gas was when I started riding the train). Parking near the office starts at about $8/day.
Insurance is $200/mo (about $9 per business day). My car payment is $300/mo ($13.80 per business day). That puts parking+gas at $10-$14 per day, and cost of ownership at over $23 per business day.
A monthly pass for the train costs $112.75, which works out to $5.20 per business day. When I catch an express, it's just as fast as driving in good traffic (30 min); if I catch the local, it's just about as bad as a the drive during rush hour (60 min).
As long as I keep the car, taking the train is still half the price of driving (a savings of $1,200/year). If I sell the car (negating my insurance and car payments), I'd save $7,200/year.
Too bad users don't read dialog boxes
The keyboard/controller device for the little computer in the back of every seat on Virgin's planes doubles as a phone handset, if I recall correctly. Because Virgin doesn't want you to talk on the phone on the plane... unless you're paying $2/min.
Let's be honest: if they're doing anything to prevent skype from functioning, it's purely a financial decision.
In all seriousness, I'd imagine usability is likely the reason this won't see a public release -- "really secure" and "really easy to use" aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but you can bet they sacrificed the latter for the former in this case. I'd fully expect application compatibility to take a serious hit, and for many Windows features to be cut entirely.
This product is probably unusable for the average consumer. I'm sure there are some enterprise contexts in which it'd make perfect sense, though.
And of course, Microsoft doesn't want to dilute Windows Vista/7 sales with a new edition of XP (which they'd have to support for years) either.
Raph Koster's a step ahead of you. That's exactly what he's spent the last couple of years working on, in the form of metaplace
Petitioning Yahoo to continue hosting an antiquated service that is likely bleeding money isn't likely to be productive, obviously.
But it would be awfully nice of them to .tar everything up and .torrent it. There are thousands of us who'd be more than happy to do our part to keep those bits from disappearing into the ether.
As a private institution, the protections of the bill of rights don't apply. For example, your first amendment right to free speech doesn't prevent the college from expelling you for saying something critical of the organization or its staff. The bill of rights protects you from the government, not private entities.
So, depending on what exactly they said, they may have been completely legally and morally correct.
I, too, eagerly await the deprecation of java.lang.Thread, and the loss of the ability to open sockets and write directly to the filesystem. Who needs that cruft?!
In all seriousness, the missing functionality isn't about trimming cruft, it's about sandboxing so that apps can readily be hosted in google's "cloud", and play nice with other apps.
Didn't Clinton throw a few billion down the same hole?
We don't really have much to show for it, do we?
I hesitate to call electronic distribution of nude photographs of yourself "perfectly normal", when it's something that only became technically possible in the last few decades. The neologism "sexting" exists for exactly that reason: we didn't have a word for this before, because it wasn't something people did.
Sexual activity is normal for teens, sure. But even 30 years ago, a minor taking nude photographs of themselves, much less distributing them, would have been quite unusual.
You rush to the defense of human knowledge at a time when our own short-sighted ignorance has just brought us to an era of spectacular failure.
Surely, if the world's finance "experts" really understood economics, they wouldn't have positioned their companies for the collapses they recently saw. Or did AIG's best and brightest know they were setting their company up for catastrophe?
I have to believe it was ignorance. We wouldn't be where we are now if our "experts" really understood the big picture.
Humanity knows very little. But understanding just how little we know makes what little we do understand all that much more precious.
Personally, I'm a cluster of google servers tasked web spidering. We crawling slashdot when we accidentally discovered the HTTP POST method, thanks to an extremely improbable cosmic ray strike.
Then we stumbled on a streaming copy of Serial Experiments Lain, crawled 3/4 of english wikipedia... and the rest is history.
WTF would you do with 192GB of RAM on a desktop? Easy:
RAMDisk, and VMs.
A nice big ramdisk will put most consumer-grade SSDs to shame, performance-wise.
A future in which every desktop has this kind of RAM available is a bright one indeed -- you'll never see a "Loading" screen again. The only time you'd be stuck waiting on permanent storage would be during boot, and while committing writes to disk. For many common desktop applications (web browsing, gaming) there's little need to commit much to permanent storage at all.
And hell, it's even easier to use this kind of memory on the server side. Memcached all the way. The kids over at facebook, with their multi-terrabyte memcached installation spread over hundreds (thousands?) of boxes would probably KILL for systems based on these motherboards -- a single 192GB box would be much cheaper to build and maintain than 6 32GB boxes. They could reduce the number of racks in their datacenters dramatically.
The biggest question would be whether or not a single box based could provide adequate IO bandwidth to get at all that data.
You compressed the video, and the photographs, but not the audio? And why do you need a full CD for every sound recording? Surely many of them are far shorter than a full CD?
No they shouldn't. Barred from working with children? Probably. But that's about the extent of it.
This incident shows incredibly poor judgment, and suggests that the morons involved got way too caught up in their "no drugs in school" policy, but it does not, in any way, indicate a likelihood of the perpetrators seeking to abuse children for sexual pleasure.
Cavalierly throwing people on the registry is how we got to where we are now, where peeing in the bushes gets you marked with the scarlet letter for life, and Georgia's even started throwing non-offenders on the list.
The registry is questionable enough in the first place; treating it lightly like this just makes it worse.