Both Google and MySpace are intended to be what my father the real-estate agent would call "destination locations" -- you go out with the specific intent to patronize one or two of them, the same way you go out with the specific intent to patronize your bank. This is why a bank generally does not stress overmuch about being on a corner. You can compare this to gas stations, which are NOT destinations (nobody says "Hmm, I think I'll hop in the car and drive over to that Shell station on 67th street next to the Burger King") -- their location is critically important to them. Almost every gas station you find will be built on a corner, for maximum visiblity and accessibility.
In the Internet, things are almost completely reversed. If you're a destination, then you might well get accessed by the address bar (Amazon, Google, eBay, MySpace) -- its very important to you to have a punchy, memorable, very unambiguous (can't be mispelled or misremembered) name. If you're not a destination, you rely on people seeing you "from the road" as it were, and in today's internet "the road" is Google. Google doesn't care whether you have a maximally-punchy minimally-long domain name or not.
I wouldn't write a 45 letter domain name for the heck of it, but you can feel free to not treat "six to eight characters terminated with.com, and exactly equivalent to your business name" as the gospel anymore. You're the expert on your own business, so you're best qualified to determine whether your users will see you as a destination location or not.
I remember wiping Windows 98 for a few people with that trouble. Generally took about one hour for the actual install and another hour for putting their computer in a usable state (i.e. getting them back up and running with their daily-use applications set up). I can't believe XP has made that a much slower process.
Yep. Are you intending for your web site to be a destination location? Like, someone will log on and say "I want to go to Bob's web site now, www.bobswebsite.com"? Because the vast majority of home users do NOT have usage patterns like this and I'm guessing your users won't either. Back in the olden days of the Internet, when search engines were unknown or cruddy and Internet expertise was nil, somebody who wanted to try out that whole "buying books online" thing might actually type in www.books.com just to see if it worked. Then books.com, internet.com, business.com, nameofyourbusiness.com, etc were worth a lot of money. Now, most of your first-time leads are going to be coming in from search engines and they largely don't care about your domain name (helps to have a search term in the url, of course, but you can get that just as easily by naming yourself www.bobs-pc-shop.com instead of www.bobs-pc.com). Your returning customers will either remember the domain name (rather unlikely), go to their history tab (very unlikely), go to a bookmark they made (suprisingly likely, and a convinient "bookmark this site" button works wonders), or just do it the easy way and Google your business name again.
Heck, I'm as atypical as a user can be and I've been finding myself Googling "Amazon" recently.
... just mosey on over to www.ghostzilla.com, install it, and then put the browsing window in a contextually appropriate app window on your screen. My bosses totally don't care what I do on company time as long as I meet my deadlines, but if they did and I were feeling sneaky I might, say, integrate the window into an Eclipse panel...
Morpheus: "Neo, you forgot to escape input you received from the user. You know what that means?" Neo: "No, Morpheus." Morpheus: "It means everyone who does business with the Bank of Zion is about to get their identity hijacked and the next time you get together with Trinity she will actually be a 40 year old Russian Man." Neo: "Whoa."
They tried that in FFVII. It did not exactly go over well with a large segment of fans. Other games where its used are Grandia II, Skyes of Arcadia (not a playable character but I was almost choked up), the Baldur's Gate series, etc etc.
In the grand tradition of Asian matchmakers I have a prospect for you. She's boundlessly perky, very intelligent, and participates in rhythmic gymnastics like nobody you've ever met. OK, so she's a little on the emaciated side, but you would be too if your primary food groups were revolutionary spirit and grass. She also is sort of sadistic, kidnaps little children for fun, and really hates your guts... but wants to get with you, TODAY, if its on her terms. If you're so hard up for a girlfiend that you could stand being trod on, look no further than North Korea.
Yep. And GalCivII sold 30% of its copies online according to their blog post. Many game developers would have to split the $49.95 with a retailer, distributor, and publisher, eventually seeing somewhere between $10 and $20. When Stardock sells GalCiv online, they split the $49.95 with Stardock, Stardock, and Stardock (well, OK, kick in something like $.80 for credit card processing).
OK, somewhat atypical use case here: I spent approximately $16 on music in my life until the age of 23. I used to sing but listening to music was never a very big thing for me. Then I got to college and got infected with the Napster bug, and frequently play music in the background while working on projects to have something to hum along to. When I got my first job I wanted to legalize my status. Enter iTunes. $20 later I had Patio's Programming Playlist 100% legal. Yay, cheap at the price and met my requirements ("plays on my one computer without requiring any work"). I kept buying about one song a week from iTunes, generally on impulse (e.g. my little brother said "can't touch this" and I wanted to hear that MC Hammer song again for giggles -- and for a price thats less than a soda in a vending machine thats an itch I can scratch). Doing the math, that would put my first year of iTMS usage at roughly quadruple my lifetime music expenditure.
Then one day I went to the doctor and was told something which involved the words "valve", "blockage", and "serious". I joined a gym the next day and resolved to go three days a week. My gym plays Brittney Spears' Greatist Hits all day, every day. I was ready to murder the receptionist and if someone tried to stop me then whoops I'd do it again. I couldn't quit the gym, so I decided to buy an MP3 player to drown out that toxic Toxic. And at this point I already had $60 sunk in my music collection on iTMS. So I just ordered an iPod.
The iPod is a great deal. The iTunes Music Store is a terrible deal.
Can someone explain this to me? Compared to legal alternatives, the iPod is at best a wash on features (other than tight integration with iTMS) and is priced much, much more expensive (you pay a significant Apple fanboy premium versus competing players). Compared to legal alternatives for aquiring tracks from name artists, iTMS has practically trademarked the terms "cheap" and "easy". I wanted to get the Hammertime song (don't ask). iTMS = fifteen seconds and $.99 later its mine.
I got sucked into the iPod/iTMS cult because I was an iTMS user who needed a portable MP3 player, not an iPod user who needed a download service.
The difference between Infinium Labs and NASA is that one of them squanders tens of millions of dollars producing something of dubious societal value, blows through capital at an obscene rate, has to get more money by going back to the idiots who funded it in the first place and saying "Well, we don't have much now, but concentrate on the potential!", and is defended only by legions of fanboys... and the other makes video games.
Deep Space One cost $150 million dollars. In return, we got technological research which, at best, means we can fund our next pointless space project in a slightly less inefficient manner. To pick one technology at random, they developed a solar cell. Yay. How much terrestrial research could we have done on solar cells for $150 million dollars? Heck, even if we had an insane desire to blast a research budget allowing for only one prototype into space, how much money would we have saved if we had just put the new solar cell on an autonomous satellite?
You don't toast. It can't toast. A match made in heaven! Sharper Image will have distribution rights by the end of the year, for the overpaid executive in your life who has everything... except a toaster than can't actually toast bread.
Lets see, what were my last major gaming purchases:
1) Civilization 4. Bought this from direct2drive, which nigh-totally eliminates my copy proctection hassles (although I had to log into their website through Internet explorer to actually validate the game -- oh noes!).
2) Oblivion. Same deal.
3) Half-Life 2. Snagged it via Steam. I heard a lot of sound and fury about how obtrusive that was going to be but the process was very seamless for me.
4) WoW. Ever wonder why MMORPGs are so big in China? Because you can't pirate a service (well, OK, you can't pirate a service nearly so easily as you can pirate anything else in China).
5) Galactic Civilization II. Got this from their download manager (do we detect a trend?) and their first bullet-pointed feature is "This game has no DRM scheme.")
From my perspective, CD protection is a regretful necessity which is non-regretfully no longer necessary for me to play games. The only time I need a physical object any more is when I play console games. And I'll probably have to get that WoW expansion later, at least long enough to install it once. I think companies are going to realize that digital distribution solves their copy-protection woes AND cuts the retailer out of the equation and continue to increase the availability of it.
Yes, in UK and Australia (and probably other Commonwealth nations, although I don't have personal experience outside of those two -- Canada I think follows American usage) "mathematics" always shortens to "maths" when describing a field of study ("My worst subject at uni was maths"), the process of computation ("Help me, I can't get the maths to work out here"), etc etc.
There is a Japanese research group which has a cloaking system (well, technically its more of a very adaptive camoflague -- significant drawbacks, such as the requirement to have a camera focused on the object you want to cloak, make it less than useful for military applications). Its essentially useless currently, but it makes for very fun tech demos.
Vanguard apparently wants to bring back what even EQ had to do major gymnastics to code around. Guilds spending more time finding third party programs and strategies to ensure other guilds won't progress rather than working on progression. (If you played EQ during the PoP era and were in a high end guild, it was common to make sure one or both Decorins were moved under the world to make sure nobody got flagged for Rallos Zek until the servers got rebooted.)
So true, although I was out by then. Lum the Mad said it best: "Anyone who says EQ is not a PVP game has obviously never seen the forums."
You're both right. You're right on what SHA-1 is. They're right on SHA-1 protecting credit card transactions. SHA-1 is used to digitally sign those little certificate thingees that the trust model for https:/// is built on, and https:/// handles most (competently implemented) credit card transactions on the Internet. Compromising SHA-1 (it would have to be a pretty darn severe compromise*) would theoretically allow you to compromise the security of a credit card transaction by maliciously altering certificates to represent your servers as the ones the mark should be doing business with.
* It wouldn't be enough to just get *any* hash collision, you'd need a string of data which would both function as a certificate and collide.
I think even enforcing "the game must be available for hands-on play", which the show already does, wouldn't help too much. Black&White was certainly Game of the Year for all years measured in two hours or less. It was only after the initial sense of wonder at the control scheme and graphics faded that you realized that they hadn't shipped a game with the tech demo. I'm looking at you, Spore! Prove me wrong, please!
After seeing Dan Brown's foray into crypto (Digital Fortress) I wonder if that Sicilian capo with the cipher "you'd use to keep out your little sister" couldn't improve his codes...
I think the most inane thing, in a very inane book, was when the world-renowned linguist/prodigy who spoke umpteen dialects and was consulted by the NSA for his Chinese expertise couldn't tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese in less than thirty minutes. Oh, but it gets better (at least, if you have any clue about either of the two languages): apparently, Japanese being written only in kanji is a) possible b) easily confusable with Chinese and c) not intelligible to a reader of Chinese.
Sunshine was just not a good game, but Mario64 stands as one of the best platformers of all time (it was his first foray into 3D, on the N64). If you get the chance to sit down with it sometime (or buy it when it is inevitably rereleased for the Wii) I strongly recommend you do -- its quite possibly the perfect expression of the license in threespace.
She doesn't want to be *kidnapped*. She wants to be *rescued*. The one I feel sorry for in this situation is Bowser... he keeps getting caught up in Princess/Mario's twisted courtship (alright already, we get it, you're an item -- hang up the plumber's boots and settle down to raise some mushrooms already), and beaten up for his trouble.
My mother anthropomorphizes her computer to a degree thats crazy (I swear, if I told her sacrificing a squirrel on the keyboard would get rid of popups... fear for the local wildlife). I'm not quite that bad, but I almost did feel... wrong when I started using my new Dell after 5 years with my last one. Like the feel of a new baseball glove you haven't broken in yet, you know? OK, so maybe thats the wrong analogy on slashdot...
And I know I do it all the time with programs. Who *hasn't* said "Come on baby, work with me here, no NPE no NPE no NPE NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO I HATE YOU!"
Slashdot Mirror
In the Internet, things are almost completely reversed. If you're a destination, then you might well get accessed by the address bar (Amazon, Google, eBay, MySpace) -- its very important to you to have a punchy, memorable, very unambiguous (can't be mispelled or misremembered) name. If you're not a destination, you rely on people seeing you "from the road" as it were, and in today's internet "the road" is Google. Google doesn't care whether you have a maximally-punchy minimally-long domain name or not.
I wouldn't write a 45 letter domain name for the heck of it, but you can feel free to not treat "six to eight characters terminated with .com, and exactly equivalent to your business name" as the gospel anymore. You're the expert on your own business, so you're best qualified to determine whether your users will see you as a destination location or not.
I remember wiping Windows 98 for a few people with that trouble. Generally took about one hour for the actual install and another hour for putting their computer in a usable state (i.e. getting them back up and running with their daily-use applications set up). I can't believe XP has made that a much slower process.
Heck, I'm as atypical as a user can be and I've been finding myself Googling "Amazon" recently.
... just mosey on over to www.ghostzilla.com, install it, and then put the browsing window in a contextually appropriate app window on your screen. My bosses totally don't care what I do on company time as long as I meet my deadlines, but if they did and I were feeling sneaky I might, say, integrate the window into an Eclipse panel...
Morpheus: "Neo, you forgot to escape input you received from the user. You know what that means?"
Neo: "No, Morpheus."
Morpheus: "It means everyone who does business with the Bank of Zion is about to get their identity hijacked and the next time you get together with Trinity she will actually be a 40 year old Russian Man."
Neo: "Whoa."
They tried that in FFVII. It did not exactly go over well with a large segment of fans. Other games where its used are Grandia II, Skyes of Arcadia (not a playable character but I was almost choked up), the Baldur's Gate series, etc etc.
In the grand tradition of Asian matchmakers I have a prospect for you. She's boundlessly perky, very intelligent, and participates in rhythmic gymnastics like nobody you've ever met. OK, so she's a little on the emaciated side, but you would be too if your primary food groups were revolutionary spirit and grass. She also is sort of sadistic, kidnaps little children for fun, and really hates your guts... but wants to get with you, TODAY, if its on her terms. If you're so hard up for a girlfiend that you could stand being trod on, look no further than North Korea.
Yep. And GalCivII sold 30% of its copies online according to their blog post. Many game developers would have to split the $49.95 with a retailer, distributor, and publisher, eventually seeing somewhere between $10 and $20. When Stardock sells GalCiv online, they split the $49.95 with Stardock, Stardock, and Stardock (well, OK, kick in something like $.80 for credit card processing).
Then one day I went to the doctor and was told something which involved the words "valve", "blockage", and "serious". I joined a gym the next day and resolved to go three days a week. My gym plays Brittney Spears' Greatist Hits all day, every day. I was ready to murder the receptionist and if someone tried to stop me then whoops I'd do it again. I couldn't quit the gym, so I decided to buy an MP3 player to drown out that toxic Toxic. And at this point I already had $60 sunk in my music collection on iTMS. So I just ordered an iPod.
Can someone explain this to me? Compared to legal alternatives, the iPod is at best a wash on features (other than tight integration with iTMS) and is priced much, much more expensive (you pay a significant Apple fanboy premium versus competing players). Compared to legal alternatives for aquiring tracks from name artists, iTMS has practically trademarked the terms "cheap" and "easy". I wanted to get the Hammertime song (don't ask). iTMS = fifteen seconds and $.99 later its mine.
I got sucked into the iPod/iTMS cult because I was an iTMS user who needed a portable MP3 player, not an iPod user who needed a download service.
Deep Space One cost $150 million dollars. In return, we got technological research which, at best, means we can fund our next pointless space project in a slightly less inefficient manner. To pick one technology at random, they developed a solar cell. Yay. How much terrestrial research could we have done on solar cells for $150 million dollars? Heck, even if we had an insane desire to blast a research budget allowing for only one prototype into space, how much money would we have saved if we had just put the new solar cell on an autonomous satellite?
You don't toast. It can't toast. A match made in heaven! Sharper Image will have distribution rights by the end of the year, for the overpaid executive in your life who has everything... except a toaster than can't actually toast bread.
Lets see, what were my last major gaming purchases: 1) Civilization 4. Bought this from direct2drive, which nigh-totally eliminates my copy proctection hassles (although I had to log into their website through Internet explorer to actually validate the game -- oh noes!). 2) Oblivion. Same deal. 3) Half-Life 2. Snagged it via Steam. I heard a lot of sound and fury about how obtrusive that was going to be but the process was very seamless for me. 4) WoW. Ever wonder why MMORPGs are so big in China? Because you can't pirate a service (well, OK, you can't pirate a service nearly so easily as you can pirate anything else in China). 5) Galactic Civilization II. Got this from their download manager (do we detect a trend?) and their first bullet-pointed feature is "This game has no DRM scheme.") From my perspective, CD protection is a regretful necessity which is non-regretfully no longer necessary for me to play games. The only time I need a physical object any more is when I play console games. And I'll probably have to get that WoW expansion later, at least long enough to install it once. I think companies are going to realize that digital distribution solves their copy-protection woes AND cuts the retailer out of the equation and continue to increase the availability of it.
Yes, in UK and Australia (and probably other Commonwealth nations, although I don't have personal experience outside of those two -- Canada I think follows American usage) "mathematics" always shortens to "maths" when describing a field of study ("My worst subject at uni was maths"), the process of computation ("Help me, I can't get the maths to work out here"), etc etc.
Yep, and a specially designed cloak. Completely useless but fun to watch.
There is a Japanese research group which has a cloaking system (well, technically its more of a very adaptive camoflague -- significant drawbacks, such as the requirement to have a camera focused on the object you want to cloak, make it less than useful for military applications). Its essentially useless currently, but it makes for very fun tech demos.
I A/xv/oc.html
http://projects.star.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/MED
My favorite one is the breakdancing guy in the bottom video.
Vanguard apparently wants to bring back what even EQ had to do major gymnastics to code around. Guilds spending more time finding third party programs and strategies to ensure other guilds won't progress rather than working on progression. (If you played EQ during the PoP era and were in a high end guild, it was common to make sure one or both Decorins were moved under the world to make sure nobody got flagged for Rallos Zek until the servers got rebooted.)
So true, although I was out by then. Lum the Mad said it best: "Anyone who says EQ is not a PVP game has obviously never seen the forums."
You're both right. You're right on what SHA-1 is. They're right on SHA-1 protecting credit card transactions. SHA-1 is used to digitally sign those little certificate thingees that the trust model for https:/// is built on, and https:/// handles most (competently implemented) credit card transactions on the Internet. Compromising SHA-1 (it would have to be a pretty darn severe compromise*) would theoretically allow you to compromise the security of a credit card transaction by maliciously altering certificates to represent your servers as the ones the mark should be doing business with.
* It wouldn't be enough to just get *any* hash collision, you'd need a string of data which would both function as a certificate and collide.
I think even enforcing "the game must be available for hands-on play", which the show already does, wouldn't help too much. Black&White was certainly Game of the Year for all years measured in two hours or less. It was only after the initial sense of wonder at the control scheme and graphics faded that you realized that they hadn't shipped a game with the tech demo. I'm looking at you, Spore! Prove me wrong, please!
... that a Chinese black-marketeer is blaming outsourcing for his quality woes?
After seeing Dan Brown's foray into crypto (Digital Fortress) I wonder if that Sicilian capo with the cipher "you'd use to keep out your little sister" couldn't improve his codes...
I think the most inane thing, in a very inane book, was when the world-renowned linguist/prodigy who spoke umpteen dialects and was consulted by the NSA for his Chinese expertise couldn't tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese in less than thirty minutes. Oh, but it gets better (at least, if you have any clue about either of the two languages): apparently, Japanese being written only in kanji is a) possible b) easily confusable with Chinese and c) not intelligible to a reader of Chinese.
Sunshine was just not a good game, but Mario64 stands as one of the best platformers of all time (it was his first foray into 3D, on the N64). If you get the chance to sit down with it sometime (or buy it when it is inevitably rereleased for the Wii) I strongly recommend you do -- its quite possibly the perfect expression of the license in threespace.
She doesn't want to be *kidnapped*. She wants to be *rescued*. The one I feel sorry for in this situation is Bowser... he keeps getting caught up in Princess/Mario's twisted courtship (alright already, we get it, you're an item -- hang up the plumber's boots and settle down to raise some mushrooms already), and beaten up for his trouble.
And I know I do it all the time with programs. Who *hasn't* said "Come on baby, work with me here, no NPE no NPE no NPE NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO I HATE YOU!"
Peace out man. Or, like, whatever.