Well actually they used to be arranged that way (like newsgroups, from general to specific), but it was reversed in, I dunno, 1993 or so. I remember when I started at university in 1995 it was still possible to send emails to people with the domain arranged that way round.
1. Come up with new TLD 2. Watch corporations flock to register theirname.tel because they can't afford for squatters to get there first 3. ?? 4. Profit!
Repeat every time you feel the need for a new revenue stream.
It's an incredibly frightening thought. I mean, it's fair to say that a person with an IQ of 100 is not terribly bright. Half of the population are more stupid than that.
Oh, please. The Fiesta is a MUCH bigger car than Mr. Bean's Mini - that's a 1950s design and passive safety has come quite a long way since then. European safety regulations are more or less as strict as American ones, and we know that safe doesn't have to mean big.
Also, when it comes to actual usable space, American cars fail hard. I mean, how on earth do you manage to make a car as big as a Ford Crown Victoria feel cramped in the back? Meanwhile, the Honda Jazz is several feet shorter than a Civic, but there's enough room in the back to throw a barn dance, and if you fold down the back seats you can get two mountain bikes in there. Standing up.
Yeah, it seems to me, as an outside observer, that Americans equate bigger with better when it comes to cars. I mean, most of your domestic offerings seem to be really low-tech and shoddily built, with poor-quality interiors and underpowered engines (relative to their size). But you do get an awful lot of metal for your money.
In Europe, it seems that car size is less of a statue symbol, and most people buy a car that's big enough for their needs (sure, we have our fair share of idiots in giant SUVs, but I'm speaking generally). So a car like this Fiesta, while small, can still be well-equipped and comfortable.
It's going to be very difficult to change the buying habits of a whole nation, but I think it's inevitable that you'll come round to the European "small and clever" way of thinking in the end.
The old Fiesta was dull, it's true. This is a completely new car, and all indications are it's very, very good indeed. And nicely styled too, both inside and out. Sure, it's small, but it'll still have more usable space than many an American land yacht.
I dabble in this a bit, and if I had time I'd do a lot more of it. There's a killing to be made from sports betting if you're prepared to put in the effort - I know one guy who paid off his mortgage years early by dabbling while he's at work, and at almost no financial risk.
I'd say it ticks all your boxes:
- It's geeky because it involves probabilities and a fair bit of number-crunching;
- You can do it from anywhere on your laptop, and at any time you like;
- It's as lucrative as you want it to be.
There are a number of ways to approach this, but generally, betting exchanges such as Betfair are your friend. They have markets on every sport you can think of, as well as lots of other stuff like politics, reality TV shows, etc. etc. Choose a field that interests you and start to swot up.
What you have is basically an options market - you're buying and selling probabilities. You'll find varying amounts of liquidity, and some markets will be more volatile than others. Study them, learn how they tend to behave.
There are any number of strategies you can employ. If you want to take no risk at all, simply look for arbitrage - use sites like Oddschecker to spot when a bookmaker's offering a price that you can lay on the exchanges for guaranteed profit. This happens all the time - you'd be amazed. Usually it doesn't last long, though (I'm talking minutes), so you have to be quick off the mark.
Alternatively, you can just trade on the exchanges. Like any market, there is a spread between the back and lay prices of anything you can bet on, and all you have to do is back at longer odds than you lay, and you'll win whatever. In more volatile markets, you can cash in on market trends - for example, back a horse at a particular price and then lay it off when the odds shorten, hedging so that you win the same amount regardless of the outcome of the race. The trick here is to spot the likely direction of movement of the market and position yourself accordingly. You won't get it right all the time, but over time you learn.
Or if you fancy something a bit riskier, go head-to-head against the bookies. A friend of mine plays chess against a grand master who makes his living betting in-running on cricket. He does his own assessments of the state of play as the game goes on and calculates what he thinks the odds should be. When the bookie is out of step with his own calculations, he puts in money. Generally this just comes down to his opinion against that of the guy setting the odds at the bookies - and because he's smart he gets it right more often than they do. He says he makes about £500 a day tax-free out of this, and most bookies won't take his credit cards, so he gets my friend to open accounts for him and gives him 10% of his winnings!
There are other crazy tactics that some people use, such as backing horses in-running that are clearly going to win at odds of 1/100, i.e. you've got to put up £100 to win £1. An instant 1% return on investment sounds lucrative, especially if you're doing it twenty or thirty times in an afternoon, but sometimes a steward's enquiry sees the result of a race overturned and suddenly you're looking at a big loss. Effectively by doing this you're gambling on fewer than 1% of winning horses being disqualified.
Bottom line is that bookies get stuff wrong all the time and there's easy money to be made from their mistakes if you're smart and quick enough to spot them. You can feel your way into this by putting up a little bit of play money that you can afford to lose, and learn the ropes. If you're successful, your winnings will accumulate and you'll be able to play for bigger stakes. I'm not able to devote enough time to this to make a lot of money out of it, but I do turn a profit just by having half a brain. If you're able to dedicate yourself, the sky's the limit, and there's no risk.
Truth is that they just like it because the King James Bible has more of the sort of blood-and-thunder language that appeals to these sorts. The old-fashioned English it uses sounds kinda scary to the modern ear and that's how they like it.
And then there's the Tube. A single journey within Zone 1 costs four pounds. This could be as short as 100 metres if you're stupid enough to travel between Charing Cross and Embankment.
And who's stupid enough to do that when you could buy an Oyster card and save a packet? Why, tourists, of course. And tourists don't vote. So they gouge 'em.
Not the point. For no good reason, and without warning or advertising, they threw twenty-odd years of Windows UI convention out the window, and in so doing made their application less usable, not more. It was an utterly braindead move.
Rule number one of UI design: Be consistent. It's inconsistent with every other Windows application apart from Media Player. Rule number two: Don't move or remove stuff the user expects to be there. Rule number three: If you do have to change stuff, let people know. There wasn't so much as a tooltip saying "In this version of IE we've hidden the menu bar and you can find it by pressing ALT". I figured it out, but could your granny?
I personally got into 16-bit, GUI computing in 1987 when my parents gave in to ten-year-old me and spent what for them was a load of money on an Atari ST. Over the next couple of years a lot of other kids my age followed suit and bought STs or Amigas. We were introduced to Windows (Version 2, y'know) at school and it just seemed hopelessly antiquated. We couldn't get our heads round why anybody would buy a system running this crap when they could get about five STs for the same price, all of which would run rings round the PC clone.
Of course, time passed and Atari, Commodore et al proved themselves much less proficient at running businesses than they were at designing computers, support waned and we found ourselves with no realistic option other than Windows (95 by this point). It still felt like a backward step and they'd had years to catch up.
So I reckon that if things had worked out a bit differently and, say, Commodore had been as ruthless in business as Microsoft, we'd be far ahead of where we are now. Or at least we'd have got to where we are now years ago. Windows never put a computer into my house, and it did a good job of killing off the better, cheaper alternatives that myself and millions liked me had plumped for.
Why's he moaning about what time it starts at when people have a whole twenty-four hours to find a suitable time to download the thing? It's not like we all have to sprint to our computers and start it on the minute.
And this is why I've never understood the appeal of the MGS games. If I wanted to watch a movie, I'd watch a movie, and I'd probably not choose one that's extremely poorly-acted with an unremarkable plot and weak characterisation (yeah, sure, it's moderately interesting by the standards of computer games, but really, so what?). I don't want it from a computer game. I don't mind the odd cut scene, but those guys just don't know where to stop. And it's not like the gameplay's engaging enough to make up for the endless sitting around twiddling your thumbs, either.
Kinda reminds me of Dragon's Lair - play for a few seconds to unlock a couple of minutes of animation, sit back and watch. The difference is that in 1983 or whatever it was, this was an impressive trick to pull off. Now it's just a really boring way to spend an evening.
No doubt this'll get marked troll. It ain't. I just don't get the fuss over these games. Sorry.
Microsoft do indeed spend millions on usability testing. Can't fault them there. But myself and other usability professions often wonder why they bother, because it doesn't get a look-in. Here's a famous story about how one tiny part of Vista came to be how it is. Not much room for input from usability testing there...
No they're not. They're not prisoners of war because it's not a war, whatever the government rhetoric. The last time the US actually declared war was Korea. The reason for this is that when you're in a declared war, you have to play by the rules as laid out in the Geneva Conventions, and that doesn't suit the powers that be. The guys in Guantanamo are "illegal enemy combatants" or something equally nebulous, and the US government's take on things is that this entitles them to treat them as they see fit.
My boss has just today returned from five weeks of holiday, so we've figured he's not really back into "work mode" yet. So we've decided that all 15 or so of us are going to hand in our resignations tomorrow, and see how many he has to read before he realises he's been had.
If this plan backfires, I promise I'll log on from the unemployment office and let you all know...
On Valentine's Day this year I changed a female colleague of mine's new mail notification sound to play "Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye every time she got a new message. It was only about two weeks ago that I showed her how to put it back to normal - she'd had her sound muted the whole time...
I'm guessing this would be an instant sexual harassment suit in the good ol' U S of A, but here it was actually sanctioned and encouraged by the company as part of a week of shenanigans. Jolly good fun it was too.
I dunno, I've had nothing but good times there. I found the people to be as tolerant as they are in any other cosmopolitan city. My French is good, but it always takes me a little time to adjust to the local dialect. I've never had any grief off anybody for not being Francophone, but then again as soon as I speak they'll know I'm clearly not from anywhere in North America.
I think it's a great place, with a character all its own.
Personally I've no problem whatsoever spotting a girl's interest in someone, except when the someone's me. Then I keep telling myself that I shouldn't be so presumptuous, it must be my imagination, she couldn't possibly be interested in me, etc. etc. Of course, it's a self-fulfilling prophesy, because she soon loses interest if you act like that. You pretty much have to grab me by the lapels and drag me into the bedroom, not because I don't Get It, but because I can't see the appeal.
Slashdot Mirror
Well actually they used to be arranged that way (like newsgroups, from general to specific), but it was reversed in, I dunno, 1993 or so. I remember when I started at university in 1995 it was still possible to send emails to people with the domain arranged that way round.
1. Come up with new TLD
2. Watch corporations flock to register theirname.tel because they can't afford for squatters to get there first
3. ??
4. Profit!
Repeat every time you feel the need for a new revenue stream.
Nice work if you can get it.
I dunno, I think the camerawork actually adds to it. The person operating it clearly, genuinely couldn't quite believe what they were seeing.
Ktorrent absolutely rocks the house. Use that.
Man, it even had a car analogy in it.
I think I'm in love.
It's an incredibly frightening thought. I mean, it's fair to say that a person with an IQ of 100 is not terribly bright. Half of the population are more stupid than that.
Oh, please. The Fiesta is a MUCH bigger car than Mr. Bean's Mini - that's a 1950s design and passive safety has come quite a long way since then. European safety regulations are more or less as strict as American ones, and we know that safe doesn't have to mean big.
Also, when it comes to actual usable space, American cars fail hard. I mean, how on earth do you manage to make a car as big as a Ford Crown Victoria feel cramped in the back? Meanwhile, the Honda Jazz is several feet shorter than a Civic, but there's enough room in the back to throw a barn dance, and if you fold down the back seats you can get two mountain bikes in there. Standing up.
Yeah, it seems to me, as an outside observer, that Americans equate bigger with better when it comes to cars. I mean, most of your domestic offerings seem to be really low-tech and shoddily built, with poor-quality interiors and underpowered engines (relative to their size). But you do get an awful lot of metal for your money.
In Europe, it seems that car size is less of a statue symbol, and most people buy a car that's big enough for their needs (sure, we have our fair share of idiots in giant SUVs, but I'm speaking generally). So a car like this Fiesta, while small, can still be well-equipped and comfortable.
It's going to be very difficult to change the buying habits of a whole nation, but I think it's inevitable that you'll come round to the European "small and clever" way of thinking in the end.
The old Fiesta was dull, it's true. This is a completely new car, and all indications are it's very, very good indeed. And nicely styled too, both inside and out. Sure, it's small, but it'll still have more usable space than many an American land yacht.
Here's the website.
I dabble in this a bit, and if I had time I'd do a lot more of it. There's a killing to be made from sports betting if you're prepared to put in the effort - I know one guy who paid off his mortgage years early by dabbling while he's at work, and at almost no financial risk.
I'd say it ticks all your boxes:
- It's geeky because it involves probabilities and a fair bit of number-crunching;
- You can do it from anywhere on your laptop, and at any time you like;
- It's as lucrative as you want it to be.
There are a number of ways to approach this, but generally, betting exchanges such as Betfair are your friend. They have markets on every sport you can think of, as well as lots of other stuff like politics, reality TV shows, etc. etc. Choose a field that interests you and start to swot up.
What you have is basically an options market - you're buying and selling probabilities. You'll find varying amounts of liquidity, and some markets will be more volatile than others. Study them, learn how they tend to behave.
There are any number of strategies you can employ. If you want to take no risk at all, simply look for arbitrage - use sites like Oddschecker to spot when a bookmaker's offering a price that you can lay on the exchanges for guaranteed profit. This happens all the time - you'd be amazed. Usually it doesn't last long, though (I'm talking minutes), so you have to be quick off the mark.
Alternatively, you can just trade on the exchanges. Like any market, there is a spread between the back and lay prices of anything you can bet on, and all you have to do is back at longer odds than you lay, and you'll win whatever. In more volatile markets, you can cash in on market trends - for example, back a horse at a particular price and then lay it off when the odds shorten, hedging so that you win the same amount regardless of the outcome of the race. The trick here is to spot the likely direction of movement of the market and position yourself accordingly. You won't get it right all the time, but over time you learn.
Or if you fancy something a bit riskier, go head-to-head against the bookies. A friend of mine plays chess against a grand master who makes his living betting in-running on cricket. He does his own assessments of the state of play as the game goes on and calculates what he thinks the odds should be. When the bookie is out of step with his own calculations, he puts in money. Generally this just comes down to his opinion against that of the guy setting the odds at the bookies - and because he's smart he gets it right more often than they do. He says he makes about £500 a day tax-free out of this, and most bookies won't take his credit cards, so he gets my friend to open accounts for him and gives him 10% of his winnings!
There are other crazy tactics that some people use, such as backing horses in-running that are clearly going to win at odds of 1/100, i.e. you've got to put up £100 to win £1. An instant 1% return on investment sounds lucrative, especially if you're doing it twenty or thirty times in an afternoon, but sometimes a steward's enquiry sees the result of a race overturned and suddenly you're looking at a big loss. Effectively by doing this you're gambling on fewer than 1% of winning horses being disqualified.
Bottom line is that bookies get stuff wrong all the time and there's easy money to be made from their mistakes if you're smart and quick enough to spot them. You can feel your way into this by putting up a little bit of play money that you can afford to lose, and learn the ropes. If you're successful, your winnings will accumulate and you'll be able to play for bigger stakes. I'm not able to devote enough time to this to make a lot of money out of it, but I do turn a profit just by having half a brain. If you're able to dedicate yourself, the sky's the limit, and there's no risk.
Truth is that they just like it because the King James Bible has more of the sort of blood-and-thunder language that appeals to these sorts. The old-fashioned English it uses sounds kinda scary to the modern ear and that's how they like it.
And then there's the Tube. A single journey within Zone 1 costs four pounds. This could be as short as 100 metres if you're stupid enough to travel between Charing Cross and Embankment.
And who's stupid enough to do that when you could buy an Oyster card and save a packet? Why, tourists, of course. And tourists don't vote. So they gouge 'em.
Not the point. For no good reason, and without warning or advertising, they threw twenty-odd years of Windows UI convention out the window, and in so doing made their application less usable, not more. It was an utterly braindead move.
Rule number one of UI design: Be consistent. It's inconsistent with every other Windows application apart from Media Player. Rule number two: Don't move or remove stuff the user expects to be there. Rule number three: If you do have to change stuff, let people know. There wasn't so much as a tooltip saying "In this version of IE we've hidden the menu bar and you can find it by pressing ALT". I figured it out, but could your granny?
I'd say it held it back if anything.
I personally got into 16-bit, GUI computing in 1987 when my parents gave in to ten-year-old me and spent what for them was a load of money on an Atari ST. Over the next couple of years a lot of other kids my age followed suit and bought STs or Amigas. We were introduced to Windows (Version 2, y'know) at school and it just seemed hopelessly antiquated. We couldn't get our heads round why anybody would buy a system running this crap when they could get about five STs for the same price, all of which would run rings round the PC clone.
Of course, time passed and Atari, Commodore et al proved themselves much less proficient at running businesses than they were at designing computers, support waned and we found ourselves with no realistic option other than Windows (95 by this point). It still felt like a backward step and they'd had years to catch up.
So I reckon that if things had worked out a bit differently and, say, Commodore had been as ruthless in business as Microsoft, we'd be far ahead of where we are now. Or at least we'd have got to where we are now years ago. Windows never put a computer into my house, and it did a good job of killing off the better, cheaper alternatives that myself and millions liked me had plumped for.
Why's he moaning about what time it starts at when people have a whole twenty-four hours to find a suitable time to download the thing? It's not like we all have to sprint to our computers and start it on the minute.
And this is why I've never understood the appeal of the MGS games. If I wanted to watch a movie, I'd watch a movie, and I'd probably not choose one that's extremely poorly-acted with an unremarkable plot and weak characterisation (yeah, sure, it's moderately interesting by the standards of computer games, but really, so what?). I don't want it from a computer game. I don't mind the odd cut scene, but those guys just don't know where to stop. And it's not like the gameplay's engaging enough to make up for the endless sitting around twiddling your thumbs, either.
Kinda reminds me of Dragon's Lair - play for a few seconds to unlock a couple of minutes of animation, sit back and watch. The difference is that in 1983 or whatever it was, this was an impressive trick to pull off. Now it's just a really boring way to spend an evening.
No doubt this'll get marked troll. It ain't. I just don't get the fuss over these games. Sorry.
Neither as posh nor as funny. But vastly better in bed. Oh yes.
I think it was his little joke, Jerry.
You're half right.
Microsoft do indeed spend millions on usability testing. Can't fault them there. But myself and other usability professions often wonder why they bother, because it doesn't get a look-in. Here's a famous story about how one tiny part of Vista came to be how it is. Not much room for input from usability testing there...
No they're not. They're not prisoners of war because it's not a war, whatever the government rhetoric. The last time the US actually declared war was Korea. The reason for this is that when you're in a declared war, you have to play by the rules as laid out in the Geneva Conventions, and that doesn't suit the powers that be. The guys in Guantanamo are "illegal enemy combatants" or something equally nebulous, and the US government's take on things is that this entitles them to treat them as they see fit.
My boss has just today returned from five weeks of holiday, so we've figured he's not really back into "work mode" yet. So we've decided that all 15 or so of us are going to hand in our resignations tomorrow, and see how many he has to read before he realises he's been had.
If this plan backfires, I promise I'll log on from the unemployment office and let you all know...
On Valentine's Day this year I changed a female colleague of mine's new mail notification sound to play "Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye every time she got a new message. It was only about two weeks ago that I showed her how to put it back to normal - she'd had her sound muted the whole time...
I'm guessing this would be an instant sexual harassment suit in the good ol' U S of A, but here it was actually sanctioned and encouraged by the company as part of a week of shenanigans. Jolly good fun it was too.
I dunno, I've had nothing but good times there. I found the people to be as tolerant as they are in any other cosmopolitan city. My French is good, but it always takes me a little time to adjust to the local dialect. I've never had any grief off anybody for not being Francophone, but then again as soon as I speak they'll know I'm clearly not from anywhere in North America.
I think it's a great place, with a character all its own.
Maybe he's just modest.
Personally I've no problem whatsoever spotting a girl's interest in someone, except when the someone's me. Then I keep telling myself that I shouldn't be so presumptuous, it must be my imagination, she couldn't possibly be interested in me, etc. etc. Of course, it's a self-fulfilling prophesy, because she soon loses interest if you act like that. You pretty much have to grab me by the lapels and drag me into the bedroom, not because I don't Get It, but because I can't see the appeal.
You could always, y'know, learn French. And generally get involved. You never know, you might even enjoy it.
It's spectacularly ignorant to expect the local culture to adapt to you. Embrace the opportunity to try something new.