I remember there being speculation that the reason you couldn't acquire an Xbox 360 was because Microsoft was purposefully halting production. Many people thought that perhaps Microsoft was up to business tricks and shorting themselves on the production of these devices in time for the holiday season.
The net effect, of course, to be able to create such a hype that everyone needs one regardless of how much it costs.
I don't think this effect occurred, however, as I don't seem to need one.
And so I waited in expectation for the flood gates to be released as wave after wave of consoles hit everywhere. And I waited. And waited.
Is it possible that they were seriously having a hard time producing the units before the holidays? Or is this just their marketing tactic biting them in the ass with retailers balking at the cruel fates Microsoft tried to assign them?
I see only one way to solve this: Give me one. I'll run WoW on it, and decide.
I hate to break it to you, but the only lag you'll experience from either setup will probably be server side (depending on your realm). I mean, my P4 3.0 Ghz with 2 gigs of RAM and a 6600GT lags sometimes and runs fluid as real life at others.
Many of the users of WoW have done all they can to reduce the lag on their end. It's time for Blizzard to step up to the plate and use the massive amounts of money we give them monthly to get some better servers. I'm not so good with math but 5,000,000 users paying 12 dollars a month is.... $60 million?
Bill Monkey: Who's the owner of this canopy? Monkey Dubois: I, I am. I bought the place for 12 bananas in '79 and...
[Will throws feces at him] Little Bill Daggett: You, sir, are a smearing son of a bitch! You just roadappled an unarmed man! Bill Monkey: He should have armed himself if he was goin' to decorate his tree with my friend. Little Bill Daggett: You'd be Will Monkey out of Missouri; smearer and fecal slinger of innocent women and children. Bill Monkey: I'm Will Monkey and I've shat on most everything that walks or crawls; and now I'm here to brown you Little Bill for what you done to Ned. Little Bill Daggett: [walking toward Will] All right boys, he's only got one handful left. When he throws, cowpie this son of a bitch down.
What do you like the most and what do you hate the most?
Did he fail to include what his dislikes about Microsoft were? Surely everyone has some problem with their current employer. I wonder if things are run around Microsoft the same way Hitler ran things: Any voice--no matter how minor--of dissent results in termination.
If so, I hope the employee who asked the question above succeeds in maintaining his anonymity.
2005 saw the coldest winter in 70 years in New Delhi, India.
Yeah, I'll bet it was the coldest for Newfoundland too. For you see, try to tell any Newfie that global warming is occuring and they'll most likely laugh at you. It gets colder and colder there every year it seems. A basic study was done and it was determined that the melting icebergs to the north were providing cold water for the Labrador Current to bring around Newfoundland. Thus making the temperature of the ground colder which normally radiates some amount of warmth in the winter months.
You know, I'll bet that New Delhi is experiencing cold air from somewhere that's not supposed to happen. The wind currents of the earth were very complex to begin with and it took us a long time to figure them out. The changes that are starting to occur are going to be even more difficult to predict.
I think their forefathers avoided morbid obesity more through working really, really hard all the livelong day, mining coal and farming rock and like that.
Child labor it is then! We'll solve both obesity and a lack of a sugar fed workforce in one fell swoop.
Just mix those gradeschoolers in with the convicts on the chain gang...
There was this game we used to play what was it called?
Oh, right, kickball.
How much did it cost to play this?
The cost of a ball or nothing if you had a butcher shop willing to give you an pig's stomach.
Thank god West Virginia has been blessed with DDR. Were it not for this half a grand machine, they might go down in history as morbidly obese like their forefathers.
What? Their forefathers weren't morbidly obese? You mean, it may be possible to have fun and excersize without some company cashing in off of you? Blasphemy!
1. Watch Steve Jobs buy Pixar.
2. Watch Steve work and toil to make it great.
3. Watch it be sold to the Reign of the Rat.
4. Watch Steve make chump change.
5. Watch Disney build it up to be corporately evil.
6. Wait until the right moment and buy Disney.
7. Gain board of director status and challenge Steve to a there-can-be-only-one style fight to the death in the thunderdome with employees from both companies jeering you on from the sidelines.
8. When Steve tries to use his iWin fighting style, destroy him with your "blue screen of death" move.
9. Pose for Playgirl after the world realizes how great of a man you are.
10. Ponder what will be the next industry that needs Microsoft to triumph in by unecessarily dumping unlimited funds into it.
Once a friend of mine commented that VHS was superior in quality to Betamax but that the only reason VHS won was because Sony refused to license porn on their format. Whether this is true or not is probably debatable. But now we see the industry vying for licenses to the porn industry for their new formats. Why? Perhaps Sony learned their lesson with Betamax...
Ironically, I'm going to wager that Spongebob and Pikachu have more clout than Jenna Jameson and Larry Flynt in the format war. Because every child needs a babysitter and that babysitter always comes in the newest format.
Having played online games and posted in a few forums, it's clear that most people actually care about others. Usually online communities seem to be pretty closely knit groups of people, otherwise you wouldn't log on to them--kind of makes sense.
If this young man committed suicide, he obviously needed a close group of friends which would explain why he would log onto the forums. Perhaps he was looking for someone to talk him out of it and he couldn't find anybody anywhere else? After RTFA, seems like he was a daily poster on the forum.
There's also cases of people dying in real life and the community coming together to remember them. I'm reminded of Luckky Johnson on the Scylla server of Star Wars Galaxies. She battled a serious illness in real life and her character (that was logged on at all times) was suddenly never on anymore.
I Suppose this is just another effect of social networks based on computer networks through the abstracted level of the internet. Will it ever be "ok" to be concerned about guildmates or people you play online with? Right now, everyone seems to treat "meeting online" as a social stigma...
Gates has plenty of articles which detail how much he hates spam. Anyone can sit down and write this, but Gates gets the high exposure interviews with the Wall Street Journal and the AP.
Gates is all talk. If you want to read some articles from some very interesting people, check out A Plan for Spam by Paul Graham. It talks about simple ways to write Bayesian spam filters and does a very good job at describing how they work. Another valuable member of the anti-spam community is Jonathon Zdziarski who has written many books about how to actually get rid of spam. You can also read the Slashdot interview with him.
I had some problems with this article submission and kind of wondered why I was reading it exactly.
1UP, Plagiarizing, and Other Bits of Joy
Where are said "Other Bits of Joy"? All I found was a DoA guide which looked a lot like forum material at DoACentral and then I subsequently found two forums full of flame posts and colorful language. None of which was joyful in the least.
I did enjoy Hsu's blog which was discussed but not linked in the article.
I've reread the different pieces, and while I think the DoA Forums are a large basis of work, people need to read Kate Turabian's on how to cite research because I don't see this as plagiarism in the whole - just poorly cited.
I went to Kate Turabian's site. Nowhere did I find evidence of how to cite string combos from gaming websites. I found "non-periodical internet sources" but they were stealing their words, they were stealing their research in a game. Ironically, I believe the inventors of those combos (the programmers and authors of DoA) would be the sole owners.
Furthermore, who do you give credit to? The forum owners? The owners of the posts? If it's the owners of the posts, how do you acquire their real names? Should I be writing "Taken from a post by worksucks69 at DoACentral"? And how do I know that this material wasn't ganked from some other website without my knowledge? What are you to do if you want good information from a forum but it is in no way credible?
Guidelines for posting to your online journal shall be as follows:
1. All Content posted to LiveJournal.com in any way, is the responsibility and property of the author. LiveJournal is committed to keeping the Service in decent standing for all audiences but is not responsible for the monitoring or filtering of any journal Content. Within the confines of international and local law, LiveJournal.com will generally not place a limit on the type, or appropriateness of user content within journals. Those users posting material not suitable for all audiences must agree that they are fully responsible for all the content they have posted anywhere on the service. Should content be deemed illegal by such law having jurisdiction over the user, LiveJournal.com is committed to submitting all necessary information to the proper authorities;....
So it sounds like they might be in trouble with people losing property, however also in the TOS:
MODIFICATIONS TO SERVICE
LiveJournal.com reserves the right to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, the Service (or any part thereof) with or without notice at any time. You agree that LiveJournal.com shall not be liable to you or to any third party for any modification, suspension or discontinuance of the Service.
And there are other parts that make it sound like LiveJournal would never be in trouble for this unauthorized access parts. But really, who would bother to post their thoughts and words on a site that has no garauntee of saving them? At any minute, LiveJournal could format its servers and databases and start over with no one able to say anything.
NASA hopes to send a team of the world's best garbage men into space to collect this trash. Luckily for them, that's Ben Affleck's current occupation.
The enforced labor works with the prison system on highways, why can't it work in space?
Oh, I'm sure it's not all space junk, I'm sure there's some capsules containing rhesus monkey skeletons smearing their dying words on the glass of their cockpits with their fecal matter.
Simple solution, sell each item on eBay "as is" for very cheap. Then issue arrest warrants out for the winning bidders and demand they remove their trash from the perfect ecosystem of space.
If aliens could see our planet, would we be the white trash of the universe? With our garbage strewn about our front yard, four cars in our backyard that aren't mobile and a house that is?
Blame it on the Soviet Union and act like we're doing the rest of the world a huge favor by cleaning it up?... oh, wait, it's not funny if we're actually going to do it.
This article doesn't even mention the Computer Security Institute (CSI), the organization which conducts and publishes these surveys. The FBI allows them use of crime databases and is just presented the end result. On top of that, they present you with one graph and label it as referenced from the "Computer Crime Survey" when, in fact, this survey also had to do with security and is entitled 2005 Computer Crime and Security Survey. I believe you'll find a wealth of information in that PDF as it contains many graphs that break down respondents of crimes, average security expenditures, types of attacks, etc. If you're interested in what constitutes a "computer crime," check out the policy and sample cases (some amusing) as we all know that what is and isn't illegal with computers can get very fuzzy very fast.
I think this is a case of CSI running a survey and doing a damn fine job on the support but the media (and Slashdot) feel that FBI is better news than CSI.
I know there are plenty of RSS Validation tools out there that will go to a website and tell you whether or not the RSS Feed is valid based on current standards but what about for applications?
What does Dave Winer (or anyone who works with RSS daily) recommend we use to validate applications and websites? What's the best tool to quickly and efficiently evaluate our work in parsing and assembling RSS?
I've used nifty tools like XML Spy for validating XML and XSD forms and I was wondering if there is an equivalent for RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 formats.
Tomorrow, Ian Scot's plumber relates marriage to--you guessed it--plumbing!
And be sure to pick up his new book The World Is Pipes, which shows just how pipelike everything is.
This book was released to satisfy the his fans while he works on rewriting the famous Feynman Lectures on Physics so that everything is explained in relationship to pipes. Afterall, what's a wormhole but just a fancy way to say "Time Pipe"?
The famous plumber has dutifully dedicated his life to the understanding and study of pipes after his 3 year old son was killed in a fatal piping accident. We're hoping to see him win the Nobel Peace Prize in Directing Flowing Fluids and Gases this year.
It's a decent and light hearted analogy but I think there's a bit more to it than just cash flow.
As far as I am aware, the only people who've ever got in trouble for the mp3s they had were sharing those mp3s over public peer-to-peer networks. They were illegally distributing them. The users of allofmp3.com are not doing this; they are purchasing them from an organisation that has the legal right to distribute them, and importing them into their home countries. It's just the same as if they ordered the CDs by mail order from Russia because they're cheaper there.
Well, just because no one's gotten in trouble for it doesn't mean it's legal. For you see, the RIAA and even the Russian government doesn't like what's going on with sites like allofmp3. I bet someone is being paid off over there to let this slide.
Uh, before you rush to use either of those services, please take note of their legal disclaimers such as the one from allofmp3:
All the materials in MediaServices projects are available for distribution through the Internet in accordance with license # LS-3-05-03 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. Under the license terms, MediaServices pays license fees for all materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights". All materials are available solely for personal use and must not be used for further distribution, resale or broadcasting.
The user bears sole responsibility for any use and distribution of all materials received from AllOFMP3.com. This responsibility is dependent on the national legislation in each user's country of residence. The Administration of AllOFMP3.com does not possess information on the laws of each particular country and is not responsible for the actions of foreign users.
And so, since the servers are only operating under the laws of Germany or Russia, you are basically paying money for high quality mp3s. Should be caught with said files, it would be just as bad as if you had downloaded them using a P2P client for free.
Be careful folks, if it's too good to be true, it is.
a) It's slashdot, it's not "the world."
b) As a nerd, slashdot is one of the few places I can voice my angst and fustration
c) Said angst and frustration is actually understood here
d) I want people to know that I want an open document format and I want them to want it also
Slashdot Mirror
I remember there being speculation that the reason you couldn't acquire an Xbox 360 was because Microsoft was purposefully halting production. Many people thought that perhaps Microsoft was up to business tricks and shorting themselves on the production of these devices in time for the holiday season.
The net effect, of course, to be able to create such a hype that everyone needs one regardless of how much it costs.
I don't think this effect occurred, however, as I don't seem to need one.
And so I waited in expectation for the flood gates to be released as wave after wave of consoles hit everywhere. And I waited. And waited.
Is it possible that they were seriously having a hard time producing the units before the holidays? Or is this just their marketing tactic biting them in the ass with retailers balking at the cruel fates Microsoft tried to assign them?
Many of the users of WoW have done all they can to reduce the lag on their end. It's time for Blizzard to step up to the plate and use the massive amounts of money we give them monthly to get some better servers. I'm not so good with math but 5,000,000 users paying 12 dollars a month is
Bill Monkey: Who's the owner of this canopy? ...
Monkey Dubois: I, I am. I bought the place for 12 bananas in '79 and
[Will throws feces at him]
Little Bill Daggett: You, sir, are a smearing son of a bitch! You just roadappled an unarmed man!
Bill Monkey: He should have armed himself if he was goin' to decorate his tree with my friend.
Little Bill Daggett: You'd be Will Monkey out of Missouri; smearer and fecal slinger of innocent women and children.
Bill Monkey: I'm Will Monkey and I've shat on most everything that walks or crawls; and now I'm here to brown you Little Bill for what you done to Ned.
Little Bill Daggett: [walking toward Will] All right boys, he's only got one handful left. When he throws, cowpie this son of a bitch down.
If so, I hope the employee who asked the question above succeeds in maintaining his anonymity.
You know, I'll bet that New Delhi is experiencing cold air from somewhere that's not supposed to happen. The wind currents of the earth were very complex to begin with and it took us a long time to figure them out. The changes that are starting to occur are going to be even more difficult to predict.
Just mix those gradeschoolers in with the convicts on the chain gang
There was this game we used to play what was it called?
Oh, right, kickball.
How much did it cost to play this?
The cost of a ball or nothing if you had a butcher shop willing to give you an pig's stomach.
Thank god West Virginia has been blessed with DDR. Were it not for this half a grand machine, they might go down in history as morbidly obese like their forefathers.
What? Their forefathers weren't morbidly obese? You mean, it may be possible to have fun and excersize without some company cashing in off of you? Blasphemy!
The story if you want it.
Used to be in Roman times that the greatest senators of the republic were those who were the most stoic.
Now, it seems the most desired senators are those most likely to be on Jerry Springer.
My how the burning of Alexandria set us back much further than we could have thought.
1. Watch Steve Jobs buy Pixar.
2. Watch Steve work and toil to make it great.
3. Watch it be sold to the Reign of the Rat.
4. Watch Steve make chump change.
5. Watch Disney build it up to be corporately evil.
6. Wait until the right moment and buy Disney.
7. Gain board of director status and challenge Steve to a there-can-be-only-one style fight to the death in the thunderdome with employees from both companies jeering you on from the sidelines.
8. When Steve tries to use his iWin fighting style, destroy him with your "blue screen of death" move.
9. Pose for Playgirl after the world realizes how great of a man you are.
10. Ponder what will be the next industry that needs Microsoft to triumph in by unecessarily dumping unlimited funds into it.
Once a friend of mine commented that VHS was superior in quality to Betamax but that the only reason VHS won was because Sony refused to license porn on their format. Whether this is true or not is probably debatable. But now we see the industry vying for licenses to the porn industry for their new formats. Why? Perhaps Sony learned their lesson with Betamax ...
Ironically, I'm going to wager that Spongebob and Pikachu have more clout than Jenna Jameson and Larry Flynt in the format war. Because every child needs a babysitter and that babysitter always comes in the newest format.
Having played online games and posted in a few forums, it's clear that most people actually care about others. Usually online communities seem to be pretty closely knit groups of people, otherwise you wouldn't log on to them--kind of makes sense.
...
If this young man committed suicide, he obviously needed a close group of friends which would explain why he would log onto the forums. Perhaps he was looking for someone to talk him out of it and he couldn't find anybody anywhere else? After RTFA, seems like he was a daily poster on the forum.
There's also cases of people dying in real life and the community coming together to remember them. I'm reminded of Luckky Johnson on the Scylla server of Star Wars Galaxies. She battled a serious illness in real life and her character (that was logged on at all times) was suddenly never on anymore.
I Suppose this is just another effect of social networks based on computer networks through the abstracted level of the internet. Will it ever be "ok" to be concerned about guildmates or people you play online with? Right now, everyone seems to treat "meeting online" as a social stigma
I scoff at Bill Gates' "efforts" to reduce spam. What has he done precisely?
Probably just deferred the responsibility to one of his underlings. Aside from that, he talks about crazy methods such as deciding how much money the sender has to pay you before you open the e-mail.
Gates has plenty of articles which detail how much he hates spam. Anyone can sit down and write this, but Gates gets the high exposure interviews with the Wall Street Journal and the AP.
Gates is all talk. If you want to read some articles from some very interesting people, check out A Plan for Spam by Paul Graham. It talks about simple ways to write Bayesian spam filters and does a very good job at describing how they work. Another valuable member of the anti-spam community is Jonathon Zdziarski who has written many books about how to actually get rid of spam. You can also read the Slashdot interview with him.
I did enjoy Hsu's blog which was discussed but not linked in the article.
I went to Kate Turabian's site. Nowhere did I find evidence of how to cite string combos from gaming websites. I found "non-periodical internet sources" but they were stealing their words, they were stealing their research in a game. Ironically, I believe the inventors of those combos (the programmers and authors of DoA) would be the sole owners.
Furthermore, who do you give credit to? The forum owners? The owners of the posts? If it's the owners of the posts, how do you acquire their real names? Should I be writing "Taken from a post by worksucks69 at DoACentral"? And how do I know that this material wasn't ganked from some other website without my knowledge? What are you to do if you want good information from a forum but it is in no way credible?
Space.com has a breakdown of responsibility by country of some of the larger debris in space.
And if you're really hardcore into space debris (it's hard to even type that without laughing), Orbital Debris Quarterly News is your magazine!
NASA hopes to send a team of the world's best garbage men into space to collect this trash. Luckily for them, that's Ben Affleck's current occupation.
... oh, wait, it's not funny if we're actually going to do it.
The enforced labor works with the prison system on highways, why can't it work in space?
Oh, I'm sure it's not all space junk, I'm sure there's some capsules containing rhesus monkey skeletons smearing their dying words on the glass of their cockpits with their fecal matter.
Simple solution, sell each item on eBay "as is" for very cheap. Then issue arrest warrants out for the winning bidders and demand they remove their trash from the perfect ecosystem of space.
If aliens could see our planet, would we be the white trash of the universe? With our garbage strewn about our front yard, four cars in our backyard that aren't mobile and a house that is?
Blame it on the Soviet Union and act like we're doing the rest of the world a huge favor by cleaning it up?
This article doesn't even mention the Computer Security Institute (CSI), the organization which conducts and publishes these surveys. The FBI allows them use of crime databases and is just presented the end result. On top of that, they present you with one graph and label it as referenced from the "Computer Crime Survey" when, in fact, this survey also had to do with security and is entitled 2005 Computer Crime and Security Survey. I believe you'll find a wealth of information in that PDF as it contains many graphs that break down respondents of crimes, average security expenditures, types of attacks, etc. If you're interested in what constitutes a "computer crime," check out the policy and sample cases (some amusing) as we all know that what is and isn't illegal with computers can get very fuzzy very fast.
I think this is a case of CSI running a survey and doing a damn fine job on the support but the media (and Slashdot) feel that FBI is better news than CSI.
I know there are plenty of RSS Validation tools out there that will go to a website and tell you whether or not the RSS Feed is valid based on current standards but what about for applications?
What does Dave Winer (or anyone who works with RSS daily) recommend we use to validate applications and websites? What's the best tool to quickly and efficiently evaluate our work in parsing and assembling RSS?
I've used nifty tools like XML Spy for validating XML and XSD forms and I was wondering if there is an equivalent for RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 formats.
Tomorrow, Ian Scot's plumber relates marriage to--you guessed it--plumbing!
And be sure to pick up his new book The World Is Pipes, which shows just how pipelike everything is.
This book was released to satisfy the his fans while he works on rewriting the famous Feynman Lectures on Physics so that everything is explained in relationship to pipes. Afterall, what's a wormhole but just a fancy way to say "Time Pipe"?
The famous plumber has dutifully dedicated his life to the understanding and study of pipes after his 3 year old son was killed in a fatal piping accident. We're hoping to see him win the Nobel Peace Prize in Directing Flowing Fluids and Gases this year.
It's a decent and light hearted analogy but I think there's a bit more to it than just cash flow.
First off, owning an mp3 is not illegal as long as you have the rights to own it (i.e. you legally own the compact disc, cassette or record of it).
... etc. ...
...
If you really want me to name people charged with illegally acquiring mp3s:
Diana Li
Daniel Peng
Joe Nievelt
The list is a long one, I hope three names will suffice, if not, you know where Google is
Be careful folks, if it's too good to be true, it is.
a) It's slashdot, it's not "the world."
b) As a nerd, slashdot is one of the few places I can voice my angst and fustration
c) Said angst and frustration is actually understood here
d) I want people to know that I want an open document format and I want them to want it also
... once Excel switches to open document formats, I'll switch to opening documents about it.
Until then, I'm probably not going to pick up this book.