Ebay, Amazon and even Paypal have shown remarkable staying power. The web's still young, but as it ages sites tend to stick around longer and longer. It's going to take an awful lot to dethrone Facebook. I'm sure it will happen but that's the nature of business. Eventually every business either gets replaced or changes their business model to the point that you don't even recognize the company anymore.
Anything of widespread use is going to acquire idiot users. With that said, Twitter is far more useful and worthwhile than most "social" platforms out there. I put "social" in quotes because you could just as easily follow a couple of information sites or key developers on a project and your twitter becomes a centralized news feed rather than people talking about the latest annoyance on their way to work.
I was skeptical of it at first too but it's surprisingly useful if you follow the right people.
If Space X has only spent $375 million to get where it is today, imagine what NASA could do if it wasn't plagued by pork and had actual funding. Movies have bugets of $300 million: http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/budgets.php
As a human race, we have some pretty mixed priorities.
All this automation is great and everything but when does it actually translate into a benefit for humanity in general?
I'm so glad some business can now churn out more crap to purchase at cheaper prices. When are we going to focus on shortening the work week or making housing more affordable? What about investing more time in expanding humanity's presence in the solar system? Or reducing our environmental foot print?
I know in Canada there's a lot of government grants for starting your own business with some specifically targeting people on EI. It creates a situation where the government will give you $10k to $20k just to say you'll start a business, attend monthly meetings to report the status of your business and that's it. It's pretty much free money.
I have a friend who successfully started his business through this process and is still in business 5 years later, but he had a lot of horror stories from the process. The monthly mandatory meetings often involved people still trying to write up their business plan 2+ months into the program and out of maybe 30 grant receivers, he only felt 1 or 2 had any legitimate chance at making money.
In other words, new businesses are easily made; successful businesses are not.
I'm Canadian and I still make mostly cash purchases expressly to avoid giving merchants/banks a record of my purchasing history. And no, I don't see any value in being more directly targeted in marketing based on my previous purchases. I'm tired of being told what a product can do for me, how it will make me think or feel and how it's perfectly suited to my lifestyle. The only thing marketing makes me want to buy is the building materials for a cabin in the woods.
Say what you will about alcohol, but drinking a beer or two doesn't make it any harder to run 20 km the following day. I can't say the same for Mary J. Also, it smells terrible.
Men have been in the wrong since the women's lib movement. We are going to continue being in the wrong until our entire sex is demoralized and demonized to the point that we will never attempt to do anything beyond watch porn and play video games.
I really hope you're exaggerating about using nested tables to make a site work in IE6. A custom stylesheet that only targets IE6 can do the job just as well. The only hard part is knowing all of IE6's quarks.
Personally, I prefer to go the slightly more controversial route and not support anything below IE8. If a client wants IE6 support, they're going to pay through the nose for it.
To me the iPhone and the iPad are total fail. Different strokes for different folks. I personally have no interest in Google Glasses but I can appreciate the attempt and the tech behind it.
I'm in the beta and I was highly skeptical when I first started playing but after a while the game really grew on me. It's still Diablo and the new skill system seems to be based more around people making well thought out decisions as to what skill to use rather than "what skills do I spend my points on and if I pick the wrong skill am I totally screwed?".
There's less room for customization (you don't allocate your attribute points on level up) and you can't assign skills to any key you want unless you enable elective mode but otherwise I think it's a solid game. Not only that, but it's a solid game that's unlike most games made today and I think that alone is worth the purchase.
Having said that... I still would prefer Torchlight II.
The problem the Tea Party has is being represented by absolute fraking loons like Michele Bachmann. As an outsider, it gives us a foreigners yet another reason to point and laugh at the colony of crazy that is America.
Nintendo did dominate the Xbox and PS3 to the point where both Sony and Microsoft felt the need to incorporate motion controls. Nintendo also made money on every system and if the Xbox 720 rumours are true, Microsoft appears poised to follow in Nintendo's footsteps with the next console cycle. The Wii did fizzle out toward the end of it's life but it's still a great console that shook up the industry far more than the PS3 or Xbox could ever hope to.
If anything I'd argue the Wii U is the lacklustre console. The Wii is a pretty hard act to follow but this is Nintendo after all and they could easily pull off a SNES here. Only time will tell but as far as the Wii is concerned, I'd hardly call it the flop you imply it is.
Your mistake was buying a Motorola product. Up until now, they've thrown a bunch of custom crap on their Android releases (namely MotoBLUR) and honestly have not produced good phones in a while (which is why they started patent litigation before Google bought them out).
I work for a mobile dealer and most of the people in my department carry around a Galaxy S2. There is one person with an iPhone 4, and a manager who has both an iPhone 4 and a Galaxy S2. When he got the Galaxy S2, he disliked it at first but now uses it as his primary phone. Your mileage may vary, but there are good Android phones out there that either match or exceed anything Apple is offering provided you're willing to spend the extra money for it.
Everything's derivative at best. I would argue that The Colbert Report and The Daily Show are derivative of This Hour Has 22 Minutes. I also wouldn't call shows like Kids in the Hall short lived when it aired for 6 years.
Saying Canada has no culture and that anyone of sufficient talent ends up in the US and effectively becomes more "American" than their country of origin is a pretty nonsensical statement. The NHL is filled with primarily Canadian players but most of the teams are American. Does that make all those Canadians playing in the US more "American"? Does it make hockey more "American"?
Canada's culture is one of individualism, tolerance and acceptance. The nation needed bilingualism to survive from it's very early stages and because it was much slower to be settled than the US, the native populations thrived much longer and had much more influence on Canada as nation. Multiculturalism is built into the foundation of the country, which can't be said of most other countries in the world (especially not the US which aimed to be a giant melting pot that assimilated other cultures into their own rather than preserve and nurture individual cultural groups).
The British aren't known for lumberjacks, beavers, poutine or long harsh winters the last time I checked. They had no Terry Fox, Tragically Hip, RCMP or Anne of Green Gables. For such a small nation Canada has produced a wealth of artists, musicians, authors, comedians, athletes, television shows and film. If you're blind to it, then that's a shame but Canada has culture and it's a lot deeper and more complicated than you seem to realize.
We produce more than just generic and annoying superstars like Justin Beiber and Avril Lavigne. There are a lot of great Canadian musicians that may not be popular in the US and never needed to be. Here's a variety of good Canadian bands just off the top of my head:
The Arkells
The Arcade Fire
Constantines
Death From Above 1979
Elliott Brood
Hey Rosetta!
The Flatliners
Metric
The Weakerthans
I understand why people would be opposed to requiring a percentage of our media being purely Canadian content, but there are some great fringe benefits to it, like CBC Radio 3 which is arguably one the best radio stations in the world. And your ability to only cite shows and music that are successful in the US kind of gives these laws validity.
It has very limited HTML5 and CSS3 support when compared to Firefox and Chrome. Don't get me wrong, it's a respectable browser but it's still a good year behind everyone else.
I hate to burst your bubble but Canada has unions too. It was cheaper to manufacture things in Canada because we had a lower dollar up until the last 4 - 5 years when American banks and investors ran your country off a cliff.
You trust US run telecoms and they will just as readily hand over your call and internet history to the US government under the guise of "national security".
I actually think Dawkins is setting back the whole atheist movement with his belligerent attitude and single minded views. If I wasn't already an atheist, I'm not sure how the words of a scientific zealot would sway me away from the words of a religious zealot.
That much is true. I spend a lot of time in Photoshop and most of his "edits" involve cutting out an animal from stock photography, putting it in another image, flipping it and reducing the opacity by 50%. How people didn't notice this sooner is kind of baffling. It takes maybe 10 minutes at most and the results are painfully obvious. I don't think he even knew how to colour match (or even colour adjust) his photos.
Slashdot Mirror
Ebay, Amazon and even Paypal have shown remarkable staying power. The web's still young, but as it ages sites tend to stick around longer and longer. It's going to take an awful lot to dethrone Facebook. I'm sure it will happen but that's the nature of business. Eventually every business either gets replaced or changes their business model to the point that you don't even recognize the company anymore.
Anything of widespread use is going to acquire idiot users. With that said, Twitter is far more useful and worthwhile than most "social" platforms out there. I put "social" in quotes because you could just as easily follow a couple of information sites or key developers on a project and your twitter becomes a centralized news feed rather than people talking about the latest annoyance on their way to work.
I was skeptical of it at first too but it's surprisingly useful if you follow the right people.
If Space X has only spent $375 million to get where it is today, imagine what NASA could do if it wasn't plagued by pork and had actual funding. Movies have bugets of $300 million: http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/budgets.php
As a human race, we have some pretty mixed priorities.
All this automation is great and everything but when does it actually translate into a benefit for humanity in general?
I'm so glad some business can now churn out more crap to purchase at cheaper prices. When are we going to focus on shortening the work week or making housing more affordable? What about investing more time in expanding humanity's presence in the solar system? Or reducing our environmental foot print?
Most businesses don't survive the first year.
I know in Canada there's a lot of government grants for starting your own business with some specifically targeting people on EI. It creates a situation where the government will give you $10k to $20k just to say you'll start a business, attend monthly meetings to report the status of your business and that's it. It's pretty much free money.
I have a friend who successfully started his business through this process and is still in business 5 years later, but he had a lot of horror stories from the process. The monthly mandatory meetings often involved people still trying to write up their business plan 2+ months into the program and out of maybe 30 grant receivers, he only felt 1 or 2 had any legitimate chance at making money.
In other words, new businesses are easily made; successful businesses are not.
I'm Canadian and I still make mostly cash purchases expressly to avoid giving merchants/banks a record of my purchasing history. And no, I don't see any value in being more directly targeted in marketing based on my previous purchases. I'm tired of being told what a product can do for me, how it will make me think or feel and how it's perfectly suited to my lifestyle. The only thing marketing makes me want to buy is the building materials for a cabin in the woods.
Say what you will about alcohol, but drinking a beer or two doesn't make it any harder to run 20 km the following day. I can't say the same for Mary J. Also, it smells terrible.
This is the best car analogy in the history of Slashdot.
Men have been in the wrong since the women's lib movement. We are going to continue being in the wrong until our entire sex is demoralized and demonized to the point that we will never attempt to do anything beyond watch porn and play video games.
I really hope you're exaggerating about using nested tables to make a site work in IE6. A custom stylesheet that only targets IE6 can do the job just as well. The only hard part is knowing all of IE6's quarks.
Personally, I prefer to go the slightly more controversial route and not support anything below IE8. If a client wants IE6 support, they're going to pay through the nose for it.
To me the iPhone and the iPad are total fail. Different strokes for different folks. I personally have no interest in Google Glasses but I can appreciate the attempt and the tech behind it.
I'm in the beta and I was highly skeptical when I first started playing but after a while the game really grew on me. It's still Diablo and the new skill system seems to be based more around people making well thought out decisions as to what skill to use rather than "what skills do I spend my points on and if I pick the wrong skill am I totally screwed?".
There's less room for customization (you don't allocate your attribute points on level up) and you can't assign skills to any key you want unless you enable elective mode but otherwise I think it's a solid game. Not only that, but it's a solid game that's unlike most games made today and I think that alone is worth the purchase.
Having said that... I still would prefer Torchlight II.
The problem the Tea Party has is being represented by absolute fraking loons like Michele Bachmann. As an outsider, it gives us a foreigners yet another reason to point and laugh at the colony of crazy that is America.
Crashed and burned? They have sold 95 million Wii's http://kotaku.com/5879478/the-wii-will-sell-a-hundred-million-eventually
Nintendo did dominate the Xbox and PS3 to the point where both Sony and Microsoft felt the need to incorporate motion controls. Nintendo also made money on every system and if the Xbox 720 rumours are true, Microsoft appears poised to follow in Nintendo's footsteps with the next console cycle. The Wii did fizzle out toward the end of it's life but it's still a great console that shook up the industry far more than the PS3 or Xbox could ever hope to.
If anything I'd argue the Wii U is the lacklustre console. The Wii is a pretty hard act to follow but this is Nintendo after all and they could easily pull off a SNES here. Only time will tell but as far as the Wii is concerned, I'd hardly call it the flop you imply it is.
Your mistake was buying a Motorola product. Up until now, they've thrown a bunch of custom crap on their Android releases (namely MotoBLUR) and honestly have not produced good phones in a while (which is why they started patent litigation before Google bought them out).
I work for a mobile dealer and most of the people in my department carry around a Galaxy S2. There is one person with an iPhone 4, and a manager who has both an iPhone 4 and a Galaxy S2. When he got the Galaxy S2, he disliked it at first but now uses it as his primary phone. Your mileage may vary, but there are good Android phones out there that either match or exceed anything Apple is offering provided you're willing to spend the extra money for it.
Everything's derivative at best. I would argue that The Colbert Report and The Daily Show are derivative of This Hour Has 22 Minutes. I also wouldn't call shows like Kids in the Hall short lived when it aired for 6 years.
Saying Canada has no culture and that anyone of sufficient talent ends up in the US and effectively becomes more "American" than their country of origin is a pretty nonsensical statement. The NHL is filled with primarily Canadian players but most of the teams are American. Does that make all those Canadians playing in the US more "American"? Does it make hockey more "American"?
Canada's culture is one of individualism, tolerance and acceptance. The nation needed bilingualism to survive from it's very early stages and because it was much slower to be settled than the US, the native populations thrived much longer and had much more influence on Canada as nation. Multiculturalism is built into the foundation of the country, which can't be said of most other countries in the world (especially not the US which aimed to be a giant melting pot that assimilated other cultures into their own rather than preserve and nurture individual cultural groups).
The British aren't known for lumberjacks, beavers, poutine or long harsh winters the last time I checked. They had no Terry Fox, Tragically Hip, RCMP or Anne of Green Gables. For such a small nation Canada has produced a wealth of artists, musicians, authors, comedians, athletes, television shows and film. If you're blind to it, then that's a shame but Canada has culture and it's a lot deeper and more complicated than you seem to realize.
We produce more than just generic and annoying superstars like Justin Beiber and Avril Lavigne. There are a lot of great Canadian musicians that may not be popular in the US and never needed to be. Here's a variety of good Canadian bands just off the top of my head:
The Arkells
The Arcade Fire
Constantines
Death From Above 1979
Elliott Brood
Hey Rosetta!
The Flatliners
Metric
The Weakerthans
I'm also a fan of Dine Alone Records and Deranged Records in terms of Canadian labels and the artists they represent.
I understand why people would be opposed to requiring a percentage of our media being purely Canadian content, but there are some great fringe benefits to it, like CBC Radio 3 which is arguably one the best radio stations in the world. And your ability to only cite shows and music that are successful in the US kind of gives these laws validity.
It has very limited HTML5 and CSS3 support when compared to Firefox and Chrome. Don't get me wrong, it's a respectable browser but it's still a good year behind everyone else.
I could unlock my friend's Android phone just by studying the smudge patterns on the touchscreen. I imagine this would be just as easy.
I dunno why, but when I heard "drone" I thought of something smaller and less conspicuous. This thing's easily 4 meters across.
I hate to burst your bubble but Canada has unions too. It was cheaper to manufacture things in Canada because we had a lower dollar up until the last 4 - 5 years when American banks and investors ran your country off a cliff.
You trust US run telecoms and they will just as readily hand over your call and internet history to the US government under the guise of "national security".
That even if you make something idiot proof, eventually we'll encounter a better idiot.
I actually think Dawkins is setting back the whole atheist movement with his belligerent attitude and single minded views. If I wasn't already an atheist, I'm not sure how the words of a scientific zealot would sway me away from the words of a religious zealot.
"I'm a photographer, not a pixel artist"
That much is true. I spend a lot of time in Photoshop and most of his "edits" involve cutting out an animal from stock photography, putting it in another image, flipping it and reducing the opacity by 50%. How people didn't notice this sooner is kind of baffling. It takes maybe 10 minutes at most and the results are painfully obvious. I don't think he even knew how to colour match (or even colour adjust) his photos.