By far the most insultingly biased summary I've yet seen on a slashdot page, and that's saying a lot because that's Slashdot's stock-and-trade. Can someone fix that drivel please?
I've played a lot of RTS's before and after Starcraft, but I keep coming back to it for some reason. It's the logical nature of it, the balancing, the rock-paper-scissors (but about 15 layers deep) aspect of it. It seems to capture the logic of an orderly game like chess (while certainly less realistic than a game like COH)
Stars have been around a lot longer than a billion years, and there should be plenty earlier still visible.. I seem to remember they just found some very early generation stars closer to 12 billion years old (a billion years after the big bang), making it much older than the ones mentioned here.
They even mention them in the article:
Last year in Prague, Richer had the distinction of introducing to the International Astronomical Union the first hard evidence of when the first stars formed -- about 12 billion years ago, or a billion years after the universe began.
He did that by identifying and photographing the faintest stars ever seen, because the fainter a star is, the older it is. I think the article is a bit off on the actual facts, maybe they meant the stars theyre seeing now were formed a billion years after the big bang? They contradict themselves.
In any case, stars a billion years old aren't that exciting, its the 12 billion year ones, at the edge of observable space that get things interesting (they're early-generation stars, formed of primarily hydrogen as opposed to other later-generation stars that are formed of hydrogen plus heavier elements created by previous long-dead stars. So the earlier ones have a lot different properties and can get a lot larger)
My guess is that its a service to allow, among other things, detecting which click throughs on Ad-Sense actually result in sales (by performing those sales directly) and basing the advertising charge on that as commision, which would at the very least solve the problem of fradulent click-throughs.
Re:What's missing in GMail
on
Gmail vs Pine
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· Score: 1
"I hate the mouse"
Ok, you lost me, and about 99% of people who use computers.
I dont know what the big deal is. I win stuff while browsing the web all the time! IPods, ring tones, xbox 360's. Often to claim the prize I will need to guess my favorite color (which I never get wrong) or verify that the following box is indeed flashing (which it has always been).
I am also frequently the millionth viewer of a webpage, making my time spent online even more lucrative. You're probably astounded by my good luck and find it hard to believe, but it's true!
The reason google is such a fantastic company is because time and time again they will find a niche in the industry where consumers are getting screwed (by greedy corporations, a lack of competition, or all the corporation agreeing to just settle on a crap implementation and not bother updating it), and then just knock everybody's socks off by creating a service so far superior it makes your head spin:
Google Search Engine - remember search engines before Google? Crammed and cluttered with ads, and nearly useless search results. Top result for a search for "cars" in Infoseek was someone in a message board talking about cars, but there were plenty of ads in every direction! Google was the first company to put the consumer first here and bring some intelligence to the information on the web.
Google Mail - Yahoo Mail was giving us 5mb, Hotmail I think 2MB?!? Insulting. Google comes along and drops a gig for everybody, plus a far superior interface compared to the decade-old interface of Yahoo and Hotmail. Of course Yahoo and Hotmail up their mailbox sizes in response (why werent they doing this before? it obviously wasnt a problem for them because Yahoo and MS were both content screwing the customer)
Google Talk - it looks like Google will finally be the one to unite the IM programs - this would never happen on its own, because the current players are perfectly fine with screwing their users because it helps their short-term gain. Can you imagine if phone companies were the same way, you couldn't call someone unless you subscribed to their service? The state of IMs is absolutely insulting to consumers right now and I'm rather ecstatic that Google has got their hands in it and is finally going to set things straight.
Google has got to be the first company I've ever heard of that counts on the intelligence of customers, looks past immediate gains they might get by pandering to their customers, and is very hugely rewarded for it (in terms of a skyrocketed stock price).
Don't get me wrong, I try to be cynical about corporations but Google is just making it too difficult!!
Slashdot Mirror
By far the most insultingly biased summary I've yet seen on a slashdot page, and that's saying a lot because that's Slashdot's stock-and-trade. Can someone fix that drivel please?
I've played a lot of RTS's before and after Starcraft, but I keep coming back to it for some reason. It's the logical nature of it, the balancing, the rock-paper-scissors (but about 15 layers deep) aspect of it. It seems to capture the logic of an orderly game like chess (while certainly less realistic than a game like COH)
They even mention them in the article: Last year in Prague, Richer had the distinction of introducing to the International Astronomical Union the first hard evidence of when the first stars formed -- about 12 billion years ago, or a billion years after the universe began.
He did that by identifying and photographing the faintest stars ever seen, because the fainter a star is, the older it is. I think the article is a bit off on the actual facts, maybe they meant the stars theyre seeing now were formed a billion years after the big bang? They contradict themselves.
In any case, stars a billion years old aren't that exciting, its the 12 billion year ones, at the edge of observable space that get things interesting (they're early-generation stars, formed of primarily hydrogen as opposed to other later-generation stars that are formed of hydrogen plus heavier elements created by previous long-dead stars. So the earlier ones have a lot different properties and can get a lot larger)
My guess is that its a service to allow, among other things, detecting which click throughs on Ad-Sense actually result in sales (by performing those sales directly) and basing the advertising charge on that as commision, which would at the very least solve the problem of fradulent click-throughs.
"I hate the mouse" Ok, you lost me, and about 99% of people who use computers.
I dont know what the big deal is. I win stuff while browsing the web all the time! IPods, ring tones, xbox 360's. Often to claim the prize I will need to guess my favorite color (which I never get wrong) or verify that the following box is indeed flashing (which it has always been). I am also frequently the millionth viewer of a webpage, making my time spent online even more lucrative. You're probably astounded by my good luck and find it hard to believe, but it's true!
The reason google is such a fantastic company is because time and time again they will find a niche in the industry where consumers are getting screwed (by greedy corporations, a lack of competition, or all the corporation agreeing to just settle on a crap implementation and not bother updating it), and then just knock everybody's socks off by creating a service so far superior it makes your head spin:
Google Search Engine - remember search engines before Google? Crammed and cluttered with ads, and nearly useless search results. Top result for a search for "cars" in Infoseek was someone in a message board talking about cars, but there were plenty of ads in every direction! Google was the first company to put the consumer first here and bring some intelligence to the information on the web.
Google Mail - Yahoo Mail was giving us 5mb, Hotmail I think 2MB?!? Insulting. Google comes along and drops a gig for everybody, plus a far superior interface compared to the decade-old interface of Yahoo and Hotmail. Of course Yahoo and Hotmail up their mailbox sizes in response (why werent they doing this before? it obviously wasnt a problem for them because Yahoo and MS were both content screwing the customer)
Google Talk - it looks like Google will finally be the one to unite the IM programs - this would never happen on its own, because the current players are perfectly fine with screwing their users because it helps their short-term gain. Can you imagine if phone companies were the same way, you couldn't call someone unless you subscribed to their service? The state of IMs is absolutely insulting to consumers right now and I'm rather ecstatic that Google has got their hands in it and is finally going to set things straight.
Google has got to be the first company I've ever heard of that counts on the intelligence of customers, looks past immediate gains they might get by pandering to their customers, and is very hugely rewarded for it (in terms of a skyrocketed stock price).
Don't get me wrong, I try to be cynical about corporations but Google is just making it too difficult!!