Calm down turbo. I was speaking in a general sense and made it quite clear I was by not addressing any of the exceptions. Of course some people get addicted to different things online, be it a game or chat room, it makes no difference. Nowhere did I try to justify long hours online playing a game or anything of that sort. You just trolled with that reply you know? You are way off base.
All that is happening is people are discovering the internet and exploring it at different periods of their lives. Most people, when they first get connected, end up in a chat room and/or some IM program within the first few days of using it. Just like when many of us discovered it, we were amazed and used the same sort of things these people are using in their early internet life. Games, porn, chat rooms and IMing are often the extent that people use the internet for on a regular basis. They are comfortable with the technology and seem content with what they have found, at least for a bit.
As the years go by and you expand your personal scope of/for the internet, you ditch all the things you did when you first got on and really get down to business finally. Call it internet puberty if you wish... these people are just exploring things just like we all did at one point. Honestly, I think it is funny to see friends of mine who just finally get online and start talking about chat rooms or some flash game they found. It takes me back to the days when all the internet was there for was to entertain me. Now I am connected to the/a network nearly all the time, I make my living from it and if it went down for more than 6 hours, I might get the shakes.:)
I highly suggest the book On Intelligence to anyone wanting to or currently working in the AI field. This book presents the case for AI in a completely new way to look at the problem. The author stresses that to make true artificial intelligence you have to understand how the brain really works. Anyways, the book covers far more than this and is worth the quick Wikipedia read I linked to. I found this book very enlightening, well written and incredibly insightful. At the end of the day, this book likely outlines how AI programming/research influenced in the future.
Yep, exactly. He had no idea what the market for his product was going to evolve to, but he approached it in such a way that MS could adapt. They adapted so well that they pretty much became 'the market' and we all know what happened then.
and keep reading/commenting on tech related sites like this. The networking group is easy to find in any metro area with some Googling. Another oft overlooked method in this day and age is the good ol' subscription to a magazine. (eWeek and NetworkWorld are free and tend to follow the new buzzwords well enough. Currently you can read about cloud computing and speculation on Semantic web stuff)
In all honesty, you simply wanting to keep up-to-date is going to be enough. If you are interested in the subject matter to begin with, then you often find you keep up to speed with out making the _specific_ effort.
Nah. It saves all that stuff for you. It even saved my session from FF2 to FF3.
This browser is much more responsive than FF2. My performance in Gmail is much improved. The memory leak was not fixed, but it was finally addressed it seems. The memory usage still creeps up very high, but it takes much longer to reach the point of a performance hit than before. The memory leak was/is my biggest issue with FF and as far as I can tell with FF3, it may be only a minor annoyance... which I am happy to have when compared to the numerous Force Quits needed per day with FF2.
If these ISPs were overloaded to the point of thinking they may be being DDoS'ed over one event online, they are they wholly unprepared for any sort of attack that may actually be focused at them? Imagine the carnage a real attack would wreak on the ISPs! Is there anyone out there that knows the likelihood of ISPs going down if they came under a real attack? If a few botnets targeted these ISPs, could they be brought down completely? Imagine one of these ISPs really stepping up the game for a tiered internet service model, putting themselves out there as a lightening rod for angry nerds. Could a coordinated effort break the back of an ISPs ability to provide any service whatsoever?
Your thoughts are most welcome and I thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts!
Well I was only saying you had the tools already there in order to view the world as it should be viewed, with a healthy dose of skepticism. I was going to explain myself further, but decided to be on the side of brevity.
It is not that it is part of a geeks personality, but rather geeks are generally described as those who use logic and reason to look at the world. When you are using logic and reason to look at the world then you already have the tools you need to view the world from an objective point of view.
I do not know how much Socrates thoughts themselves would apply, but the Socratic Method is certainly useful. I just wanted to make that distinction for anyone unfamiliar with the works as 'just reading Socrates' is a dive into philosophy which some miay not be interested in.
Har har... you're so clever! If I load the same data(Read: Tabs) in IE7 and FF2, FF2 will eat memory till there is non left to consume while IE7 maintains the memory usage within an acceptable range that is far lower than that of what FF2 would use.
As tabs are closed? So if you have many tabs persistently open you will still run into memory issues? I guess that even if they did not fix everything, they certainly made some headway if this is true. I suppose releasing memory upon a tab being closed would reduce my force quits by half or so. That's something I guess!
Which memory leak bug? The main one that accumulates memory with open tabs? I have heard that it was still not addressed in FF3, but that was a bit ago and I hope this is it! It would be nice to be able to not have to close FF with Force Quit.. Every... Single... Time...
Chalk me up on someone who is quite jealous of S. Brin over this! I mean the vast richest he has _earned_ is of no concern to me. The fact that he gets to not only go into space, but he gets to be tagged with being the first person in space via a private venture is enough to make even the modest geek envious. Thanks for helping the door for the rest of us to follow you through in the future though.
I hope to follow the same path someday and pay for myself to float around for a few days in space;) - Then again, who doesn't?
In case you were wondering, yes, Blizzard and its assets have pretty much been priced into the stock already. Now that the merger is looking solid and ATVI revised profits upwards a few weeks ago for 07, the stock has gone to $34 after hovering around $27 for a few months.
A friend close to the two companies says: A stock price of $40 is likely to take some time (18+ months) and would be contingent on the performance of both Activision Blizzard and EA. EA will probably need to slip to the #2 publisher in order for Activision Blizzard to consistently trade over $40.
That is an oxy-moron my friend. You lampoon the shareholders of Yahoo as those who, as you said, "...take out payday loans, refinance their houses so much they owe money when they sell, cannot build traditional savings since all their income is treated as disposable. Basically the get rich generation with no long term goals other than their next big "fix"."
As shareholders of the company, that means they are making an investment(with disposable income mind you), which is what you said they were not capable of doing. So which is it? I would venture to say that the exact opposite of the people you described are the ones that own Yahoo! stock.
1) No programming team would ignore FF unless directed to do so. You are telling me you got a group of programmers together and they all loved IE so much they were completely oblivious to FF?
2) Some.NET goodies didnt work? Only some? If sales dipped like you said... then the whole system had to be hosed to get 0 sales from that demographic.
3) You traffic would not drop to nil in a week, so that is your biggest "I am lying" thing. You are suggesting that all your past users accessed your site that week, saw it didnt work right, and decided to not come back ever again. None of the only check the site every couple weeks? I mean give me a break - this is obviously an exaggeratiom
4) FF traffic shot back up in a week. (See #3)
5) Your 'younger' crowd would have been apt to try your site in IE if it failed in FF... at least in lets say... 25% of the cases.
The bottom line is this story is almost certainly partially fabricated and why? Do you not like Microsoft or maybe you just really like FF? I cannot believe you got modded up for blatant fanboyism.
I am a geek/nerd. No doubt about it. My plates say "IF ELSE." I could not care less about this in any way shape or form. Our geekdom/nerddom is a result of us caring about being intelligent people, not to be up on the latest and greatest gadgets/sites. TFA is all about the 'lifestyle', but we didn't do any of that... these are traits OTHERS attributed to us and as you can see, they are pretty off base.
Most nerds take pride in their intelligence and they should be! If that is not what is coming out of this 'rise of the geek' movement then who cares? I certainly don't. I would much rather have the influence be that society beings to respect and value intelligent people... something that was lost during generation X/Next and who knows if we can ever get it back... I have my doubts.
Well everyone here seems to be complaining about how bad their first job in their industry was. What about those who got an awesome job out of school? My first gig after school was great! It was the perfect platform to develop my skill set and enabled me to jump ship for a 50% bump in salary after a year+.
I just thought I would chime in from the other side of the tracks. Now do not think it was purely luck though, I earned the good first job by beating out the rest of you during the interview process:)
Because the cult of Star Wars, which far far surpasses that of Conan, made SWG a huge success among the crowd in question right?
The answer is no. Also, it is not a small fraction of 10 Million subscriptions, in fact Blizzard defines the term to avoid this confusion.
Blizzard.com says:
World of Warcraft's Subscriber Definition
World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules. So you seem to have you facts confused here. The cartoonish graphics didnt draw people to the game, instead like you said, peoples friends and colleagues got them playing. That is exactly why Wow is so successful, people can easily recommend the game to friends knowing how the game plays for new users themselves.
Wow succeeds because of this line of thinking among its users: "Hey you should play this game I got a while ago, it is pretty cool. If you want to play I can start a new character with you and we can pay together if you want."
WoW brought non-gamers into the fray and can boast 10 million users as a direct result of tapping a new market of non-gamers(Non PC Gamers at least). Wow did not turn these people onto PC gaming on a larger scale though, it isn't opening doors for others genres (or games in this case) to get these users. These users playing WoW, that would have otherwise not be playing anything on a PC are, 1) Not looking for another a new PC game and more importantly 2) are still very happy with what WoW is giving them given the longevity of its sustained user base. If a company wishes to tap the same users that made WoW wildly successful, they have to earn it! Blizzard created its new market by drawing people to their game and other companies will have to do the same. The point here is that a company cannot just make a game and sell a bunch of copies early on and claim to be challenging WoW. Instead they have to start well, sustain growth AND THEN they may be able to draw the new coveted market Blizzard has cornered at present. Let us not forget that WoW did not really take off with the Average Joe for a good 12+ months after it went gold(at least).
These other games may get some of the gamers that knew the genre's(MMO) landscape before WoW and actually care to try other MMO's. They will not eat into WoW's new bread and butter - in fact, they are all just scurrying around for the crumbs.
No Issues. I have been on torrents and uploading at the same speed for well over 2 years with no issues. I have tracked a solid 70k/sec upload speed for months and months and my charts show no throttling at all. I am on the best residential connection Cox offers and I cannot see how my experience would be any different than another users unless Cox is identifying the tracker and blocking if they recognize it (TPB/*nova/etc). Cox would be unable to identify the trackers I use and maybe that lets me get away with it? Who knows, just thought I would share.
Well I cant disagree with you in all honesty, but I would say that the jury is still out on that. It is not an overnight thing mind you - time must pass in order to know the extent of changes. I would venture to say that Firefox has been growing significantly, but to say it commands a considerable market share is not very accurate. Let us not forget either that FF is not a household brand nor a company seeking profit for its shareholders. Moreover, many of the FF users are fanatical about FF extensions and not the browser itself. That said, I am by no means saying that these extensions are not a result of how FF was built and supported by its community. I give credit where credit is due and FF certainly deserves acclaim for its great support of 3rd party extensions.
FF is free, OS X is not. That distinction alone makes it pretty difficult to compare the two. However I do think you have a good point and it is something to keep an eye on.
Slashdot Mirror
Calm down turbo. I was speaking in a general sense and made it quite clear I was by not addressing any of the exceptions. Of course some people get addicted to different things online, be it a game or chat room, it makes no difference. Nowhere did I try to justify long hours online playing a game or anything of that sort. You just trolled with that reply you know? You are way off base.
All that is happening is people are discovering the internet and exploring it at different periods of their lives. Most people, when they first get connected, end up in a chat room and/or some IM program within the first few days of using it. Just like when many of us discovered it, we were amazed and used the same sort of things these people are using in their early internet life. Games, porn, chat rooms and IMing are often the extent that people use the internet for on a regular basis. They are comfortable with the technology and seem content with what they have found, at least for a bit.
:)
As the years go by and you expand your personal scope of/for the internet, you ditch all the things you did when you first got on and really get down to business finally. Call it internet puberty if you wish... these people are just exploring things just like we all did at one point. Honestly, I think it is funny to see friends of mine who just finally get online and start talking about chat rooms or some flash game they found. It takes me back to the days when all the internet was there for was to entertain me. Now I am connected to the/a network nearly all the time, I make my living from it and if it went down for more than 6 hours, I might get the shakes.
I highly suggest the book On Intelligence to anyone wanting to or currently working in the AI field. This book presents the case for AI in a completely new way to look at the problem. The author stresses that to make true artificial intelligence you have to understand how the brain really works. Anyways, the book covers far more than this and is worth the quick Wikipedia read I linked to. I found this book very enlightening, well written and incredibly insightful. At the end of the day, this book likely outlines how AI programming/research influenced in the future.
Yep, exactly. He had no idea what the market for his product was going to evolve to, but he approached it in such a way that MS could adapt. They adapted so well that they pretty much became 'the market' and we all know what happened then.
and keep reading/commenting on tech related sites like this. The networking group is easy to find in any metro area with some Googling. Another oft overlooked method in this day and age is the good ol' subscription to a magazine. (eWeek and NetworkWorld are free and tend to follow the new buzzwords well enough. Currently you can read about cloud computing and speculation on Semantic web stuff)
In all honesty, you simply wanting to keep up-to-date is going to be enough. If you are interested in the subject matter to begin with, then you often find you keep up to speed with out making the _specific_ effort.
Obviously not.
Nah. It saves all that stuff for you. It even saved my session from FF2 to FF3.
This browser is much more responsive than FF2. My performance in Gmail is much improved. The memory leak was not fixed, but it was finally addressed it seems. The memory usage still creeps up very high, but it takes much longer to reach the point of a performance hit than before. The memory leak was/is my biggest issue with FF and as far as I can tell with FF3, it may be only a minor annoyance... which I am happy to have when compared to the numerous Force Quits needed per day with FF2.
If these ISPs were overloaded to the point of thinking they may be being DDoS'ed over one event online, they are they wholly unprepared for any sort of attack that may actually be focused at them? Imagine the carnage a real attack would wreak on the ISPs! Is there anyone out there that knows the likelihood of ISPs going down if they came under a real attack? If a few botnets targeted these ISPs, could they be brought down completely? Imagine one of these ISPs really stepping up the game for a tiered internet service model, putting themselves out there as a lightening rod for angry nerds. Could a coordinated effort break the back of an ISPs ability to provide any service whatsoever?
Your thoughts are most welcome and I thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts!
Well I was only saying you had the tools already there in order to view the world as it should be viewed, with a healthy dose of skepticism. I was going to explain myself further, but decided to be on the side of brevity.
It is not that it is part of a geeks personality, but rather geeks are generally described as those who use logic and reason to look at the world. When you are using logic and reason to look at the world then you already have the tools you need to view the world from an objective point of view.
I do not know how much Socrates thoughts themselves would apply, but the Socratic Method is certainly useful. I just wanted to make that distinction for anyone unfamiliar with the works as 'just reading Socrates' is a dive into philosophy which some miay not be interested in.
Har har ... you're so clever! If I load the same data(Read: Tabs) in IE7 and FF2, FF2 will eat memory till there is non left to consume while IE7 maintains the memory usage within an acceptable range that is far lower than that of what FF2 would use.
Worthless troll.
As tabs are closed? So if you have many tabs persistently open you will still run into memory issues? I guess that even if they did not fix everything, they certainly made some headway if this is true. I suppose releasing memory upon a tab being closed would reduce my force quits by half or so. That's something I guess!
Which memory leak bug? The main one that accumulates memory with open tabs? I have heard that it was still not addressed in FF3, but that was a bit ago and I hope this is it! It would be nice to be able to not have to close FF with Force Quit.. Every... Single... Time...
Chalk me up on someone who is quite jealous of S. Brin over this! I mean the vast richest he has _earned_ is of no concern to me. The fact that he gets to not only go into space, but he gets to be tagged with being the first person in space via a private venture is enough to make even the modest geek envious. Thanks for helping the door for the rest of us to follow you through in the future though.
;) - Then again, who doesn't?
I hope to follow the same path someday and pay for myself to float around for a few days in space
In case you were wondering, yes, Blizzard and its assets have pretty much been priced into the stock already. Now that the merger is looking solid and ATVI revised profits upwards a few weeks ago for 07, the stock has gone to $34 after hovering around $27 for a few months.
A friend close to the two companies says: A stock price of $40 is likely to take some time (18+ months) and would be contingent on the performance of both Activision Blizzard and EA. EA will probably need to slip to the #2 publisher in order for Activision Blizzard to consistently trade over $40.
That is an oxy-moron my friend. You lampoon the shareholders of Yahoo as those who, as you said, "...take out payday loans, refinance their houses so much they owe money when they sell, cannot build traditional savings since all their income is treated as disposable. Basically the get rich generation with no long term goals other than their next big "fix"."
As shareholders of the company, that means they are making an investment(with disposable income mind you), which is what you said they were not capable of doing. So which is it? I would venture to say that the exact opposite of the people you described are the ones that own Yahoo! stock.
Making quite a few reaches to defend him are we not? A defense like that almost proves that he was fibbing.
Your story is too convenient to be 100% true.
.NET goodies didnt work? Only some? If sales dipped like you said... then the whole system had to be hosed to get 0 sales from that demographic.
1) No programming team would ignore FF unless directed to do so. You are telling me you got a group of programmers together and they all loved IE so much they were completely oblivious to FF?
2) Some
3) You traffic would not drop to nil in a week, so that is your biggest "I am lying" thing. You are suggesting that all your past users accessed your site that week, saw it didnt work right, and decided to not come back ever again. None of the only check the site every couple weeks? I mean give me a break - this is obviously an exaggeratiom
4) FF traffic shot back up in a week. (See #3)
5) Your 'younger' crowd would have been apt to try your site in IE if it failed in FF... at least in lets say... 25% of the cases.
The bottom line is this story is almost certainly partially fabricated and why? Do you not like Microsoft or maybe you just really like FF? I cannot believe you got modded up for blatant fanboyism.
I am a geek/nerd. No doubt about it. My plates say "IF ELSE." I could not care less about this in any way shape or form. Our geekdom/nerddom is a result of us caring about being intelligent people, not to be up on the latest and greatest gadgets/sites. TFA is all about the 'lifestyle', but we didn't do any of that... these are traits OTHERS attributed to us and as you can see, they are pretty off base.
Most nerds take pride in their intelligence and they should be! If that is not what is coming out of this 'rise of the geek' movement then who cares? I certainly don't. I would much rather have the influence be that society beings to respect and value intelligent people... something that was lost during generation X/Next and who knows if we can ever get it back... I have my doubts.
Well everyone here seems to be complaining about how bad their first job in their industry was. What about those who got an awesome job out of school? My first gig after school was great! It was the perfect platform to develop my skill set and enabled me to jump ship for a 50% bump in salary after a year+.
:)
I just thought I would chime in from the other side of the tracks. Now do not think it was purely luck though, I earned the good first job by beating out the rest of you during the interview process
The answer is no. Also, it is not a small fraction of 10 Million subscriptions, in fact Blizzard defines the term to avoid this confusion.
Blizzard.com says: World of Warcraft's Subscriber Definition World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules. So you seem to have you facts confused here. The cartoonish graphics didnt draw people to the game, instead like you said, peoples friends and colleagues got them playing. That is exactly why Wow is so successful, people can easily recommend the game to friends knowing how the game plays for new users themselves.
Wow succeeds because of this line of thinking among its users: "Hey you should play this game I got a while ago, it is pretty cool. If you want to play I can start a new character with you and we can pay together if you want."
...and it is an emphatic No.
WoW brought non-gamers into the fray and can boast 10 million users as a direct result of tapping a new market of non-gamers(Non PC Gamers at least). Wow did not turn these people onto PC gaming on a larger scale though, it isn't opening doors for others genres (or games in this case) to get these users. These users playing WoW, that would have otherwise not be playing anything on a PC are, 1) Not looking for another a new PC game and more importantly 2) are still very happy with what WoW is giving them given the longevity of its sustained user base. If a company wishes to tap the same users that made WoW wildly successful, they have to earn it! Blizzard created its new market by drawing people to their game and other companies will have to do the same. The point here is that a company cannot just make a game and sell a bunch of copies early on and claim to be challenging WoW. Instead they have to start well, sustain growth AND THEN they may be able to draw the new coveted market Blizzard has cornered at present. Let us not forget that WoW did not really take off with the Average Joe for a good 12+ months after it went gold(at least).
These other games may get some of the gamers that knew the genre's(MMO) landscape before WoW and actually care to try other MMO's. They will not eat into WoW's new bread and butter - in fact, they are all just scurrying around for the crumbs.
No Issues. I have been on torrents and uploading at the same speed for well over 2 years with no issues. I have tracked a solid 70k/sec upload speed for months and months and my charts show no throttling at all. I am on the best residential connection Cox offers and I cannot see how my experience would be any different than another users unless Cox is identifying the tracker and blocking if they recognize it (TPB/*nova/etc). Cox would be unable to identify the trackers I use and maybe that lets me get away with it? Who knows, just thought I would share.
My $.02
Well I cant disagree with you in all honesty, but I would say that the jury is still out on that. It is not an overnight thing mind you - time must pass in order to know the extent of changes. I would venture to say that Firefox has been growing significantly, but to say it commands a considerable market share is not very accurate. Let us not forget either that FF is not a household brand nor a company seeking profit for its shareholders. Moreover, many of the FF users are fanatical about FF extensions and not the browser itself. That said, I am by no means saying that these extensions are not a result of how FF was built and supported by its community. I give credit where credit is due and FF certainly deserves acclaim for its great support of 3rd party extensions.
FF is free, OS X is not. That distinction alone makes it pretty difficult to compare the two. However I do think you have a good point and it is something to keep an eye on.