Having spent much of my grown life as a NOC monkey, I can assure you heads would roll at the ISPs I've worked at if we had nearly the number and lengths of outages experienced in the gaming world.
And the obvious difference is that with an ISP you don't have dozens or hundreds of people trying new ways to game the system. With fail over, live backup servers and cron jobs aplenty, you just swap out/swap in and you are good to go. With MMORPGs, someone hacks the system and you have to shut it down deliberately, pour yourself a double-shot and let out a loud WTF. Then study the hack, if you can, then engineer a work-around, then test it, then deploy it. Then bring the system back up. Yeah, these are very comparable systems alright.
Another difference is when a new MMORPG becomes popular and you go from a hundred test users to a thousand gamers to 100,000 to 1,000,000 in about a week. Gee, our roomful of servers has to become a building full. Should take just 0.001% of a year to do that. Capacity is a chicken and egg situation -- you aren't going to buy a thousand servers before you have even launched a game so you are forced to play catch up.
Tin foil territory here, but is it a coincidence that soon after we learn that the big ISPs have rooms dedicated to government monitoring of all internet traffic we are pushed toward bandwidth caps?
(1) Tell them we are monitoring everything
(2) Throttle them all so we can actually handle the data
(3) "Save Dick and Jane User from Osama!", while getting kickbacks from the ISPs
(4) But really just move the world closer to a NWO, while profiting every step of the way and gathering enough data on everyone that they can put away anyone who threatens their plan
The same points distribution has happened to myself, so I hazard a guess that the pool of moderators is limited, compared to the amount of moderation needed, so they are giving each moderator more points. This is supported by the fact that they don't extend the time given to use the points, so the net effect is that more mod points are awarded. Based on the age of some of the meta-mods I have done, they are months and months behind on that task, so it is reasonable that they could be behind on the moderating one. Given that the head honchos have unlimited mod points, to "mop up" what the moderators don't get, this new arrangement should free them a bit from the never-ending moderating task. Feel free to mod this -1, speculation.
On-topic, the Tower Of Pisa is like Windows -- throw more money at the problem, but never fix it, and people will actually enjoy the defects. Marketing over engineering wins again!
IAANANG but what if, and I'm just spitballing here, an alternate network stack is written. It allows user-designated programs to tap into the "sample everything" trough, and does standard network stack stuff for every other program. When you install AltNS it asks for some 2000 byte random string and you have to provide that on a case-by-case basis whenever you want to allow a new progie to snoop everything. Ok, I worded that like crap but I think my drift has been cast, to the four sheets.
Microsoft's efforts are designed to roughly match what is available from other sources (while trying to kill everything else off, but that is another discussion). So, FOS software is dictating what we all get, even if we don't use FOSS. FOS program x adds feature y...and eventually Microsoft adds something similar -- everyone ultimately gets feature y (some with crapware z).
Since Microsoft has pretty much maxed out their OS, both in featureset (Vista had to actually down-grade things to give newbies the change they crave) and marketshare, all that is left is for someone else to do it all for free. This leaves Microsoft playing eternal catch-up, with a constant downward pressure on their OS's price. All driven by FOSS.
It is so interesting that Microsoft always claim their need to innovate when they, almost be definition, do anything but. Hail to FOSS programmers -- the only value providers left in the software arena. Microsoft is more like Wal-Mart, sucking the value out of the system while compensating no one but themselves.
Google asked if I meant "silafluofen" when I typed "silafluorene" in. This database says silafluofen is a pesticide. Who wants to be spraying a pesticide on everything?
Part of the reason that DVD sales continue is that Blockbuster and Hollywood Video stores almost never have the Special Edition for rent. Those who are real fans of a movie end up wanting the SE. Similar for Netflix where you get a single DVD at a time -- if you want that second DVD it is an extra request. And, if you kept the Netflix DVD of Hot Fuzz around long enough to listen to all six commentaries (on the Special Edition DVD anyway), you are probably spending more back-to-back-to-back -to-back-to-back-to-back time than you would like watching the same movie. In other words, it would work better for you to own the SE and watch it whenever you want, with whatever commentary you want. Ownership makes sense (at least it did for me).
So the boat building video guy needs to come out with a special edition. Make it longer, more DVDs, printed extras (and more restrictive or at least well-defined licensing terms in print and on-screen). For that matter, branch out into a related or new area, like backyard play structures -- we bought one of those -- a dealer "demo" at half price -- that still set us back almost $5K. There has got to be a way to teach people how to make one.
It won't take long until they come back to you to buy another copy. And if their volume goes up, yours does as well. Each rental is a fractional-sale, leading up to new sales for you that you would never get otherwise. And some of those renting the DVDs will want to own them, coming to you to purchase them.
I'd say you have a break-even-or-better situation that beats mine: I publish 260 days per year, 9 unique quotations per issue, no charge but hopefully they will buy something from my web site -- except no one ever has, despite 1,500 to 2,000 unique visitors per day. Such is life and I earn/save in other ways to get by.
Over the course of the day, the music creeps up, and up, and by this time it was deafening.
Volume levels trend upward as we listen because our ears adapt. This seemingly good thing leads to hearing loss. Makes you wonder if Otolaryngologists have shares in ear bud manufacturers...
Why does Apple think anyone would pay for the ability to play in full screen?
I can't stand QuickTime either, but the latest QT I installed (to view the MOVs my Panasonic TZ5 creates) allows me to full screen for no cost. Of course, RAD Tools allows me to convert giant sized MOVs to one-tenth sized DivX files, so I doubt I will keep QT installed much longer.
I find Process Explorer incredibly underwhelming -- Task Manager allows me to kill most things I want to kill, and the Windows Update reboot nag can be banisheded by running SERVICES.MSC and turning off the Windows Update service.
And if you click on a PDF when you have Adobe as your PDF handler, it (slow)loads a 32MB-of-RAM-using component that does not get unloaded when you close that page. Pure joy!
A few months back Amazon offered a free MP3 download. I downloaded the file, tried to play it in WMP, no joy. Anyone else have this happen? Did it want/need a license or something (for this "free" track?!) Anyway, it was enough to convince me that "Amazon" and "MP3" should never appear in the same sentence (but if it is just a setting or something, I'd be happy to flick the switch...this Thursday or in November).
Anyone case to elaborate on what kind of shake-up this is going to have for astronomy and cosmology?
And just before we start shaking, can someone point me to the calculation for the exact ratio of "full face" to "oblique" galaxies we were expecting to see? Starting with a definition of how full is "full". 51%? 90%? 99%? 99.99% I think it is more likely a random differentiation, like say 98.7654321%, or "Gee, it looks pretty full on to me, Jim". All of which makes the findings more like "20% more mass, plus or minus 200 to 2000% (we're not really sure)".
We are going to need standard galaxy sizes, standard dust distribution, standard distance of comparison (the standard dust distributions alone will probably not be feasible to find) -- and then we will need 10 to 100 of these to do a statistically meaningful comparison.
Haven't we got better things to do than invent theories based on too many assumptions for too little data? Personally, I've got LeBron to watch in 47 minutes.
(1) Create TinySMS.com
(2) People type in their message and are given a helpful TinySMS string like &Ee*3#9-! to text to their SO, cleverly avoiding the cost of receiving an SMS by just recording the preview string
(3) People smash their phones trying to text strings like "&Ee*3#9-!" until they realize it isn't possible
(4) TinySMS ends up selling the unread text messages to the highest bidder
(5) E! buys an unread TinySMS and learns of Britney's latest accident 12 minutes sooner
(6)...For If When Do loop While...
(7) Profit!
LPGA women can compete with the PGA men, but not vice-a-versa? Who came up with this nonsense? Same for the female hockey goalie playing in the NHL, but I presume no men allowed to play in the women's league.
Once you hear of something like this it is time to find your sports fix elsewhere. This is really more of a political correctness / "we are all equal but some of us are more equal than others" movement than a sports one.
It all comes back to one group wanting a one-way advantage over another. This furthers the "minority" advantage everywhere, tilting the playing field even more toward pig rule. P.C. = irony challenged.
And what if you want to be part of a forum that is hosted by YahooGroups? I belong to 5 or 10 such groups, and (try to) post URLs to them. Your suggestion does not work for this. Clearly YahooGroups, like MSN/Hotmail, is vandalizing their own email/forum system in order to get rid of the worthless overhead of hundreds of millions of email accounts used by people who block ads and thus bring in zero money to Micro/hoo. The free email era is drawing to a close -- gmail won and the other players have no reason to hang around.
(1) you can preview the URL by going to TinyURL and doing it there, or having TinyURL configured that way just for you.
There's no reason to use a URL shortening service for links on web pages
(2) YahooGroups (for example) breaks long URLs (and "long" strings of any characters these days, inserting spaces after 30 or so characters) and so now I routinely post the full URL [in brackets because it probably won't work] and the TinyURL that will.
Ever notice how popular American sports are both insanely boring and timed to allow commerical breaks every several minutes? American Football - commercials get shown between every huddle. Baseball - commercials between every inning and during each time out.
Let's be accurate here. You are half right about baseball's between innings ads, but not during each time out (baseball doesn't really have time outs), but rather during each pitching change (and there are maybe only 3 or 4 of those in a game). American football runs ads at predictable times but never "between every huddle" -- they are run after a change of possession, after a score and after a kick-off (so you can have a "score, ads, kick-off, ads" worst case).
FWIW, baseball ads are easy to work around. They come at predictable times, last a very predictable time and then play resumes. Football ads are also fairly predictable and easy to plan around. Basketball has way too many timeouts and time stoppages, with little predictability. If you want to talk about a boring sport with annoying ads, go for basketball. I have seen the last 30 seconds of a game last thirty minutes due to timeouts, fouls, free throws, more fouls, timeouts, etc. etc. At the other extreme is the PGA Masters, with only 4 minutes of ads per hour.
Fair comment. Would it help if I added that my faves list has 400 tracks? IOW I rarely hear that particular song... Anyway, it makes me think that advertising success is on a circular rather than 0 to 9 scale. Too much and you get a negative reaction that is equal to no advertising (or worse).
Off topic, but speaking of which: can we get a new style of "shuffle"? I would like my player to track what songs have been played, and not include them in the random draw for the next song to be played -- and this should hold true even when I close the player and re-open it later. Write to an INI/dat file (or even, shudder, the registry) if you have to, just don't give me computer-random-i.e.-not-what-I-want shuffling ANY more! Once you have played the 400 faves, you wipe the INI/dat file and start again. Simple and better than the ubiquitous computer random approach that never plays 80% of my faves.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, with one exception. Billy Bob cracks me up and I've watched it several times already.
Having spent much of my grown life as a NOC monkey, I can assure you heads would roll at the ISPs I've worked at if we had nearly the number and lengths of outages experienced in the gaming world.
And the obvious difference is that with an ISP you don't have dozens or hundreds of people trying new ways to game the system. With fail over, live backup servers and cron jobs aplenty, you just swap out/swap in and you are good to go. With MMORPGs, someone hacks the system and you have to shut it down deliberately, pour yourself a double-shot and let out a loud WTF. Then study the hack, if you can, then engineer a work-around, then test it, then deploy it. Then bring the system back up. Yeah, these are very comparable systems alright.
Another difference is when a new MMORPG becomes popular and you go from a hundred test users to a thousand gamers to 100,000 to 1,000,000 in about a week. Gee, our roomful of servers has to become a building full. Should take just 0.001% of a year to do that. Capacity is a chicken and egg situation -- you aren't going to buy a thousand servers before you have even launched a game so you are forced to play catch up.
Tin foil territory here, but is it a coincidence that soon after we learn that the big ISPs have rooms dedicated to government monitoring of all internet traffic we are pushed toward bandwidth caps?
(1) Tell them we are monitoring everything
(2) Throttle them all so we can actually handle the data
(3) "Save Dick and Jane User from Osama!", while getting kickbacks from the ISPs
(4) But really just move the world closer to a NWO, while profiting every step of the way and gathering enough data on everyone that they can put away anyone who threatens their plan
The same points distribution has happened to myself, so I hazard a guess that the pool of moderators is limited, compared to the amount of moderation needed, so they are giving each moderator more points. This is supported by the fact that they don't extend the time given to use the points, so the net effect is that more mod points are awarded. Based on the age of some of the meta-mods I have done, they are months and months behind on that task, so it is reasonable that they could be behind on the moderating one. Given that the head honchos have unlimited mod points, to "mop up" what the moderators don't get, this new arrangement should free them a bit from the never-ending moderating task. Feel free to mod this -1, speculation.
On-topic, the Tower Of Pisa is like Windows -- throw more money at the problem, but never fix it, and people will actually enjoy the defects. Marketing over engineering wins again!
Goosh.org is the site.
You really don't want goosh.com...
IAANANG but what if, and I'm just spitballing here, an alternate network stack is written. It allows user-designated programs to tap into the "sample everything" trough, and does standard network stack stuff for every other program. When you install AltNS it asks for some 2000 byte random string and you have to provide that on a case-by-case basis whenever you want to allow a new progie to snoop everything. Ok, I worded that like crap but I think my drift has been cast, to the four sheets.
Microsoft's efforts are designed to roughly match what is available from other sources (while trying to kill everything else off, but that is another discussion). So, FOS software is dictating what we all get, even if we don't use FOSS. FOS program x adds feature y...and eventually Microsoft adds something similar -- everyone ultimately gets feature y (some with crapware z).
Since Microsoft has pretty much maxed out their OS, both in featureset (Vista had to actually down-grade things to give newbies the change they crave) and marketshare, all that is left is for someone else to do it all for free. This leaves Microsoft playing eternal catch-up, with a constant downward pressure on their OS's price. All driven by FOSS.
It is so interesting that Microsoft always claim their need to innovate when they, almost be definition, do anything but. Hail to FOSS programmers -- the only value providers left in the software arena. Microsoft is more like Wal-Mart, sucking the value out of the system while compensating no one but themselves.
Who knew it was this easy!
Google asked if I meant "silafluofen" when I typed "silafluorene" in. This database says silafluofen is a pesticide. Who wants to be spraying a pesticide on everything?
Part of the reason that DVD sales continue is that Blockbuster and Hollywood Video stores almost never have the Special Edition for rent. Those who are real fans of a movie end up wanting the SE. Similar for Netflix where you get a single DVD at a time -- if you want that second DVD it is an extra request. And, if you kept the Netflix DVD of Hot Fuzz around long enough to listen to all six commentaries (on the Special Edition DVD anyway), you are probably spending more back-to-back-to-back -to-back-to-back-to-back time than you would like watching the same movie. In other words, it would work better for you to own the SE and watch it whenever you want, with whatever commentary you want. Ownership makes sense (at least it did for me).
So the boat building video guy needs to come out with a special edition. Make it longer, more DVDs, printed extras (and more restrictive or at least well-defined licensing terms in print and on-screen). For that matter, branch out into a related or new area, like backyard play structures -- we bought one of those -- a dealer "demo" at half price -- that still set us back almost $5K. There has got to be a way to teach people how to make one.
It won't take long until they come back to you to buy another copy. And if their volume goes up, yours does as well. Each rental is a fractional-sale, leading up to new sales for you that you would never get otherwise. And some of those renting the DVDs will want to own them, coming to you to purchase them.
I'd say you have a break-even-or-better situation that beats mine: I publish 260 days per year, 9 unique quotations per issue, no charge but hopefully they will buy something from my web site -- except no one ever has, despite 1,500 to 2,000 unique visitors per day. Such is life and I earn/save in other ways to get by.
Over the course of the day, the music creeps up, and up, and by this time it was deafening.
Volume levels trend upward as we listen because our ears adapt. This seemingly good thing leads to hearing loss. Makes you wonder if Otolaryngologists have shares in ear bud manufacturers...
Why does Apple think anyone would pay for the ability to play in full screen?
I can't stand QuickTime either, but the latest QT I installed (to view the MOVs my Panasonic TZ5 creates) allows me to full screen for no cost. Of course, RAD Tools allows me to convert giant sized MOVs to one-tenth sized DivX files, so I doubt I will keep QT installed much longer.
I find Process Explorer incredibly underwhelming -- Task Manager allows me to kill most things I want to kill, and the Windows Update reboot nag can be banisheded by running SERVICES.MSC and turning off the Windows Update service.
And if you click on a PDF when you have Adobe as your PDF handler, it (slow)loads a 32MB-of-RAM-using component that does not get unloaded when you close that page. Pure joy!
A few months back Amazon offered a free MP3 download. I downloaded the file, tried to play it in WMP, no joy. Anyone else have this happen? Did it want/need a license or something (for this "free" track?!) Anyway, it was enough to convince me that "Amazon" and "MP3" should never appear in the same sentence (but if it is just a setting or something, I'd be happy to flick the switch...this Thursday or in November).
Norton Disk Doctor (ndd.exe) _did_ fix corrupted files. DE was the disk editor. Two different beasts.
Attach the second phone to your dog Rover. Those FBI guys will be exHAUSTed trying to keep up with Rover!
Anyone case to elaborate on what kind of shake-up this is going to have for astronomy and cosmology?
And just before we start shaking, can someone point me to the calculation for the exact ratio of "full face" to "oblique" galaxies we were expecting to see? Starting with a definition of how full is "full". 51%? 90%? 99%? 99.99% I think it is more likely a random differentiation, like say 98.7654321%, or "Gee, it looks pretty full on to me, Jim". All of which makes the findings more like "20% more mass, plus or minus 200 to 2000% (we're not really sure)".
We are going to need standard galaxy sizes, standard dust distribution, standard distance of comparison (the standard dust distributions alone will probably not be feasible to find) -- and then we will need 10 to 100 of these to do a statistically meaningful comparison.
Haven't we got better things to do than invent theories based on too many assumptions for too little data? Personally, I've got LeBron to watch in 47 minutes.
(1) Create TinySMS.com ...For If When Do loop While...
(2) People type in their message and are given a helpful TinySMS string like &Ee*3#9-! to text to their SO, cleverly avoiding the cost of receiving an SMS by just recording the preview string
(3) People smash their phones trying to text strings like "&Ee*3#9-!" until they realize it isn't possible
(4) TinySMS ends up selling the unread text messages to the highest bidder
(5) E! buys an unread TinySMS and learns of Britney's latest accident 12 minutes sooner
(6)
(7) Profit!
LPGA women can compete with the PGA men, but not vice-a-versa? Who came up with this nonsense? Same for the female hockey goalie playing in the NHL, but I presume no men allowed to play in the women's league.
Once you hear of something like this it is time to find your sports fix elsewhere. This is really more of a political correctness / "we are all equal but some of us are more equal than others" movement than a sports one.
It all comes back to one group wanting a one-way advantage over another. This furthers the "minority" advantage everywhere, tilting the playing field even more toward pig rule. P.C. = irony challenged.
And what if you want to be part of a forum that is hosted by YahooGroups? I belong to 5 or 10 such groups, and (try to) post URLs to them. Your suggestion does not work for this. Clearly YahooGroups, like MSN/Hotmail, is vandalizing their own email/forum system in order to get rid of the worthless overhead of hundreds of millions of email accounts used by people who block ads and thus bring in zero money to Micro/hoo. The free email era is drawing to a close -- gmail won and the other players have no reason to hang around.
(1) you can preview the URL by going to TinyURL and doing it there, or having TinyURL configured that way just for you.
There's no reason to use a URL shortening service for links on web pages
(2) YahooGroups (for example) breaks long URLs (and "long" strings of any characters these days, inserting spaces after 30 or so characters) and so now I routinely post the full URL [in brackets because it probably won't work] and the TinyURL that will.
Ever notice how popular American sports are both insanely boring and timed to allow commerical breaks every several minutes? American Football - commercials get shown between every huddle. Baseball - commercials between every inning and during each time out.
Let's be accurate here. You are half right about baseball's between innings ads, but not during each time out (baseball doesn't really have time outs), but rather during each pitching change (and there are maybe only 3 or 4 of those in a game). American football runs ads at predictable times but never "between every huddle" -- they are run after a change of possession, after a score and after a kick-off (so you can have a "score, ads, kick-off, ads" worst case).
FWIW, baseball ads are easy to work around. They come at predictable times, last a very predictable time and then play resumes. Football ads are also fairly predictable and easy to plan around. Basketball has way too many timeouts and time stoppages, with little predictability. If you want to talk about a boring sport with annoying ads, go for basketball. I have seen the last 30 seconds of a game last thirty minutes due to timeouts, fouls, free throws, more fouls, timeouts, etc. etc. At the other extreme is the PGA Masters, with only 4 minutes of ads per hour.
Fair comment. Would it help if I added that my faves list has 400 tracks? IOW I rarely hear that particular song... Anyway, it makes me think that advertising success is on a circular rather than 0 to 9 scale. Too much and you get a negative reaction that is equal to no advertising (or worse).
Off topic, but speaking of which: can we get a new style of "shuffle"? I would like my player to track what songs have been played, and not include them in the random draw for the next song to be played -- and this should hold true even when I close the player and re-open it later. Write to an INI/dat file (or even, shudder, the registry) if you have to, just don't give me computer-random-i.e.-not-what-I-want shuffling ANY more! Once you have played the 400 faves, you wipe the INI/dat file and start again. Simple and better than the ubiquitous computer random approach that never plays 80% of my faves.