I understood at one time that the www. prefix was indicative of someone following a standard? All 'legitimate' websites used www, while those who were a bit more dodgy, or less professional, or didn't follow the ICANN (maybe) protocol skipped the prefix. Is this still technically a standard? Anybody know what the deal with that is/was? Just geeky curiousity.

K.

Positive: I don't have a CS degree. But I've been a geek for 10-15 years. I parlayed this into a 'Technical Services Director' position at work.

Negative: I got called at 8:30 in the morning, to come in and 'fix the internet'...because AOL's webmail site was down. I got called a year or two ago, to come in and fix someone's broken keyboard. I assumed it had just come unplugged, when I went to pick it up and check, about half a cup of coffee came pouring out. I get asked, about 5 times a day, how to copy and paste.

The real problem is that there's a whole different level of knowledge between someone who grew up playing video games/plunking away at a computer, and someone who has never seen one before in their life. SO much of the stuff we take for granted really is a learned skill.

Those people who are willing to learn the skill? I don't mind helping at all. I enjoy teaching and helping. The people who send me into a half-psychotic rage are those who are 'too important', too lazy, or too 'old' to learn new things. Who refuse to learn and feel like it is their right to just ask me whenever they can't be bothered to remember something (like ctrl-c). Those are the ones I actively discourage, ignore, blow off, or direct to RTFM.

I don't think most people mind helping someone in their sphere of knowledge. But they do mind being disrespected or treated like a bookshelf resource or an excuse to be lazy/ignorant/refuse to learn to do a vital part of your job, while using me and making twice what I do.

K.

That's a good point, I hadn't really thought of it when I posted this. But it seems to be a strategy, in the console wars, that you release your game on one console 6 months before the other. The 'early adopters' will flock to your console if they want the game bad enough.

My thinking behind the 4-5 good games line was sort of the...4-5 tugs on the rope model, rather than relying on one particular app. Presumably, it would take a couple weeks, at least, to port. And if I can get 'CoolGame2009' for free, if I dual boot or run a Linux game box, why would I pay for it on Win? If I'm not going to pay for it, why would a developer spend the time on it? At least until they catch up and realize that it's pulling customers away. This is sort of the model Firefox did, I think. They created that critical mass/groundswell, now they lead the development cycle. MS/GC/etc run along behind them cobbling together every FF innovation into their new version.

FF might only have 40% market share (last I read 6+ months ago), but they've achieved the status of critical innovator. Whatever is in their browser is guaranteed to show up in the others ASAP. That's a position of significant leverage.

K.

Thank you. Yes. There goes the next two days.:)

K.

Seriously, if you want Linux to really take off and outnumber Windows on home PCs, one of the strategies I'd consider would be to create 4-5 really good games not available on MS/Mac products. *nix geeks do a lot of ragging on GUI users, but exert little real effort to give them motivation to change.

All it would take is one superior game, one superior product and you'd get a massive influx of dual-booters. There's been a lot of work lately on making easy-to-install *nix flavors, Debian, CentOS, can both in my experience be installed by a child with no outside help (I even did it.) But unless you're running a server for something or just like to be confused, there's no motivation for it. If you gave people a game, an app, an experience they couldn't have on another OS, you'd provide real motivation.

Despite the current trends, good games don't require super graphics or movie tie-ins or big name voice actors. The best games, have always just needed better-than-suck graphics, superior user interface, and/or something that makes the game hook. Generally a little quirk or wrinkle in the game playing experience that no one else has ever figured out how to iron out. Something about the UI that just works. There are whole series of games that really aren't all that great as far as games go, but just have such a great interface that people keep coming back to them. Then again, there was a game on Windows3.1 shareware that came pre-installed called CastleWin. Was one of the coolest games I've ever played, just a Rogue-clone with graphics, you could re-name your items, and do a few other neat tricks. Still can't find that one anywhere.

K.

Its main objectives include the 'automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence.' == made of win

If the EU gives me a dollar, a day, for the rest of my life, I promise not to introduce this bot to bash.org/IRC.

On the other hand, if it dynamically defines normal as 'the most common behavior observed' Europeans can pretty much do whatever they want and feel confident that they're within a safe margin of typical internet behavior. Either that or the EU will have to release a patch that explains to the bot how threats of homosexual rape, pimping out 'your mom', and other wholesome and sundry activities that appear to exist on any forum/medium online are not truly normal.

K.

Er...my web browser is going to keep track of that for me? Or some site it goes to? How much does that cost?

If you're going to be condescending, you should probably make a distinction between a web browser and a computer. I've got IE, FF, Lynx and Chrome. And not a single one of them can do even basic addition or subtraction, as far as I know. Let alone keep a running tally of numbers that may or may not be updated on a second by second basis. By multiple people in the house/on the network, at the same time.

As for the rest, perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I can buy a paper for 50 cents and everybody in the house can read it. In addition, people of my same socio-economic class commonly discuss relevant bits of news of the day and I can go check up on those at a variety of sources, even if it's just the local newstand or newspaper dispenser's headlines. At the point where you price the lower (and larger) end of our socio-economic scale out of the information, you suddenly create even more ignorance in the largest voting block. I can't possibly envision how this is a good idea, unless you're a politician.

This trend, coupled with the Fox News/infotainment/edu-tising/etc trend we see in TV news means that online news is the only way to get a broad picture and different sides of an issue. Not to mention it being the best way to dig deeper on something.

Actually, I can get a broadband ADSL 768/128 connection for $26.00 (US) a month. And I can get an old laptop for a couple hundred dollars, or maybe even one of those $100 laptops, someday. I'm more concerned with those people who make up the bulk of the population that are 'just scraping by'. Rather than the people who are homeless/slowly dying of malnourishment. Fortunately, in the Western world at least, they're not the largest component of the population.

K.

What's a micro-payment? Twelve cents? Twelve dollars? My first question: How do you track micro-payments, in your checkbook? Let's say, one day, I read 100 articles on 17 (or 7 for that matter) different sites. One site charges 8 cents, another charges 75 cents, another a buck twelve, per article. How do I track how much money I spent? There would need to be a RSS-like "over"-service that tracks all of that. Second, what if I'm poor. Dirt poor? Where do I get this credit card to make this 'micro-payment'? I think, if you're below a certain economic margin you can't even get a debit card. I know you couldn't 10 years ago. More importantly, if I'm poor, where do I get this money to read the news? It staggers me that the internet is for and about information...but we continually discuss putting barriers in between people and information. Like this one. While at the same time railing at the gods that our users are too dumb and uneducated and 'just don't want to learn (information)'. There are already trends that indicate a technological caste system. People who can write applications to publish/sort/sift information, and people who use those applications. Someone who actually bothers to learn HTML and someone who takes a 6 week class at the local JC on how to use Dreamweaver. There's a higher tier, the people who write {favorite html editor}. News organizations are known as "The Fifth Estate", in a democracy they have a special place, without being melodramatic, something of a sacred place, even. You don't get educated end users by making information complicated, hard to understand, or...too expensive for the largest socio-economic class to access. K.