I'm having a slow month.. More forced updates and black. screens / stuck updates means more money fixing it. I have a great client that is crippled by these regularly. Friday already scheduled.
boy fucking howdy, this. 40 is a terrible age to suddenly become unemployed in the IT field due to your company closing. Those 20 somethings with a wet degree will do it for half what you expect to be paid.
The inverse is also true. A death threat makes it easier to get a concealed carry license, even in Kalifornia. I have mine ( even though I've not been threatened ) and I carry. Every day, everywhere. Yes, even to my kids school. Yes, even in the house. Yes, right. now. A death threat wouldn't bother me much, as I go about my day in Cooper condition yellow anyway.
Two things never discussed in the ebook / paper costs debate are the costs of warehousing and taxes on unsold inventory and availability of "out of print" books. One of the reasons it's nearly impossible to get older works is they are purposefully allowed to go out of print. No publisher wants to do another run of 40,000 copies of "Pride of Chanur" and then hold onto them as they trickle out to bookstores and buyers. Publishers want the latest flavor of Teen Paranormal Romance which is selling NOW. They want to print 10,000 copies and then move on to the next latest Zombie Teen Paranormal Werewolf Romance. There's thousands of excellent books no longer available even used at a reasonable price. Ebooks allow publishers to warehouse zero copies, saving the tax on inventory and space requirements. Ebooks allow YOU as a writer ( assuming you've been at it a while ) to sell your backlist to new readers. Some of the great SF authors of the 60's and 70's have dozens of titles that are impossible to find. For the cost of converting or creating an ebook, you will continue to have a copy available to sell, in theory, forever as it will never go out of print.
My Pop is 73, asked me to help him buy a "tablet" the other day because he wants to keep his sheet music on it. He plays ukulele. I'm a dyed in the wool linux and android user, he's an old mainframe engineer from the 70's. He's not unintelligent but has had a bit of a decline in mental acuity so after much soul wrangling I steered him towards an iPad. He loves it. Simple, "intuitive" ( for him ) just his speed. He immediately downloaded "Onsong" after I helped him research it and off he went, merrily importing chords and music.
Here's the observation- if regular users / geeks abandon Apple for unwalled gardens, it won't be readily apparent because there are always going to be older people like my Pop buying Apple products for the ease of use and simplicity. Just like there's always gonna be an older AOL user out there. But there may be no serious revenue stream in it for Apple. Older people use devices differently than most of us.
See, my pop is not interested in any more apps. He's found the one thing he wants to use an iPad for and he's DONE. I showed him how to read his gmail on it on the web, he flat refuses to read a book on it, doesn't care about buying music ( he prefers to listen to ukulele examples on youtube) doesn't play games, doesn't care about facebook, twitter, instagram or anything else. He uses his laptop for his finances... he even wants to unlink his credit card from the appstore so "hackers" won't steal his card number.
So Apple managed to sell him an iPad and *one* app. I can guarantee you he will use that one app and be perfectly content till the battery stops charging.
"There are NO Apple Infidels in Microsoft's marketspace! We are re-soundly defeating them! They are nothing when face with our superior products! The are worth no more than an old shoe! Those are not Apple products, those are Microsoft products! I tell you, they lie!! We have them surrounded in their Ipads!!"
..and IT guy and linux guy. Kids ( 13 & 11 ) run windows ( WoW and Minecraft.. and ipods and itunes giftcards from the grandparents.. sue me. ) So while yes, I could whip up a linux solution with one of the copious free bits of kit I have hanging around and yes, I'd enjoy fiddling with it for hours on end, I opted for K9 Web Protection. Free, 5 minutes to set up on each pc and damn if it doesn't really work great.
What I like is the levels of granularity- block entire categories but add exceptions as the kids come across a page that I deem acceptable- they have to come to me and make the case for allowing a particular website. Plus the time restrictions work as expected- it severs their connection at bedtime. Bonus - it blocks web ads.
I recommend it to my clients all the time when asked the same question.
One of the reasons books go "out of print" is due to being a little long in the tooth, not being the current trend of "Teen Paranormal Romance"- essentially, it costs the publisher inventory taxes to hold volumes in the warehouse should demand ever increase for an older title. So when a print run ends, they don't reprint another 10,000 copies to store and pay inventory taxes on in the hopes of selling 10 at a bookstore each subsequent year... this is why it's hard to find older CJ Cherryh books and stuff by Niven.
With digital- there is no warehouse, there is no annual tax on unsold items...
IRS: "How many books in your warehouse?" Publisher: "One!"
( as an aside- I'd love to see MAFIAA math applied by the IRS to their digital titles. ) IRS: "How many albums / movies in your warehouse? MAFIAA: "One!" IRS: "that equals 30 bazillion potential copies. Pay up."
Seriously, I make a living off ex-geek squad customers. I run a small one-man computer repair / virus removal business. Can't tell you how many PC's I fix and find Geek Squad fingerprints all over it. One lady called me in a panic because GS had quoted her $1300 to "repair" her unbootable PC ( new Motherboard, new hard drive, new RAM ( WTF?) and a new power supply.. I fixed it for a flat $75 by running chkdsk on the drive and cleaning off the virus. She's still my customer to this day and I've easily made a grand off her over the years, migrating data, removing new malware and viruses as they come up (gotta love teens )
I have a simple business model that geek squad can't compete with. 1) I do it better for less. I pick up and drop off too, if you dont want me to stay at your place and work on it rt. 2) I WARRANTY all my work- ie: if for whatever reason you aren't satisfied, I'll make it right, NO CHARGE, no argument and no hassle. 3) you get ME every time you dial my business number, not some kid that worked the fry basket last week. I can rmember the ongoing issues with your stuff. 4) this is the biggie: I will do everything I can to recover your data, BEFORE I format it and reinstall. Even if I have to spend an extra hour with a ubuntu bootable disk picking it off the disk and putting it on a backup drive.
I've around 350 regular clients, some have been with me for 7 years. They're my bread and butter. Most of them despise GS, and by extension, Best Buy. Customers have a long memory for getting screwed.
based on reading the above, my addled brain immediately thinks that all the antimatter went back in time to before the big bang,( to negative infinity and beyond,) while normal matter went forward in time. There. Solved THAT mystery.
Lo about 1999 or 2000 a group of us fans went on the tour of his house in L.A. Sat in his living room on the floor and listened to him tell us stories, wandered up and down stairs and all around the house looking and a veritable treasure trove of Sci-Fi memorabilia, paintings, props, brickabrack and the books- gods... the sheer number of books! Even got to scrabble around under the house in the "graveyard" or whatever he called it, just a dirt cellar really, but full of ghouls,zombies, eerie stuff and gods know what props from old movies. Wicked fucking cool.
I sat there - watching him wave his hands around as he talked about old movies and people he knew and props he had collected and realized that the sheer volume of things in that house made it like the Smithsonian of Sci-Fi. Could have spent a lifetime in there and still not seen everything.
Left a $20 in the basket by the front door as we left. Felt like the world was a shabbier place knowing all that work he put into collecting it would go to waste, split up and carted off when he passed. You could really tell he loved collecting it, loved telling the stories about it. Glad I went. Sad it's gone. Wonder where all those original paintings from the covers of Amazing Stories and similar wound up...?
Teaching religion in public schools isn't against the U.S.constitution. The problem is that Fundie Christians only want Fundie Christianity's version of religion taught in public schools and too many of the people in positions of power are Fundie Christian. Under that condition the State is showing preference of one religion over another. That is against the constitution. If schools want to teach religion, all they have to do is be willing to teach ANY religion. Hindu, Muslim, Goddess Worship, Witchcraft, Santeria, Vodou, you get the picture. But Fundies come unglued at the thought of children being taught Vodou or Witchcraft and then the ACLU ( thankfully ) gets involved.
See, it's all or nothing. Can't have state sponsored religion. Same goes for public displays at the Winter Solstice ( Christmas for the rest of you ) The state cannot allow a creche on the front lawn of the courthouse unless they also allow a Menorah, a sign from the Atheists espousing that "There is no God", a yule tree and a nicely lit Pentacle.
As soon as the Atheists and Pagans want to join in, the fundies go apeshit and decry the evilness and hijacking of "their" Holiday and displays and declare that Christianity is "under attack" in this "Christian founded Nation"
Actually, the restrictions on permissible levels of TDS, Chromium 6, MTBE and arsenic for bottled water that has been purified, regardless of source ( Muni, well, spring, lake) exceed enormously the restrictions for spring water that is bottled 'au naturel' from the source -- there are permissible levels of arsenic allowed in spring water, ( true!) but goddess forbid you filter out the sediments, undesireable minerals like calcium carbonate, because now you've 'purified' the water and the regulations are very different.
Oh, and don't knock RO. A production RO/DI system can take TDS in water down to.5 ppm. We can get purity down to 18.2 megaohm.
.... In fact, DeCSS has shown that the more you try to restrict the flow of information, the more folks who may not have cared otherwise now want to help share it.
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
..great fucking synchronicity. Someone just emailed me that wav file this morning, based on a conversation that that should be a corporate theme song today.
..Obviously the board of directors at SCO are jamming some seriously proscribed narcotics into every available orifice. From the outrageous press releases, it looks like 'trafficking quantities' and not recreational quantites. They should get nabbed for trafficking anyway, at the very least they are stuffing tons of the stuff into their attornys orifices.
What's next? Cancel Christmas? Cut off the Widows and Orphans? No more kitchen scraps?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm having a slow month.. More forced updates and black. screens / stuck updates means more money fixing it. I have a great client that is crippled by these regularly. Friday already scheduled.
boy fucking howdy, this. 40 is a terrible age to suddenly become unemployed in the IT field due to your company closing. Those 20 somethings with a wet degree will do it for half what you expect to be paid.
"Inca Gold" apparently wasn't on the researchers reading list.
The inverse is also true. A death threat makes it easier to get a concealed carry license, even in Kalifornia. I have mine ( even though I've not been threatened ) and I carry. Every day, everywhere. Yes, even to my kids school. Yes, even in the house. Yes, right. now. A death threat wouldn't bother me much, as I go about my day in Cooper condition yellow anyway.
Two things never discussed in the ebook / paper costs debate are the costs of warehousing and taxes on unsold inventory and availability of "out of print" books. One of the reasons it's nearly impossible to get older works is they are purposefully allowed to go out of print. No publisher wants to do another run of 40,000 copies of "Pride of Chanur" and then hold onto them as they trickle out to bookstores and buyers. Publishers want the latest flavor of Teen Paranormal Romance which is selling NOW. They want to print 10,000 copies and then move on to the next latest Zombie Teen Paranormal Werewolf Romance. There's thousands of excellent books no longer available even used at a reasonable price. Ebooks allow publishers to warehouse zero copies, saving the tax on inventory and space requirements. Ebooks allow YOU as a writer ( assuming you've been at it a while ) to sell your backlist to new readers. Some of the great SF authors of the 60's and 70's have dozens of titles that are impossible to find. For the cost of converting or creating an ebook, you will continue to have a copy available to sell, in theory, forever as it will never go out of print.
My Pop is 73, asked me to help him buy a "tablet" the other day because he wants to keep his sheet music on it. He plays ukulele. I'm a dyed in the wool linux and android user, he's an old mainframe engineer from the 70's. He's not unintelligent but has had a bit of a decline in mental acuity so after much soul wrangling I steered him towards an iPad. He loves it. Simple, "intuitive" ( for him ) just his speed. He immediately downloaded "Onsong" after I helped him research it and off he went, merrily importing chords and music.
Here's the observation- if regular users / geeks abandon Apple for unwalled gardens, it won't be readily apparent because there are always going to be older people like my Pop buying Apple products for the ease of use and simplicity. Just like there's always gonna be an older AOL user out there. But there may be no serious revenue stream in it for Apple. Older people use devices differently than most of us.
See, my pop is not interested in any more apps. He's found the one thing he wants to use an iPad for and he's DONE. I showed him how to read his gmail on it on the web, he flat refuses to read a book on it, doesn't care about buying music ( he prefers to listen to ukulele examples on youtube) doesn't play games, doesn't care about facebook, twitter, instagram or anything else. He uses his laptop for his finances... he even wants to unlink his credit card from the appstore so "hackers" won't steal his card number.
So Apple managed to sell him an iPad and *one* app. I can guarantee you he will use that one app and be perfectly content till the battery stops charging.
"There are NO Apple Infidels in Microsoft's marketspace! We are re-soundly defeating them! They are nothing when face with our superior products! The are worth no more than an old shoe! Those are not Apple products, those are Microsoft products! I tell you, they lie!! We have them surrounded in their Ipads!!"
..and IT guy and linux guy. Kids ( 13 & 11 ) run windows ( WoW and Minecraft.. and ipods and itunes giftcards from the grandparents.. sue me. ) So while yes, I could whip up a linux solution with one of the copious free bits of kit I have hanging around and yes, I'd enjoy fiddling with it for hours on end, I opted for K9 Web Protection. Free, 5 minutes to set up on each pc and damn if it doesn't really work great.
What I like is the levels of granularity- block entire categories but add exceptions as the kids come across a page that I deem acceptable- they have to come to me and make the case for allowing a particular website. Plus the time restrictions work as expected- it severs their connection at bedtime. Bonus - it blocks web ads.
I recommend it to my clients all the time when asked the same question.
I asked my son if he broke the neighbor's window, he "wrongly claimed" that he didn't.
My boss asked me if I was coming in to work today and I "wrongly claimed" I was ill.
"Sweetheart, I am not "wrongly claiming" when I told you I never slept with your sister. It was an "inadvertent error" ..I *LIKE* this !
One of the reasons books go "out of print" is due to being a little long in the tooth, not being the current trend of "Teen Paranormal Romance"- essentially, it costs the publisher inventory taxes to hold volumes in the warehouse should demand ever increase for an older title. So when a print run ends, they don't reprint another 10,000 copies to store and pay inventory taxes on in the hopes of selling 10 at a bookstore each subsequent year... this is why it's hard to find older CJ Cherryh books and stuff by Niven.
With digital- there is no warehouse, there is no annual tax on unsold items...
IRS: "How many books in your warehouse?"
Publisher: "One!"
( as an aside- I'd love to see MAFIAA math applied by the IRS to their digital titles. )
IRS: "How many albums / movies in your warehouse?
MAFIAA: "One!"
IRS: "that equals 30 bazillion potential copies. Pay up."
Seriously, I make a living off ex-geek squad customers. I run a small one-man computer repair / virus removal business. Can't tell you how many PC's I fix and find Geek Squad fingerprints all over it. One lady called me in a panic because GS had quoted her $1300 to "repair" her unbootable PC ( new Motherboard, new hard drive, new RAM ( WTF?) and a new power supply.. I fixed it for a flat $75 by running chkdsk on the drive and cleaning off the virus. She's still my customer to this day and I've easily made a grand off her over the years, migrating data, removing new malware and viruses as they come up (gotta love teens )
I have a simple business model that geek squad can't compete with.
1) I do it better for less. I pick up and drop off too, if you dont want me to stay at your place and work on it rt.
2) I WARRANTY all my work- ie: if for whatever reason you aren't satisfied, I'll make it right, NO CHARGE, no argument and no hassle.
3) you get ME every time you dial my business number, not some kid that worked the fry basket last week. I can rmember the ongoing issues with your stuff.
4) this is the biggie: I will do everything I can to recover your data, BEFORE I format it and reinstall. Even if I have to spend an extra hour with a ubuntu bootable disk picking it off the disk and putting it on a backup drive.
I've around 350 regular clients, some have been with me for 7 years. They're my bread and butter. Most of them despise GS, and by extension, Best Buy. Customers have a long memory for getting screwed.
based on reading the above, my addled brain immediately thinks that all the antimatter went back in time to before the big bang,( to negative infinity and beyond,) while normal matter went forward in time. There. Solved THAT mystery.
Actually, not so. That's why I can eat bacon!!!
explain to them that's MY FREAKIN BACON SANDWICH in the fridge! I had my NAME ON IT!!
Farkin' lunch thieves...
if so, replace the batteries. Windows will spend ungodly amounts of cpu time polling the mouse if the battery is low.
3C
Lo about 1999 or 2000 a group of us fans went on the tour of his house in L.A. Sat in his living room on the floor and listened to him tell us stories, wandered up and down stairs and all around the house looking and a veritable treasure trove of Sci-Fi memorabilia, paintings, props, brickabrack and the books- gods... the sheer number of books! Even got to scrabble around under the house in the "graveyard" or whatever he called it, just a dirt cellar really, but full of ghouls,zombies, eerie stuff and gods know what props from old movies. Wicked fucking cool.
I sat there - watching him wave his hands around as he talked about old movies and people he knew and props he had collected and realized that the sheer volume of things in that house made it like the Smithsonian of Sci-Fi. Could have spent a lifetime in there and still not seen everything.
Left a $20 in the basket by the front door as we left. Felt like the world was a shabbier place knowing all that work he put into collecting it would go to waste, split up and carted off when he passed. You could really tell he loved collecting it, loved telling the stories about it. Glad I went. Sad it's gone. Wonder where all those original paintings from the covers of Amazing Stories and similar wound up...?
3C
After all, isn't Outlook a virus posing as an MUA?
Teaching religion in public schools isn't against the U.S.constitution. The problem is that Fundie Christians only want Fundie Christianity's version of religion taught in public schools and too many of the people in positions of power are Fundie Christian. Under that condition the State is showing preference of one religion over another. That is against the constitution. If schools want to teach religion, all they have to do is be willing to teach ANY religion. Hindu, Muslim, Goddess Worship, Witchcraft, Santeria, Vodou, you get the picture. But Fundies come unglued at the thought of children being taught Vodou or Witchcraft and then the ACLU ( thankfully ) gets involved.
See, it's all or nothing. Can't have state sponsored religion. Same goes for public displays at the Winter Solstice ( Christmas for the rest of you ) The state cannot allow a creche on the front lawn of the courthouse unless they also allow a Menorah, a sign from the Atheists espousing that "There is no God", a yule tree and a nicely lit Pentacle.
As soon as the Atheists and Pagans want to join in, the fundies go apeshit and decry the evilness and hijacking of "their" Holiday and displays and declare that Christianity is "under attack" in this "Christian founded Nation"
3C.
Minion to Darl:
".. We've analysed their attack sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your ship standing by?"
3C
mmmm yep.
.5 ppm. We can get purity down to 18.2 megaohm.
Actually, the restrictions on permissible levels of TDS, Chromium 6, MTBE and arsenic for bottled water that has been purified, regardless of source ( Muni, well, spring, lake) exceed enormously the restrictions for spring water that is bottled 'au naturel' from the source -- there are permissible levels of arsenic allowed in spring water, ( true!) but goddess forbid you filter out the sediments, undesireable minerals like calcium carbonate, because now you've 'purified' the water and the regulations are very different.
Oh, and don't knock RO. A production RO/DI system can take TDS in water down to
3C
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
3C
..great fucking synchronicity. Someone just emailed me that wav file this morning, based on a conversation that that should be a corporate theme song today.
*shiver*
3C
..Obviously the board of directors at SCO are jamming some seriously proscribed narcotics into every available orifice. From the outrageous press releases, it looks like 'trafficking quantities' and not recreational quantites. They should get nabbed for trafficking anyway, at the very least they are stuffing tons of the stuff into their attornys orifices.
What's next? Cancel Christmas? Cut off the Widows and Orphans? No more kitchen scraps?
3C
Fuck- I believe it.
Get sixteen-odd Peeps in me and you have to anchor me to the radiator to keep me from flying around the room.
"We're gonna sugar you up and take you home to momma!"
Good times.. good times.
3C