Back in the 90s there was an NPR program called "Hearts in Space" that played this sort of stuff. It was great to fall asleep to, but I think I'll stick with my current trance and progressive for relaxation. Less danger of me nodding off.
I've been told I'm "abnormally happy" by a few folks over the years, and it has made me wonder - my mother was bi-polar, my oldest sister is also bi-polar, my second oldest sister has schizophrenia, and the third oldest sister is chronically depressed. Is chronic happiness also a mental illness? I have occasionally bouts of sadness or anger, but they never last more than a few hours and I can usually sleep it off. I always thought I had just inherited my father's stoic personality, but sometimes I wonder if "chronic happiness" is as much of an inbalance as chronic depression. Even my husband doesn't understand why I'm so chilled out, even if there are things I should be worrying about.
The trick is, of course, to use a different pent name if you've self-published. And to not mention it in your query letters. Ever. (Since it's a different "person.")
I think this is the critical point that the traditional publishing houses are totally missing. I don't buy books because of advertisements or book reviews. I buy them because either 1. a friend suggested it 2. a forum suggested it (not the same as a review or an ad by any means) or, the most likely case, I saw the book in a bookstore and thought it looked interesting. Amazon's recommendation services actually do 90% of the work for me these days. I log in, and "Hey here's a book you might like." Sure enough, it's a genre that I like and the blurb on the back cover looks great. In my wishlist or cart it goes! Or they send me an email with "Stuff you might like." The remaining 10% comes from friends raving about a book.
Getting an agent to sign you these days is a miserable, painful exercise. They're picky, because the publishers are picky, and even then there's only a 7% chance your book is going to bring a profit to the publisher.
Although I still think we need editors, and I respect the work that agents do, something is going to have to give. I'd prefer to see the entire NYC angency/publisher model completely revamped and streamlined for the ebook age, and if it takes Amazon to do it, then so be it.
Interesting, User Experience 101 is being taught as one of the last classes of my MIT degree. So anyone who has *most* of an MIS or CS master's degree but never actually finished it... never got to that class.
Explains a lot, actually.
From the Japanese folks I've met in real life, their entire culture is built around being socially awkward. I think that's why their pop culture deals with the robot-love genre better than anyone else. (Chobits from CLAMP is the de facto masterpiece of the genre and picks apart the ethics of robots better than anyone since Asimov.)
We buy oodles of them. A shipment of ten every week or so. We clone them and crank them and prep them and deploy them in a neverending cycle to keep our clients (many of whom are also growing) up to date with decent machines. Their business class desktops are reliable little workhorses, and my office was nervously considering the prospects of what we would have to do if the supply of HP boxes disappeared. I volunteered to hand build machines from kits, but I don't think my boss took me seriously.
This is the negative aspect to mainstreaming gifted kids. Fortunately, since I was in a larger school system, I was able to attend a true "nerd high school" and be among other kids who were gifted. In a school where everyone is scoring in the 1400-1600 range on the SATs (or 2100-2400 using the current scoring), it was okay to just be yourself and not feel too weird about it.
There are actually a few schools in the country that might be a good fit for a math genius, and would give him the critical socialization he'll need to be a normal adult someday. For example, A.R. Johnson Health Sciences and Engineering school in Augusta, GA, is a school that teaches pre-med and engineering classes in high school, omitting other activities such as art and PE (students who want those classes need to go to its rival school, Davidson Fine Arts.) I'm sure they'd love to have him on the Math Decathalon team.
My in-laws live in rural SC and the only broadband option they have is sattelite (which isn't really broadband at all.) Trying to fix their laptop is a nightmare since they only have dialup. It's not profitable for the cable or phone companies to run out an entire line to one house on the end of a dead end road when there is no guarantee that the people at that road could even afford it, so they don't bother. Extending the subsidies would knock out one more excuse the broadband companies have against universal access.
That only works if users actuall install the updates. Best case scenario, they actually call IT and ask about it and make us install it for them. Worst case scenario, they ignore it and we don't find out about it until six months later when they're system is suddenly infected beyond repair because they double clicked a fake UPS attachment reciept.
They need to incorporate the option of turning on automatic, silent upgrades like Google Chrome has - many end users don't recognize the "Hey I've got an update" balloons on their machines, and just ignore them until they wind up several versions out of date. Also, Adobe needs to cut out this "reboot required" nonsense for Adobe Reader. Not everyone is able to reboot machines at a drop of a hat, and it's annoying to have to schedule a reboot on a server for a program that didn't require a reboot for installation and is only used once every few months. (I seriously update Adobe more than I use it on many machines.)
I point blank asked my husband if he wanted a Kindle Fire for Christmas. $200 is within my price range, whereas a $500 iPad is not. He said "not really" but then suggested we snag one for his mother. The aggressive pricing is going to make these the top seller this year in electronics. For people who are merely content consumers they are perfect. (If you're a content creator, though, it's not enough, which is why I think he was "meh" on the whole idea and is sticking with his laptop.)
Some debt collectors are scammers, calling you for debts you don't actually owe to try to extort money from you. I can account for every penny I've paid in the last eight or nine years - if anyone is trying to robocall me about a debt, that means someone has committed fraud under my name or telephone number. (So I guess I do have bigger things to worry about.) But for people out there who actually do owe money, they're already not in the best financial organization shape, and they may not be able to keep track of who is a legit bill or who is a scammer over the phone. Debt collection needs to remain in the physical mail realm, for the security and privacy and protection of the debtor.
Compared to what other industries? What is their profit margin as a percentage of gross revenues? Many retailers, for example, run on a 3% profit margin or less. HMOs run at about a 4% profit margin; other plans run just a bit higher. This is lower than some other insurance industries (such as life insurance, which ran at an average 8% profit margin in 2007), but certainly not as low as other businesses. (Newegg ran on a razor thin 1.7% profit margin last year.)
Encroachment OF the fed's power ONTO the states. The state's technically can't encroach on the fed's power, per the Constitution. (All powers not granted to the federal government are reserved for the states.)
I heard on NPR today that while 2% of the latest increases in health insurance costs could be attributed to the ACA, the other 98% of the increases were a combination of insurance companies pre-emptively raising rates in case health care costs went up further in the future, and actual increases in current health care costs that had nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.
SE fixed the horrible wait times by introducing Level Sync, to allow players of different levels to play together at the same level as one of the party members, and more recently Grounds of Valor dungeon training, to allow 18 people to level in one giant alliance of smashing stuff fun inside dungeons. The combination of the two has made Crawler's Nest and Gusgen Mines the favored leveling spots from level 30 to level 70. These days, you'll probably get an invitation within ten minutes of flagging up, or you can just wait until someone shouts about a party that's forming and join in.
I think if the infrastructure is based off SaaS or low-resource programs, a thin-client is fine. Unfortunately, the desktops I manage need multiple fat clients, and our options are: order $1000 systems from a PC manufacturer that come with the specs we want or order $400 systems and drop in $50 worth of RAM to upgrade it to the specs we want. A thin-client just doesn't cut it for most of the users.
The soul is there in FFXI, you just have to endure a bit of grind before you get to it. FFXI actually has four major expansions that are old school FF game quality storylines in their own right. SE did manage to create a true virtual world in XI - a perpetual breathing landscape that is ever changing, with memorable NPC characters (anyone who completed Chains of Promathia knows and loves Prishe dearly) and a lot of meat to dig through. It doesn't hurt that after XIV tanked, the developers got the green light to "break" FFXI in all the right ways. It's really only been in the last year that the game has come into its own as a mature, fully developed MMO. (Now, we're terrified they'll dump the XIV dev team on XI and ruin all the good things they have done.)
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the 90s there was an NPR program called "Hearts in Space" that played this sort of stuff. It was great to fall asleep to, but I think I'll stick with my current trance and progressive for relaxation. Less danger of me nodding off.
I've been told I'm "abnormally happy" by a few folks over the years, and it has made me wonder - my mother was bi-polar, my oldest sister is also bi-polar, my second oldest sister has schizophrenia, and the third oldest sister is chronically depressed. Is chronic happiness also a mental illness? I have occasionally bouts of sadness or anger, but they never last more than a few hours and I can usually sleep it off. I always thought I had just inherited my father's stoic personality, but sometimes I wonder if "chronic happiness" is as much of an inbalance as chronic depression. Even my husband doesn't understand why I'm so chilled out, even if there are things I should be worrying about.
The trick is, of course, to use a different pent name if you've self-published. And to not mention it in your query letters. Ever. (Since it's a different "person.")
I think this is the critical point that the traditional publishing houses are totally missing. I don't buy books because of advertisements or book reviews. I buy them because either 1. a friend suggested it 2. a forum suggested it (not the same as a review or an ad by any means) or, the most likely case, I saw the book in a bookstore and thought it looked interesting. Amazon's recommendation services actually do 90% of the work for me these days. I log in, and "Hey here's a book you might like." Sure enough, it's a genre that I like and the blurb on the back cover looks great. In my wishlist or cart it goes! Or they send me an email with "Stuff you might like." The remaining 10% comes from friends raving about a book.
Getting an agent to sign you these days is a miserable, painful exercise. They're picky, because the publishers are picky, and even then there's only a 7% chance your book is going to bring a profit to the publisher.
Although I still think we need editors, and I respect the work that agents do, something is going to have to give. I'd prefer to see the entire NYC angency/publisher model completely revamped and streamlined for the ebook age, and if it takes Amazon to do it, then so be it.
Interesting, User Experience 101 is being taught as one of the last classes of my MIT degree. So anyone who has *most* of an MIS or CS master's degree but never actually finished it... never got to that class. Explains a lot, actually.
Then it was never any competition to DropBox or Box.net at all, really.
The head stylization pretty closely resembles something like Hatsune Miku, sans a mouth.
From the Japanese folks I've met in real life, their entire culture is built around being socially awkward. I think that's why their pop culture deals with the robot-love genre better than anyone else. (Chobits from CLAMP is the de facto masterpiece of the genre and picks apart the ethics of robots better than anyone since Asimov.)
We buy oodles of them. A shipment of ten every week or so. We clone them and crank them and prep them and deploy them in a neverending cycle to keep our clients (many of whom are also growing) up to date with decent machines. Their business class desktops are reliable little workhorses, and my office was nervously considering the prospects of what we would have to do if the supply of HP boxes disappeared. I volunteered to hand build machines from kits, but I don't think my boss took me seriously.
This is the negative aspect to mainstreaming gifted kids. Fortunately, since I was in a larger school system, I was able to attend a true "nerd high school" and be among other kids who were gifted. In a school where everyone is scoring in the 1400-1600 range on the SATs (or 2100-2400 using the current scoring), it was okay to just be yourself and not feel too weird about it.
There are actually a few schools in the country that might be a good fit for a math genius, and would give him the critical socialization he'll need to be a normal adult someday. For example, A.R. Johnson Health Sciences and Engineering school in Augusta, GA, is a school that teaches pre-med and engineering classes in high school, omitting other activities such as art and PE (students who want those classes need to go to its rival school, Davidson Fine Arts.) I'm sure they'd love to have him on the Math Decathalon team.
Some libraries with e-lending enabled over the web can do just that now. Our local library is experimenting with it.
My in-laws live in rural SC and the only broadband option they have is sattelite (which isn't really broadband at all.) Trying to fix their laptop is a nightmare since they only have dialup. It's not profitable for the cable or phone companies to run out an entire line to one house on the end of a dead end road when there is no guarantee that the people at that road could even afford it, so they don't bother. Extending the subsidies would knock out one more excuse the broadband companies have against universal access.
That only works if users actuall install the updates. Best case scenario, they actually call IT and ask about it and make us install it for them. Worst case scenario, they ignore it and we don't find out about it until six months later when they're system is suddenly infected beyond repair because they double clicked a fake UPS attachment reciept.
They need to incorporate the option of turning on automatic, silent upgrades like Google Chrome has - many end users don't recognize the "Hey I've got an update" balloons on their machines, and just ignore them until they wind up several versions out of date. Also, Adobe needs to cut out this "reboot required" nonsense for Adobe Reader. Not everyone is able to reboot machines at a drop of a hat, and it's annoying to have to schedule a reboot on a server for a program that didn't require a reboot for installation and is only used once every few months. (I seriously update Adobe more than I use it on many machines.)
I point blank asked my husband if he wanted a Kindle Fire for Christmas. $200 is within my price range, whereas a $500 iPad is not. He said "not really" but then suggested we snag one for his mother. The aggressive pricing is going to make these the top seller this year in electronics. For people who are merely content consumers they are perfect. (If you're a content creator, though, it's not enough, which is why I think he was "meh" on the whole idea and is sticking with his laptop.)
Some debt collectors are scammers, calling you for debts you don't actually owe to try to extort money from you. I can account for every penny I've paid in the last eight or nine years - if anyone is trying to robocall me about a debt, that means someone has committed fraud under my name or telephone number. (So I guess I do have bigger things to worry about.) But for people out there who actually do owe money, they're already not in the best financial organization shape, and they may not be able to keep track of who is a legit bill or who is a scammer over the phone. Debt collection needs to remain in the physical mail realm, for the security and privacy and protection of the debtor.
Compared to what other industries? What is their profit margin as a percentage of gross revenues? Many retailers, for example, run on a 3% profit margin or less. HMOs run at about a 4% profit margin; other plans run just a bit higher. This is lower than some other insurance industries (such as life insurance, which ran at an average 8% profit margin in 2007), but certainly not as low as other businesses. (Newegg ran on a razor thin 1.7% profit margin last year.)
Encroachment OF the fed's power ONTO the states. The state's technically can't encroach on the fed's power, per the Constitution. (All powers not granted to the federal government are reserved for the states.)
I heard on NPR today that while 2% of the latest increases in health insurance costs could be attributed to the ACA, the other 98% of the increases were a combination of insurance companies pre-emptively raising rates in case health care costs went up further in the future, and actual increases in current health care costs that had nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.
SE fixed the horrible wait times by introducing Level Sync, to allow players of different levels to play together at the same level as one of the party members, and more recently Grounds of Valor dungeon training, to allow 18 people to level in one giant alliance of smashing stuff fun inside dungeons. The combination of the two has made Crawler's Nest and Gusgen Mines the favored leveling spots from level 30 to level 70. These days, you'll probably get an invitation within ten minutes of flagging up, or you can just wait until someone shouts about a party that's forming and join in.
I think if the infrastructure is based off SaaS or low-resource programs, a thin-client is fine. Unfortunately, the desktops I manage need multiple fat clients, and our options are: order $1000 systems from a PC manufacturer that come with the specs we want or order $400 systems and drop in $50 worth of RAM to upgrade it to the specs we want. A thin-client just doesn't cut it for most of the users.
No go when many of the systems require high end video cards for dual monitor setups to run graphic intensive Xray processing software.
The soul is there in FFXI, you just have to endure a bit of grind before you get to it. FFXI actually has four major expansions that are old school FF game quality storylines in their own right. SE did manage to create a true virtual world in XI - a perpetual breathing landscape that is ever changing, with memorable NPC characters (anyone who completed Chains of Promathia knows and loves Prishe dearly) and a lot of meat to dig through. It doesn't hurt that after XIV tanked, the developers got the green light to "break" FFXI in all the right ways. It's really only been in the last year that the game has come into its own as a mature, fully developed MMO. (Now, we're terrified they'll dump the XIV dev team on XI and ruin all the good things they have done.)