I'd say that's a pretty fair reason to review a book. I hadn't heard about it, but the concept of remaking a childhood favorite to make it better sounds pretty intriguing, and I might have been tempted to check it out. If the review can tell me to avoid it (or, perhaps, skim a chapter in the library just to see how it goes), that's a valuable service.
A few years ago, Bank of America wouldn't let you use more than 4 characters, and they had to be numbers. Basically, just a PIN. They've since updated that, but for a while it was ridiculously bad.
Yes, this is the weird part of it for me, too. You wouldn't call your mechanic, tell them the car is "working funny" (or "not working") and then refuse to answer any other questions.
Can you describe the problem? I don't know, I'm car illiterate.
Well, what part of it doesn't seem to be working? Um.... well, you see (nervous laughter) I'm REALLY not good with cars.
When did the problem start? Can you tell me anything about the problem? Stop asking me questions! Can't you just FIX it already!?
Yeah, this is what really drives me crazy. Sometimes they're giving you complete gibberish, and while you're trying to sort it out, they get angry.
Example: woman calls and says "the printer is working, but it won't print." I spend three minutes trying to figure out in what way "it's working" other than printing, so I can get half a clue about what she means. Is it working from other computers but not hers, etc?
Finally she blurts out with "can't you stop asking me questions and just FIX it?"
To which I replied: "I AM fixing it. I have to find out what's broken first."
Turned out that the printer wasn't working at all, and a turn off/on fixed it just fine. Apparently the phrase "the printer is working" meant "the power light is on."
Honestly, I hear more people call the box "the CPU" than I hear them call it "the hard drive." Maybe it's a regional preference.
And while I'm okay with computer illiterates saying so rather than making stuff up, it does really frustrate me when they use that as an excuse to shut off their brains instead of trying to let me help them. Sometimes questions as simple as "what do you see on the screen" are met with "oh, I don't know, I'm not very good with the computers you know. Can't you just come down here?" Is the mouse working? What does it say in the top-left corner of the window? Simple things that a child can answer, but an adult is so convinced they don't understand they're unwilling to try.
You didn't specify a car, but as a contrast with my 97' Honda Civic:
$30 per tank, tops, will get me 300 miles/week, which covers 40 miles per day for work plus incidentals. That's $1500/year.
Loan payments: none, because the car is 12 years old. Even when I owed money, they were ~260 for 5 years. Averaging over 12 years, we're looking at maybe 110/month for the total cost of the car?
Insurance: $45/month. When it was newer, it may have been closer to $100 or even $150, can't really remember. Call it $90/month over the life of the car, just to round up.
Add everything up, and you're looking at $3900/year, more or less. That's still more than a transit pass you cited, but considering there is no transit across 20 miles of country highways to my office, it's not even an option for me.
I think you're absolutely right. Being on the show is a nod to his involvement, and the people that voted for it, but they're going to do with a different name. They just don't want to snub the popular endorsement of Colbert.
See, the problem is, there's this word called ironic that means something, but it's something that most people just don't really get, can't explain very well, and never properly recognize in real life.
Then there's this other thing, which is seen regularly in real life and everybody understands, but doesn't have a particularly good word for it (the thing that makes you go "yeah, it figures") which is apparently not irony, but it's close enough that people apply the term because they don't know what else to call it.
Honestly, I'm all for accepting the practical fact that the thing everybody thinks is irony might as well just be accepted as being irony, and the thing that is presently called irony, which nobody can really explain or understand, ought to just stop being called anything.
No kidding. It's hard enough getting people to NOT type www when dealing with our intranet.
Me: Type home.domain.com
Them: So that's www dot home...
Me: No, really, type the words coming out of my mouth, not the words in your head. And by the way, you haven't actually needed to type any of those w's anytime in the last decade, for the most part.
On the other hand, if you think you have somewhere between $3400 and $3800 in the bank and you're not quite sure, and then your ATM says, no, you have $3964.01 in there, it may not be apparent that there's been a glitch giving you an extra $500. Or were all cases so ridiculously out of balance that it should have been clear to everyone their money couldn't possibly be right?
Been playing Kingdom of Loathing for a little more than three years now; best browser-based game I've found. And I say this as a guy who liked KoL so much he went out and made his own KoL imitation browser game. I think mine is respectable, but theirs is still more fun for me.
And yet, when my college Physics department offered a programming class in 1996, they offered it in FORTRAN.
I did get some C++ from the computer science department, though. Naturally, now I do all my programming in PHP, which is a relatively new and rapidly changing language, and JavaScript, which is (in my experience) kind of a mess.
I'm not sure there's a definite "yes" or "no" answer to "is it worth it?" Too many variables. That said, taking a long look at the payment model may be a good place to start.
I run a web-based game (www.twilightheroes.com), where the model is donation only. I don't expect most people to be able to pay, and assume that they won't want to give me any money unless they play the game enough to decide they really love it. What I do offer is a monthly donation item plus a small number of long-term donation options. None of these are required to play, they're just a little better, or they've got extra flavor/humor attached, or they make things easier. I'm very careful not to allow the donation items to give donators large amounts of content that non-donators don't get. Most importantly, these things are a one-time cost, and guaranteed to be beneficial as long as the game exists.
I do expect that people would be very touchy about having things change once they've paid for it, and I expect that a lot of people would cringe or even flat-out reject a required ongoing subscription. I simply refuse to try any game that demands a subscription, and I know I'm not the only one. On the other hand, a game that sort of inspired mine works on the same donation model, and I've given them hundreds of dollars for in-game goods on a month-by-month basis, where I probably wouldn't have given them a cent if I knew it was going to be an ongoing cost.
As for profitability, I've been working on my project for nearly three years now (really public and live for a year and a half). I wouldn't call it *very* profitable, but it is profitable. It's not my primary job, just evenings and weekends, and after costs I'm probably making minimum wage if you assume about two hours per day working on it, which is close.
For someone to say that's worth it or not worth it is highly subjective. I could certainly be doing better things if I just wanted more money. On the other hand, it's nearly as fun as anything else I've tried, and to be able to make minimum wage having fun and entertaining a few thousand people at the same time is a rare treat. On top of being a fantastic resume builder and a highly educational process, you could argue it's a great value. Compared to the opportunity cost of not doing other things (more lucrative programming, having more fun, playing someone else's games) maybe it's a loss. Everyone's got to answer that for themselves.
I've had surprisingly good luck with SuperAntiSpyware. Silly name, but it's cleaned up a lot of the fake antivirus software fairly well for us. Before we found it we regularly resorted to reimaging, but this one has worked very well. We've had some other virus/spyware things that it doesn't work quite so well on, but the fake antivirus cleanup has been consistently good.
TeaTimer is nice in theory, but only for people who are already technical enough to know what's going on. For anyone not that technical, you're just setting yourself up for phone calls: "I'm getting a popup!" or "something's modifying something and I don't know what it is! come quickly!"
Simple rules like "it's okay if you know what you're installing" don't seem to work well in my experience. The paranoid ones are never sure it's okay, and the rest assume it's always okay, even if they alert says "the program EraseMyHardDrive wants to access your registry."
Sorry for the cynicism, but a couple of years at a university has consistently shown me these tendencies.
While on the one hand I see your point that experts will do a better job than untrained writers (you should see me rant when a marketing VP says he wants to make the web site for a billion dollar investment firm) your doom and gloom worst case scenario that seems to indicate anyone who isn't an official technical writer must not be capable of writing at all seems extreme.
Yes, keep the illiterate techs away from the documentation process, but I think you could safely say "encourage your most capable writers to do the documentation" and for many businesses that ought to work reasonably well.
I'm a righty who has his mouse on the left because of carpal tunnel issues with my right. Though after a couple of years I guess you could say I'm nearly ambidextrous with the mouse. I'm not anywhere near ambidextrous with anything else, though.
Beat me to it. I was going to say, "It looks like a duck, it sounds like a duck, but it evolved from a sparrow instead of a swallow, so it can't possibly be a duck."
I'm up at about 7000 feet, about 6 miles outside of Durango, CO, which is a pretty small town. Even with a streetlight and a couple of porch lights in our little cul-de-sac, I can still see the milky way on any night that's not cloudy. It's lovely, truly.
The only problem for the comet watching is going to be the "low" part -- too many trees on all sides to get a good view of anything not high in the sky.
As a counterpoint, I grew up on a farm, and I'm one of two boys. The next closest neighbors had three boys and one girl, and the next closest neighbors had 3 boys. Maybe I lived in a clean area? But more likely personal analogies aren't safe to generalize to statistics. I have no idea what the national statistics are, though.
Well, the article does say the original object was "brighter than Venus" so that's a start. Also, considering these were naked eye observations, it's not even possible to have a precise brightness value for the original. That of course means the 20 billion number probably is more of a guess than a precise number, but I wouldn't say it's completely useless to mention here.
You know this is probably true because if you think about it, people leaning towards liberalism are more free spirited, going on vacation, listening to music, doing what makes them feel good, having the attitude of a college student, and whatever they have in their homes is going to reflect that. Conservatives are more about responsibility, working hard, living below your means, advancing your family, being proud of America, and what they put in their homes will also reflect that. In all this is an interesting study.
I'm a liberal. I work a day job and have a small business that I run on evenings and weekends. I live below my means and make that a priority. I advance my family, I'm proud of my country, and I rarely go on vacations unless they're family events that drag me out of town. I do listen to music, though. On the other hand, I don't know anybody who doesn't listen to music, whatever their political leaning. I also don't know anyone who never does thing that make them feel good, nor do I know anyone who always does things that make them feel good. I call shenanigans on this wild, useless stereotype.
For what it's worth, my wife is more conservative than I am and is cleaner than I am, but I tend to attribute that to the male/female differences instead of political leaning.
See, back then I was famous(ish) for a duct tape art gallery. It's still around, but it's soooo 1990s now. But in 2001 Google had me in the #4 spot.
Also note: none of the top 10 results for duct tape point to an actual vendor of the stuff.
What if you do admit being wrong after having people telling you that you're wrong, but once having corrected your stance, other people tell you that you're wrong and that you're an idiot for having listened to the first people who told you you were wrong? Then what do you do?
Well, this isn't actual right or wrong on a factual level. This is a subjective better/worse judgment, and it's not unusual for people to disagree about such things. Not every issue can be determined factually. Is red a better color than blue? That can't be answered factually, even though people certainly have their preferences. Now, does this software crash every time I run it? If it does, that means the software is absolutely wrong in some way, and that's a fact.
Couldn't disagree more. The disagree mail segment very much agrees with me, and is relatively work safe, which I don't trust much of the rest of idle to be (no idea, haven't been there, but that's what I've heard).
Do you know how easy it is to NOT click on things you don't want to read? Answer: easier than clicking on it, that's for sure! I'm not interested in more than half the articles on slashdot, and it's quite easy to skip them.
C'mon: "a cat is no trade for integrity"? That is going to be the best thing I've heard all day. I'm far better off having read that than I would have been otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say that's a pretty fair reason to review a book. I hadn't heard about it, but the concept of remaking a childhood favorite to make it better sounds pretty intriguing, and I might have been tempted to check it out. If the review can tell me to avoid it (or, perhaps, skim a chapter in the library just to see how it goes), that's a valuable service.
A few years ago, Bank of America wouldn't let you use more than 4 characters, and they had to be numbers. Basically, just a PIN. They've since updated that, but for a while it was ridiculously bad.
Can you describe the problem? I don't know, I'm car illiterate.
Well, what part of it doesn't seem to be working? Um .... well, you see (nervous laughter) I'm REALLY not good with cars.
When did the problem start? Can you tell me anything about the problem? Stop asking me questions! Can't you just FIX it already!?
Example: woman calls and says "the printer is working, but it won't print." I spend three minutes trying to figure out in what way "it's working" other than printing, so I can get half a clue about what she means. Is it working from other computers but not hers, etc?
Finally she blurts out with "can't you stop asking me questions and just FIX it?"
To which I replied: "I AM fixing it. I have to find out what's broken first."
Turned out that the printer wasn't working at all, and a turn off/on fixed it just fine. Apparently the phrase "the printer is working" meant "the power light is on."
Honestly, I hear more people call the box "the CPU" than I hear them call it "the hard drive." Maybe it's a regional preference.
And while I'm okay with computer illiterates saying so rather than making stuff up, it does really frustrate me when they use that as an excuse to shut off their brains instead of trying to let me help them. Sometimes questions as simple as "what do you see on the screen" are met with "oh, I don't know, I'm not very good with the computers you know. Can't you just come down here?" Is the mouse working? What does it say in the top-left corner of the window? Simple things that a child can answer, but an adult is so convinced they don't understand they're unwilling to try.
Add everything up, and you're looking at $3900/year, more or less. That's still more than a transit pass you cited, but considering there is no transit across 20 miles of country highways to my office, it's not even an option for me.
I think you're absolutely right. Being on the show is a nod to his involvement, and the people that voted for it, but they're going to do with a different name. They just don't want to snub the popular endorsement of Colbert.
See, the problem is, there's this word called ironic that means something, but it's something that most people just don't really get, can't explain very well, and never properly recognize in real life.
Then there's this other thing, which is seen regularly in real life and everybody understands, but doesn't have a particularly good word for it (the thing that makes you go "yeah, it figures") which is apparently not irony, but it's close enough that people apply the term because they don't know what else to call it.
Honestly, I'm all for accepting the practical fact that the thing everybody thinks is irony might as well just be accepted as being irony, and the thing that is presently called irony, which nobody can really explain or understand, ought to just stop being called anything.
Me: Type home.domain.com
Them: So that's www dot home ...
Me: No, really, type the words coming out of my mouth, not the words in your head. And by the way, you haven't actually needed to type any of those w's anytime in the last decade, for the most part.
On the other hand, if you think you have somewhere between $3400 and $3800 in the bank and you're not quite sure, and then your ATM says, no, you have $3964.01 in there, it may not be apparent that there's been a glitch giving you an extra $500. Or were all cases so ridiculously out of balance that it should have been clear to everyone their money couldn't possibly be right?
Been playing Kingdom of Loathing for a little more than three years now; best browser-based game I've found. And I say this as a guy who liked KoL so much he went out and made his own KoL imitation browser game. I think mine is respectable, but theirs is still more fun for me.
And yet, when my college Physics department offered a programming class in 1996, they offered it in FORTRAN. I did get some C++ from the computer science department, though. Naturally, now I do all my programming in PHP, which is a relatively new and rapidly changing language, and JavaScript, which is (in my experience) kind of a mess.
No kidding. Was just going to mention that. Sheesh.
I'm not sure there's a definite "yes" or "no" answer to "is it worth it?" Too many variables. That said, taking a long look at the payment model may be a good place to start.
I run a web-based game (www.twilightheroes.com), where the model is donation only. I don't expect most people to be able to pay, and assume that they won't want to give me any money unless they play the game enough to decide they really love it. What I do offer is a monthly donation item plus a small number of long-term donation options. None of these are required to play, they're just a little better, or they've got extra flavor/humor attached, or they make things easier. I'm very careful not to allow the donation items to give donators large amounts of content that non-donators don't get. Most importantly, these things are a one-time cost, and guaranteed to be beneficial as long as the game exists.
I do expect that people would be very touchy about having things change once they've paid for it, and I expect that a lot of people would cringe or even flat-out reject a required ongoing subscription. I simply refuse to try any game that demands a subscription, and I know I'm not the only one. On the other hand, a game that sort of inspired mine works on the same donation model, and I've given them hundreds of dollars for in-game goods on a month-by-month basis, where I probably wouldn't have given them a cent if I knew it was going to be an ongoing cost.
As for profitability, I've been working on my project for nearly three years now (really public and live for a year and a half). I wouldn't call it *very* profitable, but it is profitable. It's not my primary job, just evenings and weekends, and after costs I'm probably making minimum wage if you assume about two hours per day working on it, which is close.
For someone to say that's worth it or not worth it is highly subjective. I could certainly be doing better things if I just wanted more money. On the other hand, it's nearly as fun as anything else I've tried, and to be able to make minimum wage having fun and entertaining a few thousand people at the same time is a rare treat. On top of being a fantastic resume builder and a highly educational process, you could argue it's a great value. Compared to the opportunity cost of not doing other things (more lucrative programming, having more fun, playing someone else's games) maybe it's a loss. Everyone's got to answer that for themselves.
I've had surprisingly good luck with SuperAntiSpyware. Silly name, but it's cleaned up a lot of the fake antivirus software fairly well for us. Before we found it we regularly resorted to reimaging, but this one has worked very well. We've had some other virus/spyware things that it doesn't work quite so well on, but the fake antivirus cleanup has been consistently good.
TeaTimer is nice in theory, but only for people who are already technical enough to know what's going on. For anyone not that technical, you're just setting yourself up for phone calls: "I'm getting a popup!" or "something's modifying something and I don't know what it is! come quickly!"
Simple rules like "it's okay if you know what you're installing" don't seem to work well in my experience. The paranoid ones are never sure it's okay, and the rest assume it's always okay, even if they alert says "the program EraseMyHardDrive wants to access your registry."
Sorry for the cynicism, but a couple of years at a university has consistently shown me these tendencies.
While on the one hand I see your point that experts will do a better job than untrained writers (you should see me rant when a marketing VP says he wants to make the web site for a billion dollar investment firm) your doom and gloom worst case scenario that seems to indicate anyone who isn't an official technical writer must not be capable of writing at all seems extreme. Yes, keep the illiterate techs away from the documentation process, but I think you could safely say "encourage your most capable writers to do the documentation" and for many businesses that ought to work reasonably well.
I'm a righty who has his mouse on the left because of carpal tunnel issues with my right. Though after a couple of years I guess you could say I'm nearly ambidextrous with the mouse. I'm not anywhere near ambidextrous with anything else, though.
Beat me to it. I was going to say, "It looks like a duck, it sounds like a duck, but it evolved from a sparrow instead of a swallow, so it can't possibly be a duck."
I'm up at about 7000 feet, about 6 miles outside of Durango, CO, which is a pretty small town. Even with a streetlight and a couple of porch lights in our little cul-de-sac, I can still see the milky way on any night that's not cloudy. It's lovely, truly. The only problem for the comet watching is going to be the "low" part -- too many trees on all sides to get a good view of anything not high in the sky.
As a counterpoint, I grew up on a farm, and I'm one of two boys. The next closest neighbors had three boys and one girl, and the next closest neighbors had 3 boys. Maybe I lived in a clean area? But more likely personal analogies aren't safe to generalize to statistics. I have no idea what the national statistics are, though.
Well, the article does say the original object was "brighter than Venus" so that's a start. Also, considering these were naked eye observations, it's not even possible to have a precise brightness value for the original. That of course means the 20 billion number probably is more of a guess than a precise number, but I wouldn't say it's completely useless to mention here.
You know this is probably true because if you think about it, people leaning towards liberalism are more free spirited, going on vacation, listening to music, doing what makes them feel good, having the attitude of a college student, and whatever they have in their homes is going to reflect that. Conservatives are more about responsibility, working hard, living below your means, advancing your family, being proud of America, and what they put in their homes will also reflect that. In all this is an interesting study.
I'm a liberal. I work a day job and have a small business that I run on evenings and weekends. I live below my means and make that a priority. I advance my family, I'm proud of my country, and I rarely go on vacations unless they're family events that drag me out of town. I do listen to music, though. On the other hand, I don't know anybody who doesn't listen to music, whatever their political leaning. I also don't know anyone who never does thing that make them feel good, nor do I know anyone who always does things that make them feel good. I call shenanigans on this wild, useless stereotype. For what it's worth, my wife is more conservative than I am and is cleaner than I am, but I tend to attribute that to the male/female differences instead of political leaning.
See, back then I was famous(ish) for a duct tape art gallery. It's still around, but it's soooo 1990s now. But in 2001 Google had me in the #4 spot. Also note: none of the top 10 results for duct tape point to an actual vendor of the stuff.
What if you do admit being wrong after having people telling you that you're wrong, but once having corrected your stance, other people tell you that you're wrong and that you're an idiot for having listened to the first people who told you you were wrong? Then what do you do?
Well, this isn't actual right or wrong on a factual level. This is a subjective better/worse judgment, and it's not unusual for people to disagree about such things. Not every issue can be determined factually. Is red a better color than blue? That can't be answered factually, even though people certainly have their preferences. Now, does this software crash every time I run it? If it does, that means the software is absolutely wrong in some way, and that's a fact.
Couldn't disagree more. The disagree mail segment very much agrees with me, and is relatively work safe, which I don't trust much of the rest of idle to be (no idea, haven't been there, but that's what I've heard). Do you know how easy it is to NOT click on things you don't want to read? Answer: easier than clicking on it, that's for sure! I'm not interested in more than half the articles on slashdot, and it's quite easy to skip them. C'mon: "a cat is no trade for integrity"? That is going to be the best thing I've heard all day. I'm far better off having read that than I would have been otherwise.