There's an edited set out there called Smyths that trims out all the "coming up" and "what you just missed" to show just the story without any redundancies. I've watched a few and found it very satisfying.
I never got anything that extreme. Maybe the combination of free plus an item with perceived decent value? Or as the other AC said, a large population center? I remember a buddy of mine trying to give away a car in Chicago that didn't run and getting mobbed because it was free.
I sold a 15-year-old car a few years back, but I was asking $2,500. I got a couple of scam contacts that I ignored, and a couple of weird people, like one who wanted the car but lived three hours away, had no transportation, and didn't have the money anyway. Still, I had a couple of genuine queries and sold it within a week without madness and chaos. I'm also in a pretty remote spot, which maybe cut down on the mobs of interested people.
That's what I was thinking. Nearly all the music I've listened to on YouTube I either already own (just don't have on the present device) or I'm researching with the intention to buy. Maybe I'm an odd case, but YouTube has been a net plus for artists and record companies, based on my usage.
In the conflict between people who don't understand how much of a nuisance they are with their phones, and the people who are self-righteously snooty about how other people use their phones, I'm not sure there's a clear winner. I can see the impulse from both sides, a little, but in the long run I think I'm going to say this goes down as a dumb policy.
Yes, there's probably some benefit to working 2 years of 50 hour weeks instead of one year of 60's and one year of 40's, because by distributing the income a little more evenly you'll get taxed a little less. My gut tells me it's going to be a fairly small difference, but that may depend on the numbers/brackets involved.
For what it's worth, two years of 50's also *sounds* more sane than a year of 60's and a year of recuperation at 40's, so maybe the tax code is providing incentive to do the healthier thing here?
Shame. I spent a whole bunch of recesses actively discussing the Lord of the Rings and other fantasy novels with my sixth grade teacher. We had a never-ending argument about whether Lloyd Alexander's Fair Folk were elves, dwarves, both, or something else. One of the most inspirational teachers I had, up through college.
When considering this point, I can't help but think of Plants vs. Zombies.
PvZ 1 was $10, if I recall. There might have been a small chance for some upsell, like extra consumable power-ups, but it was either almost entirely or entirely self-contained. You could get every plant, see every corner of the game, for that fixed price.
PvZ2 is free, with lots of in-app purchases. The sum total of available purchases for unlockables (and I'm not talking about consumables here, but the buy-once plants, etc.) is well over $60. There's some other stuff that falls in the middle ground, and you can unlock by playing if you hoard your resources or buy outright if you don't have the resources. On top of that they have ads, regularly insert popups for sales, and are constantly pushing me to buy the bonus material. And they push watching more ads, for paltry amounts of in-game currency, which is optional but there and often kind of nagging.
Comparing the two experiences, I am far happier with #1, even though I paid $10 for it while I've played #2 on and off for years without giving them a cent. If they had a $10 give-me-everything option, I'd buy it immediately, despite already having gone through basically everything already. I'm sure as hell not paying $60 for the full set, especially not when they've shown a trend of introducing even more new items now and then. I'd also be far happier with the game if it didn't have ads and other intrusive money-making schemes.
Pop-Cap has been running it for years, so I guess they're convinced it makes *them* more money, but I'm not sure, if you talked to a bunch of players, that you wouldn't at least get an even split of those who would prefer to pay up front.
No kidding. My daughters have grown up in a house with only streaming TV. When we're at a hotel and have the TV on, they complain loudly when commercials come on, because their show went away and they don't want to watch whatever this other junk is. I don't blame them one bit. At least they're getting old enough to understand it when it happens.
That's a sensibly nifty approach. It always helps to have a project to work on as you learn, and in the absence of any other project, using your learning *as* the project is a good one.
This is the Internet. The net is so wide here that you are literally quite likely to find a man that has bitten a dog.
I bit my cat once. Not hard, just applying firm pressure with my teeth to the back of his neck. I was holding him, and he was biting me, and it seemed the best way to get the point across. I got a mouthful of slightly dusty fur, but he understood.
I've served on my local Home Owner's Association board. It was a difficult, thankless job, trying to keep 22 households from being mutinously unhappy with each other and the board. Even though I did a decent job soothing ruffled feathers and not bankrupting the association, it was still a miserable experience I'm glad to be rid of. Going into politics would be like that, but millions of times worse. Nobody in their right mind should want that kind of experience.... which is why most potential candidates tend to not be in their right mind, I guess?
True, but I think you may have things reversed. People tend to vote Republican when things are good and Democrat when things are bad. Given the cyclical nature of the market, you almost have to expect a down turn when a Republican is elected on a high note, and some progress made if a Democrat is elected while things are down. It's far more likely that the economy is the cause for the president than that the president is the cause of the economy.
Of course the economy isn't always on a 4-year schedule and I think other factors, such as incumbency, scandal, etc., can inject turbulence into the presidential election cycle.
Dreams? Not quite. But one time, on the last day of classes my sophomore year of college, I'd stayed up all night working on a paper. At 4 a.m. I figured it wasn't worth going to bed to get up 3 hours later for class, and decided to pass the remaining time playing Doom in the lab. I stumbled my way through the rest of the day without incident. At the end of the afternoon, when I'd finished my last class and should have gone to bed, I ran into a friend who'd just taken some acid and decided to join him instead. A few hours later, when the visuals kicked in, instead of the usual amorphous blobs and odd patterns, every time I closed my eyes I was back inside the game, running through hallways and shooting demons. This was pretty cool, so I said to my friend, "Every time I close my eyes, all I see is Doom."
The poor guy nearly had a panic attack, thinking I was spiraling into some horrible bad trip, before I realized what I'd just said and assured him I was talking about a video game and not some weighty angst.
Without wanting to pick a side in the sexism war, I had exactly the same impression regarding Andre Norton and whilst I have read thousands of SF books I cannot remember enjoying anything by female authors.
Tried any C.S. Friedman? It's been more than a decade, but I don't recall her books being particularly mushy. (The Madness Season, for instance, or there's another one about a near-genocidal space war that I can't recall the title to at the moment, and the trilogy with True Night Falls, though that's more fantasy with an SF framing story.)
Whilst I'm on my soapbox, it bugs the hell out of me that when even one of my favourite authors, e.g. Iain M Banks introduces a main character who is female, she is invariably stunningly attractive.
Books, movies, comics, you name it, they almost all do it. Related, one of my pet peeves is that stupid slow-mo reveal they do in movies when the female star comes on screen the first time.
I don't know if I flinched, but I distinctly remember leaning waaaaay over to one side or another trying to peek around corners, as if the monitor would let me do that somehow. I was playing in a darkened basement and know I was pretty nervous, too.
Except when the liner notes were wrong, which was rare but could happen. I remember seeing occasional whole verses in the notes that didn't appear in the actual song, or were otherwise scrambled.
Once you get used to TV all the time without commercials, you realize how truly disruptive and annoying they can be.
Netflix has also made me more aware of how some shows are structured for commercial breaks, when they fade to black and then come up at the same scene, or worse, repeat or even slightly change bits of what you just saw.
Slashdot Mirror
What's wrong with mixing beer and ibuprofen?
Now Tylenol/acetaminophen hits your liver, so you wouldn't want to mix that with beer. Did you mean that instead?
There's an edited set out there called Smyths that trims out all the "coming up" and "what you just missed" to show just the story without any redundancies. I've watched a few and found it very satisfying.
I never got anything that extreme. Maybe the combination of free plus an item with perceived decent value? Or as the other AC said, a large population center? I remember a buddy of mine trying to give away a car in Chicago that didn't run and getting mobbed because it was free.
I sold a 15-year-old car a few years back, but I was asking $2,500. I got a couple of scam contacts that I ignored, and a couple of weird people, like one who wanted the car but lived three hours away, had no transportation, and didn't have the money anyway. Still, I had a couple of genuine queries and sold it within a week without madness and chaos. I'm also in a pretty remote spot, which maybe cut down on the mobs of interested people.
That's what I was thinking. Nearly all the music I've listened to on YouTube I either already own (just don't have on the present device) or I'm researching with the intention to buy. Maybe I'm an odd case, but YouTube has been a net plus for artists and record companies, based on my usage.
In the conflict between people who don't understand how much of a nuisance they are with their phones, and the people who are self-righteously snooty about how other people use their phones, I'm not sure there's a clear winner. I can see the impulse from both sides, a little, but in the long run I think I'm going to say this goes down as a dumb policy.
Yes, there's probably some benefit to working 2 years of 50 hour weeks instead of one year of 60's and one year of 40's, because by distributing the income a little more evenly you'll get taxed a little less. My gut tells me it's going to be a fairly small difference, but that may depend on the numbers/brackets involved.
For what it's worth, two years of 50's also *sounds* more sane than a year of 60's and a year of recuperation at 40's, so maybe the tax code is providing incentive to do the healthier thing here?
Honestly, I can't even keep Acer straight from Asus. Not sure if that's a trademark issue though, or just me.
Shame. I spent a whole bunch of recesses actively discussing the Lord of the Rings and other fantasy novels with my sixth grade teacher. We had a never-ending argument about whether Lloyd Alexander's Fair Folk were elves, dwarves, both, or something else. One of the most inspirational teachers I had, up through college.
When considering this point, I can't help but think of Plants vs. Zombies.
PvZ 1 was $10, if I recall. There might have been a small chance for some upsell, like extra consumable power-ups, but it was either almost entirely or entirely self-contained. You could get every plant, see every corner of the game, for that fixed price.
PvZ2 is free, with lots of in-app purchases. The sum total of available purchases for unlockables (and I'm not talking about consumables here, but the buy-once plants, etc.) is well over $60. There's some other stuff that falls in the middle ground, and you can unlock by playing if you hoard your resources or buy outright if you don't have the resources. On top of that they have ads, regularly insert popups for sales, and are constantly pushing me to buy the bonus material. And they push watching more ads, for paltry amounts of in-game currency, which is optional but there and often kind of nagging.
Comparing the two experiences, I am far happier with #1, even though I paid $10 for it while I've played #2 on and off for years without giving them a cent. If they had a $10 give-me-everything option, I'd buy it immediately, despite already having gone through basically everything already. I'm sure as hell not paying $60 for the full set, especially not when they've shown a trend of introducing even more new items now and then. I'd also be far happier with the game if it didn't have ads and other intrusive money-making schemes.
Pop-Cap has been running it for years, so I guess they're convinced it makes *them* more money, but I'm not sure, if you talked to a bunch of players, that you wouldn't at least get an even split of those who would prefer to pay up front.
Cthulhum, the element that devours all?
Great. Now when you've only got one atom/piece of it, nobody will know if they should call it alumn or alumnus.
I assume he's jolly, and is thus some kind of pirate.
No kidding. My daughters have grown up in a house with only streaming TV. When we're at a hotel and have the TV on, they complain loudly when commercials come on, because their show went away and they don't want to watch whatever this other junk is. I don't blame them one bit. At least they're getting old enough to understand it when it happens.
Yes, the speed bumps that make me slow down to 10 in a 25 zone are successfully keeping me from going 50% of the speed limit. Well done!
Computer: > Password
User: > Rameses
Computer: > Uh, you want to tack on anything there buddy?
User: > 2?
Computer: > Come on in
That's a sensibly nifty approach. It always helps to have a project to work on as you learn, and in the absence of any other project, using your learning *as* the project is a good one.
This is the Internet. The net is so wide here that you are literally quite likely to find a man that has bitten a dog.
I bit my cat once. Not hard, just applying firm pressure with my teeth to the back of his neck. I was holding him, and he was biting me, and it seemed the best way to get the point across. I got a mouthful of slightly dusty fur, but he understood.
I've served on my local Home Owner's Association board. It was a difficult, thankless job, trying to keep 22 households from being mutinously unhappy with each other and the board. Even though I did a decent job soothing ruffled feathers and not bankrupting the association, it was still a miserable experience I'm glad to be rid of. Going into politics would be like that, but millions of times worse. Nobody in their right mind should want that kind of experience. ... which is why most potential candidates tend to not be in their right mind, I guess?
True, but I think you may have things reversed. People tend to vote Republican when things are good and Democrat when things are bad. Given the cyclical nature of the market, you almost have to expect a down turn when a Republican is elected on a high note, and some progress made if a Democrat is elected while things are down. It's far more likely that the economy is the cause for the president than that the president is the cause of the economy.
Of course the economy isn't always on a 4-year schedule and I think other factors, such as incumbency, scandal, etc., can inject turbulence into the presidential election cycle.
Simple calculus explains that one. It just took another 2000 years for Newton to invent it.
Dreams? Not quite. But one time, on the last day of classes my sophomore year of college, I'd stayed up all night working on a paper. At 4 a.m. I figured it wasn't worth going to bed to get up 3 hours later for class, and decided to pass the remaining time playing Doom in the lab. I stumbled my way through the rest of the day without incident. At the end of the afternoon, when I'd finished my last class and should have gone to bed, I ran into a friend who'd just taken some acid and decided to join him instead. A few hours later, when the visuals kicked in, instead of the usual amorphous blobs and odd patterns, every time I closed my eyes I was back inside the game, running through hallways and shooting demons. This was pretty cool, so I said to my friend, "Every time I close my eyes, all I see is Doom."
The poor guy nearly had a panic attack, thinking I was spiraling into some horrible bad trip, before I realized what I'd just said and assured him I was talking about a video game and not some weighty angst.
Without wanting to pick a side in the sexism war, I had exactly the same impression regarding Andre Norton and whilst I have read thousands of SF books I cannot remember enjoying anything by female authors.
Tried any C.S. Friedman? It's been more than a decade, but I don't recall her books being particularly mushy. (The Madness Season, for instance, or there's another one about a near-genocidal space war that I can't recall the title to at the moment, and the trilogy with True Night Falls, though that's more fantasy with an SF framing story.)
Whilst I'm on my soapbox, it bugs the hell out of me that when even one of my favourite authors, e.g. Iain M Banks introduces a main character who is female, she is invariably stunningly attractive.
Books, movies, comics, you name it, they almost all do it. Related, one of my pet peeves is that stupid slow-mo reveal they do in movies when the female star comes on screen the first time.
I don't know if I flinched, but I distinctly remember leaning waaaaay over to one side or another trying to peek around corners, as if the monitor would let me do that somehow. I was playing in a darkened basement and know I was pretty nervous, too.
Except when the liner notes were wrong, which was rare but could happen. I remember seeing occasional whole verses in the notes that didn't appear in the actual song, or were otherwise scrambled.
Once you get used to TV all the time without commercials, you realize how truly disruptive and annoying they can be.
Netflix has also made me more aware of how some shows are structured for commercial breaks, when they fade to black and then come up at the same scene, or worse, repeat or even slightly change bits of what you just saw.