It was her choice to stop writing Harry Potter books and she had planned this for a decade so it has nothing to do with running out of ideas.
Letting Harry and Hermione sit in a tent for 300 pages without advancing the plot in any way, on the other hand, does have something to do with running out of ideas.
Also, with the publisher's loss of editorial sensibility. Lucrative cash cows often have that effect on them.
I guess the worst happened as the Wii isn't really good for anything, not games nor media center... none of the 7 games I own really make me play it any more (Zelda, Red Steel, Paper Mario, MonkeyBall, WiiSports, WiiPlay, Excite Truck)... and the prospects are not really nice (Mario galaxy??? yaawn).
Why bother owning a device that isn't really good for anything?
You should sell your Wii to me. I'll give you $200 for it... $300 if you include the games.
Geesh... All I want is a freaking phone that allows me to play music and videos (podcasts), install 3rd party apps, has 3G connectivity & wifi, has gmail and push-email support, syncs with an ical feed, has an IM client that works with all the major networks, allows me to teather my laptop via bluetooth to the phone, has A2DP, and a web browser that renders like a web browser should (WITH FLASH FOR CHRIST'S SAKE.) Make your own MP3/AAC ringtones. Oh, and it needs to be on more than one carrier.
And it needs to be, most importantly, a GOOD PHONE. With GOOD RECEPTION, SOUND QUALITY, AND DIALING SHOULD BE SUPER-SIMPLE!!
And it should be able to dispense candy via MMS messaging, and you should be able to win prizes by using it!
So "public has not been flocking to smartphones" - yeah if you live under a rock somewhere that may be true...
Quick, make a list of the ten most popular current mobile phone product lines. If your list doesn't contain "iPhone", "Treo", "Blackberry", and "Sidekick" -- as Dvorak's apparently does not -- then your grasp on technological culture is tenuous at best.
If there are any Wiis available to be moved, that is.
We're just about a week short of the one-year anniversary of the Wii's launch in the Americas, and I have STILL NEVER SEEN THE CONSOLE IN STOCK.
Granted, I'm not one of those people who loiters in EBGames every day during my lunch break in hopes of snagging a box right off the pallet, but I am a casual gamer doing casual game shopping. Why buy a copy of Galaxy if I still can't obtain the console to play it on?
Solid state is the only reasonable media for a handheld device.
I dunno; the iPod seems to have done quite well for itself using a good old Winchester drive for storage.
But then again, playing MP3s or videos uses an almost entirely linear disk access pattern; dealing with the random-access requirements of portable gaming is another issue entirely.
Gehry won't be receiving much sympathy from the residents of Minneapolis, who are forced to live with the Weisman Museum.
Nor from the residents of Brooklyn, New York, who will soon be forced to live with his Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards; a twisty clump of glass skyscrapers jutting out in the middle of a thousand century-old brownstones.
I like Gehry's interior design work -- his cafeteria design for Condé Nast is great, even if the floors did have to be replaced after only a couple of years due to intended warping -- but he seems entirely incapable of creating a building exterior that's compatible with its surroundings in any way. He's all sore thumbs.
I don't mean to be pedantic, but comparing a PDA to a Tablet?
Thanks to the March Of Technology Progress, an Apple Tablet in 2007 may very well have a similar weight and form factor to an Apple PDA in 1994. Could be quite a fair comparison.
In targeted online advertising, and perhaps online advertising in general, Google is the 800 pound Gorilla.
Five years ago, we all would have identified DoubleClick as that 800-lb gorilla. Five years from now, there might well be a different company at the top of the heap.
That doesn't sound like a monopolized market to me, and certainly not an illegal monopoly.
a group of mental patients in Sweden were used as subjects in a full-scale experiment designed to bring about tooth decay. They were fed copious amounts of candy, and many of them had their teeth completely ruined. But, scientifically speaking, the experiment was a huge success.
"My names is Toki. I slips in and out of diabetic coma. I wish they made candy-flavored insulin. Whatever." - Dethklok guitarist Toki Wartooth
(It should be noted, however, that Toki is actually Norwegian, not Swedish.)
On the other hand, most state lotteries only pay out about 50% of earnings, making them a worse bet than going with the mob
A large portion of the revenue from a state lottery drawing not disbursed as prize money goes to schools and other worthwhile recipients.
A large portion of the revenue from a mob numbers game not disbursed as prize money goes to bribes, hitmen, drug traffickers, and fur coats for the Don's concubines.
The RIAA is the big record labels. They invented the name to catch the bad PR so the evil things they do wouldn't reflect badly on the record labels themselves.
Evil things like certifying gold and platinum record sales, and standardizing pre- and post-emphasis equalization formulas so that an LP pressed by any label will sound correct when played back on any turntable manufacturer's device?
Take care of the thinkers of tomorrow, take care of the thinkers of today and take care that the terrorists are very very happy about this.
If terrorists cared about education they wouldn't be terrorists!
I cannot think of a better example of the dangers of miseducation (or no education) than a person who blames The Americans and The Jews for all that is wrong with his life, and is willing to lose his own life in order to hurt them.
Oh, come on -- "Mr. Sinus Theater 3000"? There's no question about whose intellectual property they were attempting to make money off of.
Contrast with something like Randy and Jason Sklar's series "Cheap Seats" on ESPN Classic. A couple of guys riffing on old TV sports footage. Familiar in concept, yes, but not a blatant knockoff. Mike and The Bots even make an appearance in once episode -- riffing on the Sklars' riffing.
Some of the DVDs do come with un-riffed versions on the flip sides of the DVDs.
A lot of the movies that got the MST3K treatment were also things that were in the public domain and/or had become low-value shovelware content, so it may well be possible to find un-riffed versions of the movies in the Discount DVDs bin of your local discount store or supermarket.
Josh: The mighty Mighty Voice of old! The maddest of the mads!
Eh. I always preferred Kevin Murphy's Tom Servo to Josh Weinstein's, but YMMV.
(Incidentally, the guy we're talking about is aka "J. Elvis Weinstein", writer from "Malcom in the Middle" and "Freaks and Geeks", and not the Josh Weinstein that was show runner on "The Simpsons" and "The Critic".)
there is no practical use for nukes other than to annihilate civilization as we know it.
You've missed the point.
The purpose of nuclear warheads it to preserve civilization as WE know it, by annihilating civilization as the people in THE BAD GUY COUNTRIES know it.
You are doing it wrong. The dock isn't meant to be a task switcher. It is a launcher/shortcut area.
Every version of Windows for the past 12 years -- and every *nix window manager that takes UI concepts from those Windows interfaces -- has had a task switcher area at the bottom (or side) of the desktop.
I won't say that it was a bad choice for Apple to disregard that de facto convention when designing the Dock, but perhaps they could be doing a better job of managing the expectations of OS X neophytes familiar with other systems.
sitting around in a comfy chair with a nice drink and listening, being MOVED by music, being swet away by something that matters, is an increasingly rare event.
I consider this a sad thing, but not unexpected, given the circumstances.
I consider it a sad (but not unexpected) thing that people would prefer to sit in a comfy chair and listen to a recording of someone else playing music, than to sit at a piano and make music themselves.
A century, one could expect a typical middle-class household to have a serviceable piano and at least one person capable of playing it. No longer the case today. We have become too passive.
It's true that a digital recording can never contain the amount of data in a vinyl groove
True in theory, but not necessarily in practice. Vinyl--or any other analog recording medium--has physical properties that limit the fidelity of the recording. Digital sampling rates have not yet caught up to this natural limit, it's conceivable that they one day could.
who is saying that all the data in a vinyl groove is more of an accurate representation of all the data extant in the original sound wave than a digitally sampled recording?
Nobody, I would hope, given that a supermajority of new recordings today are recorded and mastered in the digital domain to begin with.
"Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound."
This is a bug, not a feature. Nevermind overcompressed audio, vinyl can't even reproduce normal audio with a flat response curve; loud, low-pitched sounds would cause the needle to jump out of the groove. Vinyl masters and playback decks have to utilize the RIAA equalization curve--the only good thing ever to come from that organization--to recreate information that was intentionally removed from the recording to fit the physical constraints of the medium.
According to the article, and also Wikipedia, shes a Psyc student, published a couple papers. Seriously, thats enough to make the geek list?
Geekdom encompasses more than just computers and D&D. If she's passionate enough about Psychology to have been published, more than once even, I think it's fair to classify her as a geek.
Slashdot Mirror
It was her choice to stop writing Harry Potter books and she had planned this for a decade so it has nothing to do with running out of ideas.
Letting Harry and Hermione sit in a tent for 300 pages without advancing the plot in any way, on the other hand, does have something to do with running out of ideas.
Also, with the publisher's loss of editorial sensibility. Lucrative cash cows often have that effect on them.
I guess the worst happened as the Wii isn't really good for anything, not games nor media center... none of the 7 games I own really make me play it any more (Zelda, Red Steel, Paper Mario, MonkeyBall, WiiSports, WiiPlay, Excite Truck)... and the prospects are not really nice (Mario galaxy??? yaawn).
Why bother owning a device that isn't really good for anything?
You should sell your Wii to me. I'll give you $200 for it... $300 if you include the games.
Geesh... All I want is a freaking phone that allows me to play music and videos (podcasts), install 3rd party apps, has 3G connectivity & wifi, has gmail and push-email support, syncs with an ical feed, has an IM client that works with all the major networks, allows me to teather my laptop via bluetooth to the phone, has A2DP, and a web browser that renders like a web browser should (WITH FLASH FOR CHRIST'S SAKE.) Make your own MP3/AAC ringtones. Oh, and it needs to be on more than one carrier.
And it needs to be, most importantly, a GOOD PHONE. With GOOD RECEPTION, SOUND QUALITY, AND DIALING SHOULD BE SUPER-SIMPLE!!
And it should be able to dispense candy via MMS messaging, and you should be able to win prizes by using it!
Some people also don't believe that the Constitution is a suicide pact.
I would rather die than allow the protections guaranteed to us by the Constitution to be stolen from us.
Anybody who would not is a wretched coward.
So "public has not been flocking to smartphones" - yeah if you live under a rock somewhere that may be true...
Quick, make a list of the ten most popular current mobile phone product lines. If your list doesn't contain "iPhone", "Treo", "Blackberry", and "Sidekick" -- as Dvorak's apparently does not -- then your grasp on technological culture is tenuous at best.
Dvorak needs to be put out to pasture.
People expected Galaxy to move more Wiis.
If there are any Wiis available to be moved, that is.
We're just about a week short of the one-year anniversary of the Wii's launch in the Americas, and I have STILL NEVER SEEN THE CONSOLE IN STOCK.
Granted, I'm not one of those people who loiters in EBGames every day during my lunch break in hopes of snagging a box right off the pallet, but I am a casual gamer doing casual game shopping. Why buy a copy of Galaxy if I still can't obtain the console to play it on?
Solid state is the only reasonable media for a handheld device.
I dunno; the iPod seems to have done quite well for itself using a good old Winchester drive for storage.
But then again, playing MP3s or videos uses an almost entirely linear disk access pattern; dealing with the random-access requirements of portable gaming is another issue entirely.
"Plone"? "Zope"? Please tell me that professional web developers are not attempting to use words as silly as these yet still be taken seriously.
Besides which, I heard somewhere that PL/ONE has a syntax worse than JOSS...
Gehry won't be receiving much sympathy from the residents of Minneapolis, who are forced to live with the Weisman Museum.
Nor from the residents of Brooklyn, New York, who will soon be forced to live with his Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards; a twisty clump of glass skyscrapers jutting out in the middle of a thousand century-old brownstones.
I like Gehry's interior design work -- his cafeteria design for Condé Nast is great, even if the floors did have to be replaced after only a couple of years due to intended warping -- but he seems entirely incapable of creating a building exterior that's compatible with its surroundings in any way. He's all sore thumbs.
If making good phone software is so hard, how come apple can do it so well?
Other than that Apple is really REALLY good at making software?
I don't mean to be pedantic, but comparing a PDA to a Tablet?
Thanks to the March Of Technology Progress, an Apple Tablet in 2007 may very well have a similar weight and form factor to an Apple PDA in 1994. Could be quite a fair comparison.
In targeted online advertising, and perhaps online advertising in general, Google is the 800 pound Gorilla.
Five years ago, we all would have identified DoubleClick as that 800-lb gorilla. Five years from now, there might well be a different company at the top of the heap.
That doesn't sound like a monopolized market to me, and certainly not an illegal monopoly.
a group of mental patients in Sweden were used as subjects in a full-scale experiment designed to bring about tooth decay. They were fed copious amounts of candy, and many of them had their teeth completely ruined. But, scientifically speaking, the experiment was a huge success.
"My names is Toki. I slips in and out of diabetic coma. I wish they made candy-flavored insulin. Whatever."
- Dethklok guitarist Toki Wartooth
(It should be noted, however, that Toki is actually Norwegian, not Swedish.)
On the other hand, most state lotteries only pay out about 50% of earnings, making them a worse bet than going with the mob
A large portion of the revenue from a state lottery drawing not disbursed as prize money goes to schools and other worthwhile recipients.
A large portion of the revenue from a mob numbers game not disbursed as prize money goes to bribes, hitmen, drug traffickers, and fur coats for the Don's concubines.
The RIAA is the big record labels. They invented the name to catch the bad PR so the evil things they do wouldn't reflect badly on the record labels themselves.
Evil things like certifying gold and platinum record sales, and standardizing pre- and post-emphasis equalization formulas so that an LP pressed by any label will sound correct when played back on any turntable manufacturer's device?
You need to brush up on your RIAA history, man.
Take care of the thinkers of tomorrow, take care of the thinkers of today and take care that the terrorists are very very happy about this.
If terrorists cared about education they wouldn't be terrorists!
I cannot think of a better example of the dangers of miseducation (or no education) than a person who blames The Americans and The Jews for all that is wrong with his life, and is willing to lose his own life in order to hurt them.
Oh, come on -- "Mr. Sinus Theater 3000"? There's no question about whose intellectual property they were attempting to make money off of.
Contrast with something like Randy and Jason Sklar's series "Cheap Seats" on ESPN Classic. A couple of guys riffing on old TV sports footage. Familiar in concept, yes, but not a blatant knockoff. Mike and The Bots even make an appearance in once episode -- riffing on the Sklars' riffing.
Some of the DVDs do come with un-riffed versions on the flip sides of the DVDs.
A lot of the movies that got the MST3K treatment were also things that were in the public domain and/or had become low-value shovelware content, so it may well be possible to find un-riffed versions of the movies in the Discount DVDs bin of your local discount store or supermarket.
Josh: The mighty Mighty Voice of old! The maddest of the mads!
Eh. I always preferred Kevin Murphy's Tom Servo to Josh Weinstein's, but YMMV.
(Incidentally, the guy we're talking about is aka "J. Elvis Weinstein", writer from "Malcom in the Middle" and "Freaks and Geeks", and not the Josh Weinstein that was show runner on "The Simpsons" and "The Critic".)
there is no practical use for nukes other than to annihilate civilization as we know it.
You've missed the point.
The purpose of nuclear warheads it to preserve civilization as WE know it, by annihilating civilization as the people in THE BAD GUY COUNTRIES know it.
You are doing it wrong. The dock isn't meant to be a task switcher. It is a launcher/shortcut area.
Every version of Windows for the past 12 years -- and every *nix window manager that takes UI concepts from those Windows interfaces -- has had a task switcher area at the bottom (or side) of the desktop.
I won't say that it was a bad choice for Apple to disregard that de facto convention when designing the Dock, but perhaps they could be doing a better job of managing the expectations of OS X neophytes familiar with other systems.
sitting around in a comfy chair with a nice drink and listening, being MOVED by music, being swet away by something that matters, is an increasingly rare event.
I consider this a sad thing, but not unexpected, given the circumstances.
I consider it a sad (but not unexpected) thing that people would prefer to sit in a comfy chair and listen to a recording of someone else playing music, than to sit at a piano and make music themselves.
A century, one could expect a typical middle-class household to have a serviceable piano and at least one person capable of playing it. No longer the case today. We have become too passive.
It's true that a digital recording can never contain the amount of data in a vinyl groove
True in theory, but not necessarily in practice. Vinyl--or any other analog recording medium--has physical properties that limit the fidelity of the recording. Digital sampling rates have not yet caught up to this natural limit, it's conceivable that they one day could.
who is saying that all the data in a vinyl groove is more of an accurate representation of all the data extant in the original sound wave than a digitally sampled recording?
Nobody, I would hope, given that a supermajority of new recordings today are recorded and mastered in the digital domain to begin with.
"Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound."
This is a bug, not a feature. Nevermind overcompressed audio, vinyl can't even reproduce normal audio with a flat response curve; loud, low-pitched sounds would cause the needle to jump out of the groove. Vinyl masters and playback decks have to utilize the RIAA equalization curve--the only good thing ever to come from that organization--to recreate information that was intentionally removed from the recording to fit the physical constraints of the medium.
According to the article, and also Wikipedia, shes a Psyc student, published a couple papers. Seriously, thats enough to make the geek list?
Geekdom encompasses more than just computers and D&D. If she's passionate enough about Psychology to have been published, more than once even, I think it's fair to classify her as a geek.
--
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU d- s: a C++$>+ UL$ P++ L$ E$ !W+++$ N+ !o K+++(---) w !O !M>+ !V PS(+) PE(-) Y? !PGP t !5 !X !R tv+(++) b>+++ DI !D !G e++ h+>- r++ y?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
MySpace and Facebook, thus, have it very good for the future.
For the very near future, at least. Remember Friendster?