That's odd, none of my debit cards have chips in them. Must be not the same after all, even if they both happen to use a PIN (but then again, so do a lot of doors... does that mean the new credit cards can work as doors too?)
My filler/fluff class dragged down my GPA due to an incompetent professor. He insisted that homework assignments be emailed to him, but neglected to tell me that he wasn't getting my emails (in spite of the read receipts) until after grading was finalized and submitted. The result was that I received no credit for homework, which changed my course grade from an A to a C. Fortunately, that course only counted for 3 of 137 credit hours and had a nearly negligible effect on my final GPA.
The real problem is that most colleges require so many fluff and filler courses. I have not once used astronomy, microbiology, or World History Up To AD 1600 in my job as a sysadmin. However, I will admit that psychology (and simulated lab rats) and creative writing have been surprisingly useful.
Not to mention class rank is heavily influenced by the size of the class and breaks down in small courses/schools/etc. If you go by a single course, you could be ranked #6 and still be at the bottom of your class. Alternatively, you could be in the bottom 25%, but have a 99% average. The real problem, like credit scores, is trying to reduce a complex issue with many variables that are completely out of your control and cram it into a single number that supposedly describes you.
I graduated high school in 2006 and got my Bachelors in 2009. College admission was, and still is, the only thing that even gave half a flying fuck about my High School GPA. Grad school admissions have been the only thing to give a half-flying fuck about my undergrad GPA (and even then, as long as it meets their minimum requirement, they don't much care). Employers have mostly only cared about whether or not I did graduate. I've seen a number of (accredited) graduate schools that only assign pass/fail to courses and don't do GPAs at all. For the most part, your GPA is like your SAT score... it's relevant for a very short time frame afterwards and for a very small number of situations (mostly admissions and scholarships) and nobody gives a flying fuck after that.
The time cost is negligible and depends entirely on what you're buying and what kind of reader you are.
Scenario 1: Only buy novels, rarely re-read. Scenario 2: Buy reference books, refer to them briefly now and then. Scenario 3: Buy novels, but re-read them often.
Each of those three scenarios will give vastly different time-spent-to-money ratios. Personally, I stock up on a huge number of reference books that I spend relatively little time actually using and very few novels that I spend a lot of time reading.
Those costs are fairly low and recouped in the first few hundred or thousand sales, which is why self-publishing ebooks has been table to take off. The typical author's advance is only a few hundred to a few thousand dollars (depending on the genre, content, etc), and royalties count on volume to be profitable. And compared to authors, editors get much less and proofreaders hardly anything.
Source: I write. For money. Also, go check out Writer's Market for actual dollar figures.
The costs are still significantly lower than print books. If a print book costs $20, I would expect the ebook version to cost $10 or less. The cost discrepancy is enough that the publisher would probably still end up with as much or more profits than the print book, and it would possibly increase sales. Although it's not as bad as a few cases where I've seen the ebook cost up to 25% more than the print book. Ebooks are also a format in which a publisher could much more easily sell it themselves rather than going through a retailer, because it doesn't have all of that other overhead. I'm fairly sure the only reason they keep ebook prices as high as they are is to prevent them from killing the dead tree market.
Did you read the summary? At all? Adobe is the company that came up with PDF. The article is about how they're changing PDF DRM and expect ebooks that use Adobe's DRM to comply with the new one. Many iPad and Android books are affected, as well as (possibly) B&N ebooks, which uses a variant of it. Kindle books should not be affected. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
That's the part that's always bugged me. The big cost in publishing is the printing, shipping, warehousing, distribution of the dead trees (that's not even counting more costs if you sell through a brick and mortar store). If you double sales, all of the overhead doubles. Ebooks have almost negligible costs to do all that - which gets even closer to zero if you share resources (e.g sell through Amazon).
I buy two or three ebooks in a given year and about the same number of books in print because books are damned expensive. If you priced ebooks downward to have similar (or slightly greater) profit margins as print books, I'd probably end up spending twice the money on them overall because I would be getting much more value for my individual dollars, and the companies would end up with more profits overall. Ebooks are largely stuck due to using a similar profit model to music and movies.
That's one argument. A better argument, in my opinion, is to only buy from vendors that offer DRM-free formats (eg.g: O'Reilly) and pirate DRM-free versions from those that don't. I've seen a lot of people choosing to buy older games from GOG instead of spending those dollars on games they might want more on Steam for this very reason.
But then manufacturers will offer Free Nights and Weekend Honking, and contracts for 1000 honks per month (minimum 2 yr contract). Eventually, we'll get some good prepaid honks, but they won't always be as up to date as contract horns.
What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machines escalated into a botnet which has decimated a million websites. Facebook and Twitter have all but exhausted the resources of the Internet in their struggle for domination. Both sides now crippled beyond repair, the remnants of their users continue to post on ravaged smartphones, their dumbassery fueled by over four thousand posts of total crap. Now this will go past their death. For each user, the only acceptable outcome is the complete creation of a creepy, awkward facsimile.
Even after accounting for that, it looks like you'd have a net gain of about 1.75% (avg 0.12% per year) if you bought MSFT stock on Jan 30, 2000 and sold it today. Only slightly better than a loss.
I could make a site that doesn't work on Browser X. People will visit it once with Browser X, see it doesn't work and try it with Browser Y. The net result is that this site's logs will show Browser Y becoming insanely popular over time when the reality could be that people only use Browser Y for my site and Browser X for every other site. Probably not the case here, but there's stranger ways to unintentionally skew data.
Ok, just saw the mention of Mozilla in the last paragraph. Still interesting that Opera got mentioned at all and Mozilla isn't mentioned until the very end.
Slashdot Mirror
That's odd, none of my debit cards have chips in them. Must be not the same after all, even if they both happen to use a PIN (but then again, so do a lot of doors... does that mean the new credit cards can work as doors too?)
My filler/fluff class dragged down my GPA due to an incompetent professor. He insisted that homework assignments be emailed to him, but neglected to tell me that he wasn't getting my emails (in spite of the read receipts) until after grading was finalized and submitted. The result was that I received no credit for homework, which changed my course grade from an A to a C. Fortunately, that course only counted for 3 of 137 credit hours and had a nearly negligible effect on my final GPA.
The real problem is that most colleges require so many fluff and filler courses. I have not once used astronomy, microbiology, or World History Up To AD 1600 in my job as a sysadmin. However, I will admit that psychology (and simulated lab rats) and creative writing have been surprisingly useful.
Not to mention class rank is heavily influenced by the size of the class and breaks down in small courses/schools/etc. If you go by a single course, you could be ranked #6 and still be at the bottom of your class. Alternatively, you could be in the bottom 25%, but have a 99% average. The real problem, like credit scores, is trying to reduce a complex issue with many variables that are completely out of your control and cram it into a single number that supposedly describes you.
I graduated high school in 2006 and got my Bachelors in 2009. College admission was, and still is, the only thing that even gave half a flying fuck about my High School GPA. Grad school admissions have been the only thing to give a half-flying fuck about my undergrad GPA (and even then, as long as it meets their minimum requirement, they don't much care). Employers have mostly only cared about whether or not I did graduate. I've seen a number of (accredited) graduate schools that only assign pass/fail to courses and don't do GPAs at all. For the most part, your GPA is like your SAT score... it's relevant for a very short time frame afterwards and for a very small number of situations (mostly admissions and scholarships) and nobody gives a flying fuck after that.
If it's coming from the government, it's usually measured in shit-tons.
You mean they put a Ribbon on it? That seems to be Microsoft's go-to technique for refreshing crap heaps.
The time cost is negligible and depends entirely on what you're buying and what kind of reader you are.
Scenario 1: Only buy novels, rarely re-read.
Scenario 2: Buy reference books, refer to them briefly now and then.
Scenario 3: Buy novels, but re-read them often.
Each of those three scenarios will give vastly different time-spent-to-money ratios. Personally, I stock up on a huge number of reference books that I spend relatively little time actually using and very few novels that I spend a lot of time reading.
Those costs are fairly low and recouped in the first few hundred or thousand sales, which is why self-publishing ebooks has been table to take off. The typical author's advance is only a few hundred to a few thousand dollars (depending on the genre, content, etc), and royalties count on volume to be profitable. And compared to authors, editors get much less and proofreaders hardly anything.
Source: I write. For money. Also, go check out Writer's Market for actual dollar figures.
The costs are still significantly lower than print books. If a print book costs $20, I would expect the ebook version to cost $10 or less. The cost discrepancy is enough that the publisher would probably still end up with as much or more profits than the print book, and it would possibly increase sales. Although it's not as bad as a few cases where I've seen the ebook cost up to 25% more than the print book. Ebooks are also a format in which a publisher could much more easily sell it themselves rather than going through a retailer, because it doesn't have all of that other overhead. I'm fairly sure the only reason they keep ebook prices as high as they are is to prevent them from killing the dead tree market.
Did you read the summary? At all? Adobe is the company that came up with PDF. The article is about how they're changing PDF DRM and expect ebooks that use Adobe's DRM to comply with the new one. Many iPad and Android books are affected, as well as (possibly) B&N ebooks, which uses a variant of it. Kindle books should not be affected. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
That's the part that's always bugged me. The big cost in publishing is the printing, shipping, warehousing, distribution of the dead trees (that's not even counting more costs if you sell through a brick and mortar store). If you double sales, all of the overhead doubles. Ebooks have almost negligible costs to do all that - which gets even closer to zero if you share resources (e.g sell through Amazon).
I buy two or three ebooks in a given year and about the same number of books in print because books are damned expensive. If you priced ebooks downward to have similar (or slightly greater) profit margins as print books, I'd probably end up spending twice the money on them overall because I would be getting much more value for my individual dollars, and the companies would end up with more profits overall. Ebooks are largely stuck due to using a similar profit model to music and movies.
That's one argument. A better argument, in my opinion, is to only buy from vendors that offer DRM-free formats (eg.g: O'Reilly) and pirate DRM-free versions from those that don't. I've seen a lot of people choosing to buy older games from GOG instead of spending those dollars on games they might want more on Steam for this very reason.
But then manufacturers will offer Free Nights and Weekend Honking, and contracts for 1000 honks per month (minimum 2 yr contract). Eventually, we'll get some good prepaid honks, but they won't always be as up to date as contract horns.
Maybe this will be the judge to finally rip them a new one.
What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machines escalated into a botnet which has decimated a million websites. Facebook and Twitter have all but exhausted the resources of the Internet in their struggle for domination. Both sides now crippled beyond repair, the remnants of their users continue to post on ravaged smartphones, their dumbassery fueled by over four thousand posts of total crap. Now this will go past their death. For each user, the only acceptable outcome is the complete creation of a creepy, awkward facsimile.
Not even a robot will want to want C-SPAN
I don't know... most of the people I know that use Twitter and Facebook heavily have slightly less personality than most software.
Even after accounting for that, it looks like you'd have a net gain of about 1.75% (avg 0.12% per year) if you bought MSFT stock on Jan 30, 2000 and sold it today. Only slightly better than a loss.
I could make a site that doesn't work on Browser X. People will visit it once with Browser X, see it doesn't work and try it with Browser Y. The net result is that this site's logs will show Browser Y becoming insanely popular over time when the reality could be that people only use Browser Y for my site and Browser X for every other site. Probably not the case here, but there's stranger ways to unintentionally skew data.
Could be because they only included the major browsers. There are more things on the Net, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Ballmer bought one to use and three to throw. Everybody else just bought one to throw.
Ok, just saw the mention of Mozilla in the last paragraph. Still interesting that Opera got mentioned at all and Mozilla isn't mentioned until the very end.
I can't remember the last time an article mentioned four of the five major browsers while including Opera and not Firefox. Times, they are a-changin'
You may want to read the discussion... the mention of 58% turnout was in response to the comment "Unless your election turnout is 1%."
So his face becomes the same color as the Slashdot PT Cruiser. Duh.