Let them make an offer, then give them a reasonable counter offer with NDA and covenants to not compete fully understood before you sign on the dotted line. So what if they want to buy you out? Make them pay for the privilege, enjoy the reward for your hard work for a little bit, then move on to your next big thing. It is obvious that you can't start a new business to do the same kind of thing a week after you sell out, but there's got to be something else out there that you can do without blatantly competing against Megacorp.
Alternative approach: you don't sell because after all, the company is your baby and you want to see it grow for a little longer. And you are more than pleased to license to Megacorp whatever it is they are really after. By this you prove that you are in for the business, that you are not just trying to pick a fight with them. What you don't want do to is be petty and tell them something stupid like "stick your offer up your ass, I will never sell out to youse bastards!"
I would propose a partnership, but that makes you rely too much on Megacorp and they can use this reliance to control you, so it is not really feasible. Either sell out, or offer them a reasonable license that gets them what they want, within very strict limits, and you open up one more revenue stream.
You are not a programmer unless you are writing code and/or dealing with dynamic functionality. If all you are doing is HTML/CSS layouts, slicing images, etc. then it is design, not programming.
Pulling data from a database into a web page? Programming.
Formatting the grid control in the web page, without touching whatever makes it tick? Design.
About ten years ago we had a military contract, workflow management web app for civilians working within one of the branches of the military.
For starters, we couldn't work at our office, we had to work at theirs. Their office (which right now is a hell of a lot nicer than what it used to be) was a 10-story or so hellhole somewhere in Alexandria, Virginia. Imagine two small office buildings surrounded by what seemed like 1/4 mile square of parking lots. If you took the metro, then you had to walk around the buildings because the "right" entrance for us to go through security was at the opposite end of the buildings.
During winter that little walk was brutal, because the way in which these two buildings, and some of the other structures across the street, were arranged created a natural wind tunnel.
The offices were broken into small cubicle islands, mine was big enough for a desk and a chair, which didn't really bother me since my real office at the company was a closet converted into a 3-desk office. There were three of us, two as web programmers, one as PM + DBA.
We had no control over either the database or the web environment, and we had to use their code repository. Every time we wanted to change the schema we had to sit through meetings in which seemingly half of the building took turns bickering over why a certain varchar column was 28 characters instead of 22 characters long.
On top of that, the people that ran the project from the customer's side kept rotating in and out of the job. They did a good job, so they got promoted and left, then the next person would be assigned and he/she would start changing things around to leave his/her mark until the next performance review cycle.
There was only one cafeteria to service both buildings, if you didn't race downstairs before 11:15 AM or so, and you didn't want to wait half an hour for your food, your only choice was to wait until 1:45 PM or so. The food was mostly good, but it was a bit expensive and it would take too long to go to any of the hundreds of lunch spots just a 1/3rd of a mile away in Alexandria.
Uneducated but hopefully not unrealistic. I have been buying digital cameras for about 9 years, and the improvements are just unreal. I would had not believed back in 2000 that Sony would sell a 12 Megapixel camera with shot stabilization, face AND smile detectors, and 1080x720 video for less than $300, when my 3 megapixel Sony DSC-S70 was close to $900 so many years ago.
And that's exactly how we became a two-Kindle household. For the first few months my wife wouldn't even look at it. Then one day she finished a book too late to make it to Barnes & Noble to pick the next one. I showed her that the next book was available, much cheaper, on my Kindle.
Goodbye Kindle.
After a couple months of fighting over it, the Kindle turned itself into a brick. Warranty replacement was shipped to us that same day, we got it less than 48 hours after it was reported dead. And this also happened the week before the Kindle 2 came out.
So the week of the Kindle 2 release, I had in my hands a Kindle 1 that was right out of the box, it was not even refurbished. I ordered the Kindle 2 for myself and handed my wife the (now) brand new Kindle 1.
Two days later the Kindle 2 arrived. She took one look at the K2, then looked at her K1 and decided she would rather have a K2. Dammit.
I told my friends I was going to put the K1 on eBay. It didn't make it to eBay, one of my friends bought it on the spot and gave it to his teenager daughter. I turned that around and ordered the second K2 for my wife.
Her K2 was a brick, it was dead within 4 hours. Again Amazon replaced it on the spot. Neither of the two calls to replace the K1 and K2 took more than five minutes. All they did was verify my identity, and make sure I had tried to reboot the device. In each case the replacement unit was shipped next-day air and I was not charged one penny. They emailed me UPS labels and asked me to have the devices returned within 30 days.
FREE BOOKS
Since you obviously appreciate free books, next time you go to the Kindle area of amazon.com, sort the books by price. There are a ton of free books listed there. On top of that, subscribe to the official Kindle blog, http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A1F8Z0JAEIDVRY/ref=cm_blog_blog because they are listing free books almost every week. For example, World Wide Rave is free right now, and Harlequin posted 10 or so of their books for free to celebrate their 60th anniversary (you can go to their website (http://www.harlequincelebrates.com/) to download these in other formats, this is not a Kindle exclusive).
The purpose of the tool is not to allow non-Amazon content into the Kindle. Instead, it is to allow non-Amazon eBook sellers to be able to sell content for the Kindle. It has NOTHING to do with your ability as a user to bring content into your Kindle without paying Amazon.
I should know, I owned a Kindle 1 for 7 months and currently own two Kindle 2s (hint: if you only have one Kindle, don't show it to your wife and go LOOK HONEY, SEE HOW COOL THIS IS!!! because she'll immediately take over it and you'll end up buying a second one). I have had no issues bringing content into any of my Kindles:
1. Any content that I can read with Stanza and/or Mobipocket Creator (both free) can be converted into formats that can be read by the Kindle. 2. Amazon provides you with a unique email address to email content to be converted directly into your Kindle. 10 cents per conversion. 3. Amazon provides you with a second unique email address to email content to be converted, then emailed back to you for free. Yes, free. 4. Using the basic web browser, you can pick any web-based file that is compatible with the Kindle and it will download it just like if you purchased it from Amazon. There are plenty of websites that cater directly to the Kindle, and there is a huge drive to make Project Gutemberg and others fully compatible with the Kindle. 5. Amazon charges you for subscribing to feeds. Or you can use the free tool at Feedbooks. These clever people figured out a way to package an RSS subscription as an eBook, and it has an auto-update link. Open the book from your Kindle, click on Update and it downloads a new version of the file. Tedious? Sure, but it is free. 6. Annoyed about having to connect to your PC just so you can move your content into your Kindle? Don't feel like paying the 10-cent tax? Easy, simply dump your eBook files into a folder in your website, password protect it if you are paranoid, then open it from your basic browser. You can now download your own books from anywhere, which is great if you don't like clutter or in case you delete the wrong book by accident.
Now, of course, it sucks if you are trying to make a buck selling eBooks for the Kindle outside of Amazon and you are using a format that requires the ID of your device. If all you want to do is sell the content, then you might as well go to http://dtp.amazon.com/, list your books for free and let Amazon do all the work in exchange for a cut of the action. Amazon will not charge you for access to the DTP area, or for listing your books, they only take a cut of your sales.
I emailed Amazon's Kindle Feedback address earlier this week to complain about not being able to upload my own files to the storage area (one of my favorite features is that I can re-download my content at will), expecting to get a canned response. I actually got a person to reply to me, so it looks like at least some of those emails are being read. The person that replied hinted that maybe I wanted to send my files through the 10-cent tax generator, but he would still pass my message to the powers-that-be.
The one thing that is still completely unacceptable is that the Kindle client for the iPhone only works with purchased work, you can't add your own books (yet) unless you jailbrake your phone.
If you want to see something crazy, follow the #dollhouse hash tag on Twitter on Friday nights. People love the show, even if they hate it, they watch it so they can complain about how much it sucks. The same goes for Galactica, even in its death throes, there's a hell of a lot of live Twittering going on while the show is airing.
CBS' Ghost Whisperer and Numb3rs have survived that slot for a long time, but at the same time, the last show that they added was killed in just a few weeks.
The moment of truth is going to be when BSG goes away. If people were watching Dollhouse simply to wait for BSG, then Dollhouse's ratings will take a hell of a dive. If the show stays up, especially after the promised change around episode 6, then maybe if the show is good enough it doesn't matter how you schedule it, as long as you do it.
As for Fringe, I don't know what the hell is their problem, they need to get that show back up immediately. That's the most promising new show we have seen in a while. Geeks love bad science, it gives them a chance to prove that they know more. How many of you have pulled your hair whenever Walter starts spewing out pseudo science crap? I know I do at least once per episode, and my friends that follow the show really like that part of the show.
The dangerous thing is not the DRM itself, but that the company that runs the DRM decides to shut it down. I stand by my original statement that for Amazon to walk away from this is as weird as Apple walking away from digital music.
Maybe a couple of years from now they'll back off DRM, same as Apple eventually did.
This is a publisher issue. When the current W.E.B. Griffin novel was announced about two months ago, it was announced first as hardcover. A few days later they announced it for the Kindle, it was more expensive than the hardcover. Couple of day later it was priced a few dollars under, but still a lot. By the time I paid for mine, it was $9.99, which is what we were told to expect for main releases.
I see it a convenience thing. Tom Clancy finally caved-in (I doubt it was Penguin's fault, since W.E.B. Griffin is with Penguin too and he has been selling on the Kindle for months) and started releasing his catalog. Hunt for Red October is $6.39. Is that fair? I don't know, but it is hopefully the last time I will have to buy that book. I re-read certain novels, to the point that I destroy them so my wife forced me to buy hardcovers, the extra price would account for it lasting as long as 2-3 paperback copies.
A new problem: hundreds of hardcover books, gathering dust and bugs. Wall-to-wall bookshelves are awesome and I am sure there's not a nerd here that would love to have one, but they are a pain in the ass to keep clean and organized. The Kindle solves this for me very well: all my books are online, I don't even need to keep them in my device if I don't want to. And I don't have to worry about deleting a purchased copy by accident.
Just having my library organized that way, and not taking space in my house, and knowing that for the time being Amazon is not going anywhere (Amazon dropping their ebooks push sounds as weird as Apple deciding to walk away from digital music) makes it a little less painful to pay a little more for SOME of these books. And now my wife is hooked on it too, so on the long run I'll probably save money.
What I would really like to see is Amazon to take on the college books scam. I finished college more than 14 years ago, and I still feel like I got raped as far as the cost of my books went. My friends that are currently going through college break my heart when they tell me about what they are paying for their books, it is just unreasonable as hell, especially when the subject matter on some of these doesn't change from year-to-year.
Find topics in numerical analysis, so they know that after all that misery, plus calculus if they carry it into college, most of these problems can be solved with a scientific calculator and some reasonable assumptions.
My brother engineers can probably testify to how infuriating it was to spend those first couple miserable years mastering multi dimensional calculus, only to be shown how there were really damn good approximation algorithms in place for most of these problems. In my case it was twice infuriating, my professor was a drunk, he would verbally abuse anyone that dared walking into his classroom with a calculator that wasn't made by TI, HP or Casio. He did not care about price, so for example you couldn't dazzle him with a $200 HP (his ideal calculator was "the best TI you can find on sale for $20-$25)), but God protect you if you walked in with one of those calculators designed to balance checkbooks, because you wouldn't even get more than 10 precision digits.
Joking aside, try to see if you can find something that has a real world application. I was bored out of my mind because I was being taught calculus concepts in one year and they would not be needed in my major courses for at least two semesters.
The fact that you are considering leaving the fold makes you unreliable. By staying under the promise of more compensation you are reinforcing the idea that you are not to be trusted.
All that you are going to achieve is making it easier to your boss to find your replacement and have you train him/her. You will be out of a job in less than one year. There is a reason why you are leaving after 6 years, just move on and don't look back.
We *can* convert MKV to MP4 already, that's not the issue.
All it takes is anything that knows how to do a video passthrough (like QT Pro + Perian) and convert just the audio. A normal TV episode is usually converted in 5 minutes or less, which is great but still means one thing to do before I can watch it on the 360.
I am a web developer by trade, and so far one of the most infuriating things that I have to deal with on a weekly basis is that my customers simply can't bring themselves to care enough to remember their admin logins. Every week I have to unlock a handful of administrators. It doesn't matter if I provided them with a proper password rescue option, it is simply too much for them.
The second big problem is that we have multiple branches of certain products running at the same time, so at any given time one of my customers may have to login into her production, staging or 2-3 development servers, each with its own username and password.
We are a.net shop, so my original idea was to use the new membership and role providers and remove the login mechanism from all sites from a given customer. This works, but it is hard to get all sites in line since there is always something else going on that is more important. They still screw it up, but at least they only have to remember one username and password that works at the same level (production, staging, dev, etc.).
When I heard about OpenID I tried to see if I could implement it in any of our sites that use.net 2.0-style security. I was glad to see that somebody already had thought of this, and I found a ready to run library with a very nice login control for.net that uses OpenID.
It wasn't easy, but it was interesting, and within 10 or so hours invested I had:
1. A.net web app that used ANY OpenID instead of the built-in aspnet_* tables hierarchy. 2. A recovery page. You type your email address and it emails you a list of any OpenIDs in the system that match that email address. 3. A self-registration page. If you arrive at the web app, and you authenticate through OpenID successfully, and you don't have a local profile, it asks you to fill a quick form. 4. Security roles are used just like any standard.net app that uses the SQL membership/role providers.
The beauty of it is that I can even run my own OpenID server for my customers. All they would need to remember is that they login by typing a URL like:
userid.ouropenidserver.com
and it would do the rest for them.
One customer, three projects, three environments per project, that's nine login/password pairs that I am expecting them to remember. Instead all they need to remember is the URL and the password. If they lock themselves out, all they need to remember is the email address used to register, which emails them their OpenID URL. If they forget their password, that is handled at the OpenID provider level, not at the end user application.
Even if nobody else in the world uses it, to me it clearly means that I can spend more of my customer's money in building new things instead of on troubleshooting and damage control (even if the two figures are identical, customers will bitch more about paying for repairs than paying for work that can be recognized as new). And it is an easy concept, if they have a Google or AOL account, they already have an OpenID.
Yes, 800 is a very conservative number. On my last two visits to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum annex at Dulles International ( http://flickr.com/photos/pvera/sets/72157594265546348/ ), I shot over 400 frames without even trying. Just walking once through each section was enough to fill the SD in my D50.
1. I did not know I was not supposed to change the orientation of the 360, that left a really nasty scratched out ring about halfway down the radius of the disc (Oblivion). I was never able to buff the scratch out, even with a buffing machine. I always RTFM, and I don't remember a warning on changing the orientation of the console while a disc was inside. I ended up burning my surplus points in Goozex.com to get a replacement disc.
2. I left a disc inside of the Xbox while the house was being fumigated. The poison seeped into the Xbox and somehow the disk soaked it in and the surface became cloudy. No scratches, the surface remained smooth, but it looked pretty fogged. I don't see how I can blame Microsoft for this one, I should had just shut everything down before I left the house.
I totally feel your pain, I served a tour as a lead programmer, then technical manager, then director, then back to lead. Here's some of the things that I learned that weren't the most obvious to my fellow managers in other departments:
1. Protect them. Put a programmer in a position in which he reports to just ONE boss and he'll follow you into hell. If the manager does his job, his programmers can actually spend the time programming instead of getting sucked into a reporting system where they have 8 bosses.
2. Don't waste their time. Corporate is always adding stupid crap that all it ends up doing is slowing down the personnel that are actually producing. Try to cut down on redundant and/or useless reports, non-project/deliverable meetings, etc. Your goal here is to have your people spend as much time as possible billing to a project instead of burning overhead.
3. Detach yourself a little bit. You are not their friend, you are their boss. You don't have to be an ass about it, but you can't hang out with them unless you take out the whole team for food, drinks, whatever. If you want to hang out with people in the same company, find other managers.
4. You can rule with an iron hand, but try not to humiliate people in public. If one of your guys screws up, pull him aside and deal with it in private. Just because you have to adjust the employee doesn't mean you have to add humiliation to the mix. I know too many managers that simply can't understand how crucial this is.
5. Don't obsess over the minutiae that is out of your control. The whole idea of having these senior guys is to have them do the heavy lifting for you, while you steer them in a general direction. Don't bother catching up to whatever technology they are dealing with. You do need to understand its capabilities and its limitations, but you don't need to know how to type the damn code yourself. Again, I know plenty of managers that refuse to let go and end up as horrible micromanagers.
The best way to handle senior people is to tell them what you expect them to deliver, with broad guidance, plus whatever constraints are in place and out of your control. Let them do the work, try not to stand on their way and protect them from people that won't hesitate to make them waste their time.
Boxee runs horribly on my Mac Book Pro Core 2 2.33, 3GB ram. It doesn't run much better on my AppleTV. Maybe I am expecting too much from the AppleTV, but at least the 60 excels at streaming Netflix so I am happy.
1. Media streamed from a mac, thru connect360. 2. Rented media.
On the AppleTV:
1. Media streamed/sync through iTunes. 2. Rented media. 3. Hulu streamed through Boxee. 4. Torrents pulled through Boxee. 5. Youtube videos. My kid adores this feature, he beats the living crap out of it.
I don't even know if the AppleTV with Boxee can stream content that the 360 can pull.
I got two Xbox 360s, two AppleTVs. One set for myself and the wife, the other for my 10-yr old.
My options:
1. transcode content and watch it on the AppleTV. Takes time, and my Turbo.264 hardware encoder is a piece of crap, the new Handbrake works much better without even relying on the dongle. Parental controls are awesome, and content is organized very well.
2. stream content from the mac into the 360 with Connect360. Looks almost identical to #1, without having to transcode. Only thing that sucks is navigating through a lot of content, and there are no parental controls.
3. watch netflix on the mac. Not good enough.
4. watch netflix on the mac on the Parallels 4 side. Not good enough (almost can't tell it apart from #3).
5. watch netflix on the 360. It frickin rocks. Having to go to the website to add to the queue is a minor annoyance but not the end of the world.
6. Renting content on the 360. Works very damn nice, only a bit slow to start if it is HD content. Could use more variety.
7. Renting content on the AppleTV. Also works very nice, but sometimes it takes weeks for new content to show up. They do release at least something every week, but mostly so it looks like they are alive.
I have also used boxee on the AppleTV, and while in theory it worked, it was sloppy and it screwed up with the menu hierarchy. After an hour of playing with it I was annoyed enough to delete it.
I like how the streaming on the 360 works because it takes exactly zero tampering with the 360 to make it happen. All you need is a media pc, or a mac running software impersonating a media pc. Adding boxee to the appleTV was simply scary.
What I really want is for Apple to do exactly the same thing that was done to the 360, add a menu entry for Netflix with a SIMPLE way to authenticate the device (the way this was done in the 360 was just beautiful, just a short, easy to type code) and not a damn thing else.
I am a former alumni of the company that became the company that launched XM as a separate venture, then sucked the parent company dry to get XM up and running. The parent was renamed, and now it seems to be redirected to yet one more company. The ad copy in this current iteration reads the same promises that they were making to the market when I was freshly hired in 1996. If these people are still even remotely connected to what XM is today, then it's probably going to end up as more of the same, merger or else. It is sad because their technical people were top notch, all of this mess was because of the business side of the house.
All HDCP means is that you can't use a pure digital transport, like HDMI, to view content on devices that don't support HDCP.
Even my stupid cable box has DHCP on the DVI output, when I replaced my HDTV over the weekend it refused to work with the new TV because it couldn't complete the HDCP handshake. The new TV was fine, it was able to play a DVD from my Xbox 360 through HDMI. The problem in my case was probably a buggy implementation of the port designated for DVI->HDMI cables.
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Let them make an offer, then give them a reasonable counter offer with NDA and covenants to not compete fully understood before you sign on the dotted line. So what if they want to buy you out? Make them pay for the privilege, enjoy the reward for your hard work for a little bit, then move on to your next big thing. It is obvious that you can't start a new business to do the same kind of thing a week after you sell out, but there's got to be something else out there that you can do without blatantly competing against Megacorp.
Alternative approach: you don't sell because after all, the company is your baby and you want to see it grow for a little longer. And you are more than pleased to license to Megacorp whatever it is they are really after. By this you prove that you are in for the business, that you are not just trying to pick a fight with them. What you don't want do to is be petty and tell them something stupid like "stick your offer up your ass, I will never sell out to youse bastards!"
I would propose a partnership, but that makes you rely too much on Megacorp and they can use this reliance to control you, so it is not really feasible. Either sell out, or offer them a reasonable license that gets them what they want, within very strict limits, and you open up one more revenue stream.
You are not a programmer unless you are writing code and/or dealing with dynamic functionality. If all you are doing is HTML/CSS layouts, slicing images, etc. then it is design, not programming.
Pulling data from a database into a web page? Programming.
Formatting the grid control in the web page, without touching whatever makes it tick? Design.
About ten years ago we had a military contract, workflow management web app for civilians working within one of the branches of the military.
For starters, we couldn't work at our office, we had to work at theirs. Their office (which right now is a hell of a lot nicer than what it used to be) was a 10-story or so hellhole somewhere in Alexandria, Virginia. Imagine two small office buildings surrounded by what seemed like 1/4 mile square of parking lots. If you took the metro, then you had to walk around the buildings because the "right" entrance for us to go through security was at the opposite end of the buildings.
During winter that little walk was brutal, because the way in which these two buildings, and some of the other structures across the street, were arranged created a natural wind tunnel.
The offices were broken into small cubicle islands, mine was big enough for a desk and a chair, which didn't really bother me since my real office at the company was a closet converted into a 3-desk office. There were three of us, two as web programmers, one as PM + DBA.
We had no control over either the database or the web environment, and we had to use their code repository. Every time we wanted to change the schema we had to sit through meetings in which seemingly half of the building took turns bickering over why a certain varchar column was 28 characters instead of 22 characters long.
On top of that, the people that ran the project from the customer's side kept rotating in and out of the job. They did a good job, so they got promoted and left, then the next person would be assigned and he/she would start changing things around to leave his/her mark until the next performance review cycle.
There was only one cafeteria to service both buildings, if you didn't race downstairs before 11:15 AM or so, and you didn't want to wait half an hour for your food, your only choice was to wait until 1:45 PM or so. The food was mostly good, but it was a bit expensive and it would take too long to go to any of the hundreds of lunch spots just a 1/3rd of a mile away in Alexandria.
It wasn't hell, but we could see it from there.
I give it the finger? Or I make the universal sign for a programmer pulling his hair while trying to troubleshoot yet one more CSS layout issue?
There goes my work day. Again.
Uneducated but hopefully not unrealistic. I have been buying digital cameras for about 9 years, and the improvements are just unreal. I would had not believed back in 2000 that Sony would sell a 12 Megapixel camera with shot stabilization, face AND smile detectors, and 1080x720 video for less than $300, when my 3 megapixel Sony DSC-S70 was close to $900 so many years ago.
1. Go crazy with HDR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging). Please. I am starting to see some companies starting to show some functionality related to HDR. The more, the merrier.
2. Better vibration reduction, and let us turn it off.
3. Better low-light performance. Usable performance, don't just tell me it is ISO 6400 if the image is unusable.
4. Proper HD video. It is a disgrace that $150 camcorders have proper HD video, and $400 P&S cameras don't (gladly, this is starting to change).
5. A real god damn hyperfocal distance setting, not just a dumb infinity focus toggle.
And that's exactly how we became a two-Kindle household. For the first few months my wife wouldn't even look at it. Then one day she finished a book too late to make it to Barnes & Noble to pick the next one. I showed her that the next book was available, much cheaper, on my Kindle.
Goodbye Kindle.
After a couple months of fighting over it, the Kindle turned itself into a brick. Warranty replacement was shipped to us that same day, we got it less than 48 hours after it was reported dead. And this also happened the week before the Kindle 2 came out.
So the week of the Kindle 2 release, I had in my hands a Kindle 1 that was right out of the box, it was not even refurbished. I ordered the Kindle 2 for myself and handed my wife the (now) brand new Kindle 1.
Two days later the Kindle 2 arrived. She took one look at the K2, then looked at her K1 and decided she would rather have a K2. Dammit.
I told my friends I was going to put the K1 on eBay. It didn't make it to eBay, one of my friends bought it on the spot and gave it to his teenager daughter. I turned that around and ordered the second K2 for my wife.
Her K2 was a brick, it was dead within 4 hours. Again Amazon replaced it on the spot. Neither of the two calls to replace the K1 and K2 took more than five minutes. All they did was verify my identity, and make sure I had tried to reboot the device. In each case the replacement unit was shipped next-day air and I was not charged one penny. They emailed me UPS labels and asked me to have the devices returned within 30 days.
FREE BOOKS
Since you obviously appreciate free books, next time you go to the Kindle area of amazon.com, sort the books by price. There are a ton of free books listed there. On top of that, subscribe to the official Kindle blog, http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A1F8Z0JAEIDVRY/ref=cm_blog_blog because they are listing free books almost every week. For example, World Wide Rave is free right now, and Harlequin posted 10 or so of their books for free to celebrate their 60th anniversary (you can go to their website (http://www.harlequincelebrates.com/) to download these in other formats, this is not a Kindle exclusive).
The purpose of the tool is not to allow non-Amazon content into the Kindle. Instead, it is to allow non-Amazon eBook sellers to be able to sell content for the Kindle. It has NOTHING to do with your ability as a user to bring content into your Kindle without paying Amazon.
I should know, I owned a Kindle 1 for 7 months and currently own two Kindle 2s (hint: if you only have one Kindle, don't show it to your wife and go LOOK HONEY, SEE HOW COOL THIS IS!!! because she'll immediately take over it and you'll end up buying a second one). I have had no issues bringing content into any of my Kindles:
1. Any content that I can read with Stanza and/or Mobipocket Creator (both free) can be converted into formats that can be read by the Kindle.
2. Amazon provides you with a unique email address to email content to be converted directly into your Kindle. 10 cents per conversion.
3. Amazon provides you with a second unique email address to email content to be converted, then emailed back to you for free. Yes, free.
4. Using the basic web browser, you can pick any web-based file that is compatible with the Kindle and it will download it just like if you purchased it from Amazon. There are plenty of websites that cater directly to the Kindle, and there is a huge drive to make Project Gutemberg and others fully compatible with the Kindle.
5. Amazon charges you for subscribing to feeds. Or you can use the free tool at Feedbooks. These clever people figured out a way to package an RSS subscription as an eBook, and it has an auto-update link. Open the book from your Kindle, click on Update and it downloads a new version of the file. Tedious? Sure, but it is free.
6. Annoyed about having to connect to your PC just so you can move your content into your Kindle? Don't feel like paying the 10-cent tax? Easy, simply dump your eBook files into a folder in your website, password protect it if you are paranoid, then open it from your basic browser. You can now download your own books from anywhere, which is great if you don't like clutter or in case you delete the wrong book by accident.
Now, of course, it sucks if you are trying to make a buck selling eBooks for the Kindle outside of Amazon and you are using a format that requires the ID of your device. If all you want to do is sell the content, then you might as well go to http://dtp.amazon.com/, list your books for free and let Amazon do all the work in exchange for a cut of the action. Amazon will not charge you for access to the DTP area, or for listing your books, they only take a cut of your sales.
I emailed Amazon's Kindle Feedback address earlier this week to complain about not being able to upload my own files to the storage area (one of my favorite features is that I can re-download my content at will), expecting to get a canned response. I actually got a person to reply to me, so it looks like at least some of those emails are being read. The person that replied hinted that maybe I wanted to send my files through the 10-cent tax generator, but he would still pass my message to the powers-that-be.
The one thing that is still completely unacceptable is that the Kindle client for the iPhone only works with purchased work, you can't add your own books (yet) unless you jailbrake your phone.
Sure, it exists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_night_death_slot) but that doesn't mean that dumping a show on that slot will kill it.
If you want to see something crazy, follow the #dollhouse hash tag on Twitter on Friday nights. People love the show, even if they hate it, they watch it so they can complain about how much it sucks. The same goes for Galactica, even in its death throes, there's a hell of a lot of live Twittering going on while the show is airing.
CBS' Ghost Whisperer and Numb3rs have survived that slot for a long time, but at the same time, the last show that they added was killed in just a few weeks.
The moment of truth is going to be when BSG goes away. If people were watching Dollhouse simply to wait for BSG, then Dollhouse's ratings will take a hell of a dive. If the show stays up, especially after the promised change around episode 6, then maybe if the show is good enough it doesn't matter how you schedule it, as long as you do it.
As for Fringe, I don't know what the hell is their problem, they need to get that show back up immediately. That's the most promising new show we have seen in a while. Geeks love bad science, it gives them a chance to prove that they know more. How many of you have pulled your hair whenever Walter starts spewing out pseudo science crap? I know I do at least once per episode, and my friends that follow the show really like that part of the show.
The dangerous thing is not the DRM itself, but that the company that runs the DRM decides to shut it down. I stand by my original statement that for Amazon to walk away from this is as weird as Apple walking away from digital music.
Maybe a couple of years from now they'll back off DRM, same as Apple eventually did.
This is a publisher issue. When the current W.E.B. Griffin novel was announced about two months ago, it was announced first as hardcover. A few days later they announced it for the Kindle, it was more expensive than the hardcover. Couple of day later it was priced a few dollars under, but still a lot. By the time I paid for mine, it was $9.99, which is what we were told to expect for main releases.
I see it a convenience thing. Tom Clancy finally caved-in (I doubt it was Penguin's fault, since W.E.B. Griffin is with Penguin too and he has been selling on the Kindle for months) and started releasing his catalog. Hunt for Red October is $6.39. Is that fair? I don't know, but it is hopefully the last time I will have to buy that book. I re-read certain novels, to the point that I destroy them so my wife forced me to buy hardcovers, the extra price would account for it lasting as long as 2-3 paperback copies.
A new problem: hundreds of hardcover books, gathering dust and bugs. Wall-to-wall bookshelves are awesome and I am sure there's not a nerd here that would love to have one, but they are a pain in the ass to keep clean and organized. The Kindle solves this for me very well: all my books are online, I don't even need to keep them in my device if I don't want to. And I don't have to worry about deleting a purchased copy by accident.
Just having my library organized that way, and not taking space in my house, and knowing that for the time being Amazon is not going anywhere (Amazon dropping their ebooks push sounds as weird as Apple deciding to walk away from digital music) makes it a little less painful to pay a little more for SOME of these books. And now my wife is hooked on it too, so on the long run I'll probably save money.
What I would really like to see is Amazon to take on the college books scam. I finished college more than 14 years ago, and I still feel like I got raped as far as the cost of my books went. My friends that are currently going through college break my heart when they tell me about what they are paying for their books, it is just unreasonable as hell, especially when the subject matter on some of these doesn't change from year-to-year.
Find topics in numerical analysis, so they know that after all that misery, plus calculus if they carry it into college, most of these problems can be solved with a scientific calculator and some reasonable assumptions.
My brother engineers can probably testify to how infuriating it was to spend those first couple miserable years mastering multi dimensional calculus, only to be shown how there were really damn good approximation algorithms in place for most of these problems. In my case it was twice infuriating, my professor was a drunk, he would verbally abuse anyone that dared walking into his classroom with a calculator that wasn't made by TI, HP or Casio. He did not care about price, so for example you couldn't dazzle him with a $200 HP (his ideal calculator was "the best TI you can find on sale for $20-$25)), but God protect you if you walked in with one of those calculators designed to balance checkbooks, because you wouldn't even get more than 10 precision digits.
Joking aside, try to see if you can find something that has a real world application. I was bored out of my mind because I was being taught calculus concepts in one year and they would not be needed in my major courses for at least two semesters.
The fact that you are considering leaving the fold makes you unreliable. By staying under the promise of more compensation you are reinforcing the idea that you are not to be trusted.
All that you are going to achieve is making it easier to your boss to find your replacement and have you train him/her. You will be out of a job in less than one year. There is a reason why you are leaving after 6 years, just move on and don't look back.
We *can* convert MKV to MP4 already, that's not the issue.
All it takes is anything that knows how to do a video passthrough (like QT Pro + Perian) and convert just the audio. A normal TV episode is usually converted in 5 minutes or less, which is great but still means one thing to do before I can watch it on the 360.
... or at least the ones that handle the media that can be read by the Xbox 360.
Please add MKV support to the Xbox 360. Don't touch anything else.
Thanks!
I don't want these users in my AD.
I am a web developer by trade, and so far one of the most infuriating things that I have to deal with on a weekly basis is that my customers simply can't bring themselves to care enough to remember their admin logins. Every week I have to unlock a handful of administrators. It doesn't matter if I provided them with a proper password rescue option, it is simply too much for them.
The second big problem is that we have multiple branches of certain products running at the same time, so at any given time one of my customers may have to login into her production, staging or 2-3 development servers, each with its own username and password.
We are a .net shop, so my original idea was to use the new membership and role providers and remove the login mechanism from all sites from a given customer. This works, but it is hard to get all sites in line since there is always something else going on that is more important. They still screw it up, but at least they only have to remember one username and password that works at the same level (production, staging, dev, etc.).
When I heard about OpenID I tried to see if I could implement it in any of our sites that use .net 2.0-style security. I was glad to see that somebody already had thought of this, and I found a ready to run library with a very nice login control for .net that uses OpenID.
It wasn't easy, but it was interesting, and within 10 or so hours invested I had:
1. A .net web app that used ANY OpenID instead of the built-in aspnet_* tables hierarchy. .net app that uses the SQL membership/role providers.
2. A recovery page. You type your email address and it emails you a list of any OpenIDs in the system that match that email address.
3. A self-registration page. If you arrive at the web app, and you authenticate through OpenID successfully, and you don't have a local profile, it asks you to fill a quick form.
4. Security roles are used just like any standard
The beauty of it is that I can even run my own OpenID server for my customers. All they would need to remember is that they login by typing a URL like:
userid.ouropenidserver.com
and it would do the rest for them.
One customer, three projects, three environments per project, that's nine login/password pairs that I am expecting them to remember. Instead all they need to remember is the URL and the password. If they lock themselves out, all they need to remember is the email address used to register, which emails them their OpenID URL. If they forget their password, that is handled at the OpenID provider level, not at the end user application.
Even if nobody else in the world uses it, to me it clearly means that I can spend more of my customer's money in building new things instead of on troubleshooting and damage control (even if the two figures are identical, customers will bitch more about paying for repairs than paying for work that can be recognized as new). And it is an easy concept, if they have a Google or AOL account, they already have an OpenID.
Yes, 800 is a very conservative number. On my last two visits to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum annex at Dulles International ( http://flickr.com/photos/pvera/sets/72157594265546348/ ), I shot over 400 frames without even trying. Just walking once through each section was enough to fill the SD in my D50.
1. I did not know I was not supposed to change the orientation of the 360, that left a really nasty scratched out ring about halfway down the radius of the disc (Oblivion). I was never able to buff the scratch out, even with a buffing machine. I always RTFM, and I don't remember a warning on changing the orientation of the console while a disc was inside. I ended up burning my surplus points in Goozex.com to get a replacement disc.
2. I left a disc inside of the Xbox while the house was being fumigated. The poison seeped into the Xbox and somehow the disk soaked it in and the surface became cloudy. No scratches, the surface remained smooth, but it looked pretty fogged. I don't see how I can blame Microsoft for this one, I should had just shut everything down before I left the house.
I totally feel your pain, I served a tour as a lead programmer, then technical manager, then director, then back to lead. Here's some of the things that I learned that weren't the most obvious to my fellow managers in other departments:
1. Protect them. Put a programmer in a position in which he reports to just ONE boss and he'll follow you into hell. If the manager does his job, his programmers can actually spend the time programming instead of getting sucked into a reporting system where they have 8 bosses.
2. Don't waste their time. Corporate is always adding stupid crap that all it ends up doing is slowing down the personnel that are actually producing. Try to cut down on redundant and/or useless reports, non-project/deliverable meetings, etc. Your goal here is to have your people spend as much time as possible billing to a project instead of burning overhead.
3. Detach yourself a little bit. You are not their friend, you are their boss. You don't have to be an ass about it, but you can't hang out with them unless you take out the whole team for food, drinks, whatever. If you want to hang out with people in the same company, find other managers.
4. You can rule with an iron hand, but try not to humiliate people in public. If one of your guys screws up, pull him aside and deal with it in private. Just because you have to adjust the employee doesn't mean you have to add humiliation to the mix. I know too many managers that simply can't understand how crucial this is.
5. Don't obsess over the minutiae that is out of your control. The whole idea of having these senior guys is to have them do the heavy lifting for you, while you steer them in a general direction. Don't bother catching up to whatever technology they are dealing with. You do need to understand its capabilities and its limitations, but you don't need to know how to type the damn code yourself. Again, I know plenty of managers that refuse to let go and end up as horrible micromanagers.
The best way to handle senior people is to tell them what you expect them to deliver, with broad guidance, plus whatever constraints are in place and out of your control. Let them do the work, try not to stand on their way and protect them from people that won't hesitate to make them waste their time.
Boxee runs horribly on my Mac Book Pro Core 2 2.33, 3GB ram. It doesn't run much better on my AppleTV. Maybe I am expecting too much from the AppleTV, but at least the 60 excels at streaming Netflix so I am happy.
On the 360:
1. Media streamed from a mac, thru connect360.
2. Rented media.
On the AppleTV:
1. Media streamed/sync through iTunes.
2. Rented media.
3. Hulu streamed through Boxee.
4. Torrents pulled through Boxee.
5. Youtube videos. My kid adores this feature, he beats the living crap out of it.
I don't even know if the AppleTV with Boxee can stream content that the 360 can pull.
I got two Xbox 360s, two AppleTVs. One set for myself and the wife, the other for my 10-yr old.
My options:
1. transcode content and watch it on the AppleTV. Takes time, and my Turbo.264 hardware encoder is a piece of crap, the new Handbrake works much better without even relying on the dongle. Parental controls are awesome, and content is organized very well.
2. stream content from the mac into the 360 with Connect360. Looks almost identical to #1, without having to transcode. Only thing that sucks is navigating through a lot of content, and there are no parental controls.
3. watch netflix on the mac. Not good enough.
4. watch netflix on the mac on the Parallels 4 side. Not good enough (almost can't tell it apart from #3).
5. watch netflix on the 360. It frickin rocks. Having to go to the website to add to the queue is a minor annoyance but not the end of the world.
6. Renting content on the 360. Works very damn nice, only a bit slow to start if it is HD content. Could use more variety.
7. Renting content on the AppleTV. Also works very nice, but sometimes it takes weeks for new content to show up. They do release at least something every week, but mostly so it looks like they are alive.
I have also used boxee on the AppleTV, and while in theory it worked, it was sloppy and it screwed up with the menu hierarchy. After an hour of playing with it I was annoyed enough to delete it.
I like how the streaming on the 360 works because it takes exactly zero tampering with the 360 to make it happen. All you need is a media pc, or a mac running software impersonating a media pc. Adding boxee to the appleTV was simply scary.
What I really want is for Apple to do exactly the same thing that was done to the 360, add a menu entry for Netflix with a SIMPLE way to authenticate the device (the way this was done in the 360 was just beautiful, just a short, easy to type code) and not a damn thing else.
I am a former alumni of the company that became the company that launched XM as a separate venture, then sucked the parent company dry to get XM up and running. The parent was renamed, and now it seems to be redirected to yet one more company. The ad copy in this current iteration reads the same promises that they were making to the market when I was freshly hired in 1996. If these people are still even remotely connected to what XM is today, then it's probably going to end up as more of the same, merger or else. It is sad because their technical people were top notch, all of this mess was because of the business side of the house.
Same goes for HDTVs.
All HDCP means is that you can't use a pure digital transport, like HDMI, to view content on devices that don't support HDCP.
Even my stupid cable box has DHCP on the DVI output, when I replaced my HDTV over the weekend it refused to work with the new TV because it couldn't complete the HDCP handshake. The new TV was fine, it was able to play a DVD from my Xbox 360 through HDMI. The problem in my case was probably a buggy implementation of the port designated for DVI->HDMI cables.