You can always have the option in a contract for letting just you reuse the code but not the proprietary knowlege that you gained in writing one piece of software for another project, while not making it open source.
For example, if I'm doing web sites and I build a really pimping guestbook (This is a contrived example) I could put a contract option that doesn't let me open-source it, but it does enable me to use the same pimping guestbook on other projects.
Unfortunately, this can be problematic because then everybody will take this option and not the open source option. Depends on if you are doing this for business expediency or open-source correctness.
You can also write useful pieces of software for yourself and then just use them for every client. There, open source would be a good thing because people will see what your code actually looks like and works like.
Real Genius is one of the reasons why I'm such a geek. Val Kilmer was my role model at that age.;)
The thing I liked best about Sneakers was not that it got the tech right. You can't get the tech right in a movie, it seems. But they got the people right. I mean, every Slashdot whacko can identify with Dan Akroyd's character.
Two funny anecdotes...
After War Games aired, people who were going to be telecommuting suddenly weren't allowed because everybody was scared to have a modem attached to the net. I'm not making that up.
And I was having a chat with an AI researcher friend of mine. It turns out that they are doing something just like the matrix to slug brains. They have very very few neurons, so it's pretty easy to hook them up to a simulated body and they are happy and stuff.
You don't NEED anything but a hex editor and an instruction set reference card to do anything.;)
Having said that, UML is one of the tools in the good O-O programmer's toolbox. I don't use it right now because I haven't had a chance to learn it fully. But based on my perusal of the spec, it's quite useful as a structured method of laying out how a system works. That's also because I prefer to not use a tool until I know what I'm doing with it.
It's not a magic bullet that will enable you to solve every problem in a generic fashion that will work all of the time.
At the very least, if one is teaching beginning CS, they should use UML graphs to teach concepts instead of whatever graph notation the professor feels like using. That way, people will be comfortable with UML if they encounter it later on.
I've been using laptops and other portable computing devices for years.
Generally there are a few ways that an LCD will die. None of them have anything to do with the backlight. The backlights on my LCD displays have never failed. My earliest palmtop's case broke so it wouldn't stay open. Not an LCD failure. My next palmtop got smooshed and cracked the screen. My latest palmtop has a nick-mark on the screen because I accidentally dropped something on it. My first laptop had a depression in the screen becaue some @$^$ kicked it, but it was still usable. It finally died when the motherboard stopped working. Also not a LCD failure.
Don't worry about your backlight. Wory about everything else breaking.
Your campus *should* have various recruiting events. Mine does, both through the college of engineering and through the local ACM chapter. If you have an IEEE or ACM chapter, join it.
You also should figure out where you would REALLY like to work and apply there directly. Be agressive about it, but not annoying. I got one internship by convincing them that they should hire an intern for the summer.
Unfortunately, you have 2 things working against you for this summer. First, people are having harder times finding employment. There are less internships out there this year than there were last year.
Second, you are starting late. You should have started several months ago to search for internships.
From what I understand, it makes a lot of sense for some problems. Like, hard problems.
Basicly, a FPGA can take up the properties of any chip that can be defined by VHDL or other such languages, with some restrictions, of course. So, theoretically, you use every last square inch of silicon for the problem at hand, minus whatever is there to make it reconfigurable.
So that's nice, because if you are doing floating point problems, you don't really need the integer unit. Things like that.
However, I suspect that the thing will, at least in the short term, be a pain in the arse to program efficently (Given that it's a completely different paradigm) and will probably be for specialized applications that suck on an ordinary computer.
And it isn't something that just one company thought up. It's been in the cookers in the academic part of the world for 5-6 years at least.
I mean, the best part about it is that all of your parts are off-the-shelf and cheap...;)
How about we do patents sorta like Jurry duty. The Patent Office goes through the reputable jurried journals in a variety of different areas and makes a list. Then they pick randomly from the list a team of PhD's in the different areas. Each PhD would need to review X patents and give opinions. Put Y PhD per patent to ensure that there is enough difference in opinion.
The problem, of course, is that every quack-infested medical journal and every whacko PhD out there would insist that their publications would be included in the search. Which would then mean that they would need legal standards -- perhaps codifying that certain orginizations like the AMA, ACM, IEEE, etc. would need to approve of the journal, and that the PhD would have to be from a university with accreditation.
There are various legal avenues you can investigate. Any novel ideas can be patented and the rest locked up under a trade secret that interested parties need to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement on, as was stated before.
Why do I get the idea that the poser is trying to create some sort of weapon or another distasteful invention? Disruptive technology? Amoral company to invest in it?
I guess I should have seen this one comming, especially after the crew in the UIUC ACM's Be Users Group slowly dissapeared.
Remember, however, that this isn't a "Be Is Going Out Of Business" post. This is a "Be Is Out Of Money" post. And the ever-so-flamboyant Jean-Louis Gassee has always kept goalposts where they have until some date to make some money or else they fold. They may very well get jacked up.
The problem, of course, is that the BeOS itself, as a desktop OS, is not a viable concern anymore. Be didn't manage to grab the desktop mindshare, and instead, Linux is grabbing it. They were going for the multimedia market initially, but nobody ported any really good graphical tools over, which killed that avenue of expansion.
So now BeIA is the last best hope for BeOS. Which is highly dependent on a bunch of other companies wanting to buy it. Except that these other companies are also enthralled with Linux.
I don't have too much confidence in the ability of an Open BeOS to succeed. First, part of the reason for why BeOS is good is the careful and measured design. The success of an Open BeOS is dependent on Gassee being able to still guide the process or upon a new Linus-like cat-herding leader to take up the reigns and make sure that Open BeOS is done right. Second, there could be lots of patent/intellectual property/copyright issues that prevent them from opening up the code. Which means that they need to release a stripped version of BeOS that will require developers to re-implement functionality chunks.
I personally wish that Amiga, Be, and SGI had merged a few years back. But that's blue-sky and slightly irrational.
I suspect that what AOL really ought to do is "certify" certain open-source clients. Then make sure that all of the "certified" open source clients have ad banners, just like the real AIM.
And they could even use that to give the shaft to Micro$oft.;)
Of course, that's blue-sky dreaming. And everybody else has suggested the appropriate workaround -- make your users keep AIM.EXE in a specific location and/or query the server.. God I love machines that are owned by the user and can be tampered with!;)
Could be made to work, but...
on
DVDs On DAT?
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· Score: 2
It could be made to work. The DVD transfer rate is 1.32 megs/sec, so you need at least that much. Looking at the specs for Seagate DDS drives, they should have enough transfer, but you need to get a pretty high-end drive. Most of the cheaper drives don't have enough transfer rate. Remember that they generally show the transfer rate specs as compressed, and that's not going to work with already compressed MPEG2 data too well.
I have a sneaking suspicion, however, given that the cheapest DAT drive that's fast enough is over $1000 MSRP, you might get better results just using a DVD-RAM drive for your MPEG-ripping enjoyment. The media's either as expensive or a little more expensive than DAT (You can get DDS2 and DDS3 media, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the DDS4 -- $19 on PriceWatch -- media is required to get the required transfer rate) and the drives are $300-400.
So, really, the DAT drive seems to be a better deal. Unless you already have the drive, it's not worth getting one.
I've actually wanted one of those boxes for a while.
I would say that there is a LOT of potential there. You could have it synch with your addressbook and read the caller ID data. Thus, you would be able to tag who called and e-mail you that information.
I'd say that your best bet is to encode it in some sort of well-compressed file format, once you get it off of the modem. MPEG layer 3 would work just about anywhere, so you'd probably want to just use that as the file format.
I would say that for everything but the actual MP3 audio, and perhaps even the audio, you might just want to use PostGreSQL to store the data. It's accessible under Linux, and it's also accessible via ODBC with PsqlODBC. That way, you have the option for multiple interfaces. You can write a windows and Linux binary client, plus a web-client (Which is nice if you are at the office and want to check the home phone messages).
That will be nice when they actually get it out and there are a few advances in memory. Unfortunately, it will probably not have the cool sort of holographic effects that they had in Star Wars and Star Trek.
But I bet that the folks who do military-grade radars will love it. Imagine being able to view the exact 3D position of an aircraft instead of just looking at the overhead view.
It's just odd to see that they are using SCSI to do the interfacing. SCSI's a lot slower than the AGP port, and you are transfering several hundered times the data..;)
Basicly, assume that they are trying to shaft you in various polite and businesslike ways.
The worst they can do if you ask for more money is tell you no. Always remember that. They will almost always offer you less than they will pay, generally in case you do demand more.
You also might want to have a lawyer take a peek at your contract in general. Sometimes contracts are not worth signing, if you are liable for more damages than you are paid. But contracts are boilerplate that is negotiable, so you can always try to get around that by having your lawyer creatively modify the meaning of a clause. The biggest bear is the recent influx of liability causes, which state that if somebody sues them, you generally end up footing the bill. Those can really get you.
I haven't heard of such a box and I'm not sure if anybody's made one yet. There are building security systems, but they generally require a whole specilized set of hardware.
On the other hand, there are options. The best one would be to get a USB or PS2 magstripe reader and attach it to an embeddable computer -- Check EMJ Embedded for systems. It's $500-600 for a system with USB, Ethernet, serial ports, and a decently fast Pentium processor. That should get you exactly what you want.
It's not as bad as you think. Remember that, as a rule, good non-media Science Fiction and Fantasy is not really a mass-market item. Which means that you don't have the massive lawyers scouting for intelectual property violations, because, in most cases, it will not be worth it. So you probably won't have a Harry Potter-style crackdown on fan sites.
Now, I think that, given the current situation, your best bet is to go for a real publisher. A real publisher gives you recognition that publishing online doesn't. I can read stuff online, but since there is an editor at the publishing company sifting through all of the crap, I tend to like stuff that I can purchase as a book. That way, I miss out on the mounds of author's (generally sexual) repression mascarading as fiction, poorly written trek fanfics, people with inflated egos writing in baby-talk, etc.
I don't think a pre-sale buzz is very good. Just about every SF and Fantasy novel is purchased by the publisher without much buzz. The only buzz that helps is if you have shorter works published in SF magazines.
Now, once the book is on sale, promote the hell out of it on your own. Make an official site for the book. Do signings and stuff.
Check out your contract. You are going to have to involve a lawyer if you actually get a deal, so this won't be an extra cost. Try to make sure that you have some amount of control over the whole thing, even if you don't get everything you want. For example, you probably wouldn't get too much resistance to them letting you put the book up online some amount of time after the book goes off the market. Things like that.
Make sure that you pay nothing to get your book published. Any reputable agent gets nothing up front, just a percentage of your royalties. Any reputable publisher will give you an advance and royalties. Make sure that you will receive your money.
Right now, sad to say, your best bet is the big SF/Fantasy publishing houses. Maybe in a few years, the online places will have something good, but that day is not here.
There's always getting a case with coasters on the bottom. I've wanted one of those for years. No lifting, and you can just put the monitor and stuff on top of it..;)
The best thing to do with annoying contracts is to X out the part that is too strictly worded and replace it with something that is ethical, fair, and non-restrictive.
And don't argue the point with the company lawyer. Just get your boss to sign it. The lawyers are paid to screw you over with contracts. Your boss is just there to work you to death.
I mean, a good example was my IP agreement. It said that anything I did in my spare time was their property. I replaced it with anything done in my spare time with no company resources, with the specific example of my 3D engine, belonged to me. The wording was a little vauge, so I might have not needed to do that, but it was a good measure of safety.
The same thing goes for non-compete clauses. You adjust the meaning to something that is fair. Because, face it, it's not exactly fair to your employer if they pay $10,000 training you in SAP or some similar valuable skillset and you quit the day after you are finished being trained. It isn't fair for you to take proprietary company information with you when you leave.
I don't look upon it as planning to quit. If your employer is free to fire you at will, you should be free to quit at will and not be burdened by unnecessary restrictions. Your employer should entice you to stay with benefits, not slavery.
Some of he parts are available, like laptop-sized CD/DVD drives, for example.
The problem is that laptops are too much trouble to customize, for a number of reasons.
The main one is that, in order to fit all of the pieces in a small case, everything has to fit together like a puzzle. There is no chance of this being standardized any time soon. Every model fits together in a slightly different fashion because the size requirements change.
Next, the parts are rather fragile. Sure laptops are getting pretty durable, but they use tiny ribon cables inside and such things. You really need to know what you are doing if you want to mess with the innards of them.
Finaly, laptops are a different business model than PCs. People don't upgrade laptops and they don't buy cheap ones, which is the main two reasons why you can buy the parts.
I'm a total advocate of the custom PC, but even I purchase off-the-shelf laptops. It's just not even worth bothering with.
Having said that, You might want to check out the related market of embedded computers. All of the PC/104, Single Board, etc. systems that are out there could be modified into a working laptop.
Well, first, you should probably check out DNA Lounge. jwz (of Mozilla fame) is working on it, and he has some interesting notions.
I think that one of the important features is that it's somewhere where geeks can socialize offline. I've been to cyber-cafes and they are pretty lame. I think that jwz had it right when he decided to not be a cyber-cafe, while still retaining the geekish computer-centric attitude.
I think that you are on the right track with the video games. That appeals to the population you want and enables you to have more than just a terminal room.
I would say that you should have music at your club, since most geeks that I know will really appreciate it. See about getting live bands and DJs. But, based on my geek-centric concert activities, you want to turn the volume down below the earsplitting level, especially off of the dance floor. Most of my geek friends seem to dislike places where they can't hold a conversation. But you might as well invest in excess capacity so that you have the potential to crank up if I'm making a generilization that doesn't hold.
You didn't mention where you were located. Location is very important, because you need to be in a place where there are a good number of geeks. Bay Area good, Podunk Illinois bad.
Make it no smoking and have a wide assortment of drinks -- both alchaholic and non. Most geeks tend to have more diverse tastes in both categories, plus a lot of geeks don't smoke. You can always tweak both depending on demand.
And finally, make it look geek. Not cheezy-geek, but geek-chic. Comfortable, yet futuristic. You get the idea.
Well, I see that somebody already posted about where to get LCD screens..
For the actual CPU module, I suggest you check out a place like EMJ Embedded systems (or a better deal you find via the web -- They are the only URL I've got).
Really, one of the MIPS or StrongARM heavily integrated processors with the LCD controller integrated would be rather nice. But it seems that nobody's selling general purpose SBCs based on those chips -- at least not as far as I can tell from my limited glances. Linux Devices might have some information you want, however.
Hope that helps. I've been yearning for inexpensive devices like you are wanting that because I'd love to put that sort of feature into my game.
Slashdot Mirror
You can always have the option in a contract for letting just you reuse the code but not the proprietary knowlege that you gained in writing one piece of software for another project, while not making it open source.
For example, if I'm doing web sites and I build a really pimping guestbook (This is a contrived example) I could put a contract option that doesn't let me open-source it, but it does enable me to use the same pimping guestbook on other projects.
Unfortunately, this can be problematic because then everybody will take this option and not the open source option. Depends on if you are doing this for business expediency or open-source correctness.
You can also write useful pieces of software for yourself and then just use them for every client. There, open source would be a good thing because people will see what your code actually looks like and works like.
The experts pretty much agree that it's very very unlikely that the russians could have mounted a suborbital program.
I personally am inclined to agree with them. They would have turned up a body by now. I suspect that the engineer is looking for cash.
Real Genius is one of the reasons why I'm such a geek. Val Kilmer was my role model at that age. ;)
The thing I liked best about Sneakers was not that it got the tech right. You can't get the tech right in a movie, it seems. But they got the people right. I mean, every Slashdot whacko can identify with Dan Akroyd's character.
Two funny anecdotes...
After War Games aired, people who were going to be telecommuting suddenly weren't allowed because everybody was scared to have a modem attached to the net. I'm not making that up.
And I was having a chat with an AI researcher friend of mine. It turns out that they are doing something just like the matrix to slug brains. They have very very few neurons, so it's pretty easy to hook them up to a simulated body and they are happy and stuff.
You don't NEED anything but a hex editor and an instruction set reference card to do anything. ;)
Having said that, UML is one of the tools in the good O-O programmer's toolbox. I don't use it right now because I haven't had a chance to learn it fully. But based on my perusal of the spec, it's quite useful as a structured method of laying out how a system works. That's also because I prefer to not use a tool until I know what I'm doing with it.
It's not a magic bullet that will enable you to solve every problem in a generic fashion that will work all of the time.
At the very least, if one is teaching beginning CS, they should use UML graphs to teach concepts instead of whatever graph notation the professor feels like using. That way, people will be comfortable with UML if they encounter it later on.
I've been using laptops and other portable computing devices for years.
Generally there are a few ways that an LCD will die. None of them have anything to do with the backlight. The backlights on my LCD displays have never failed. My earliest palmtop's case broke so it wouldn't stay open. Not an LCD failure. My next palmtop got smooshed and cracked the screen. My latest palmtop has a nick-mark on the screen because I accidentally dropped something on it. My first laptop had a depression in the screen becaue some @$^$ kicked it, but it was still usable. It finally died when the motherboard stopped working. Also not a LCD failure.
Don't worry about your backlight. Wory about everything else breaking.
Your campus *should* have various recruiting events. Mine does, both through the college of engineering and through the local ACM chapter. If you have an IEEE or ACM chapter, join it.
You also should figure out where you would REALLY like to work and apply there directly. Be agressive about it, but not annoying. I got one internship by convincing them that they should hire an intern for the summer.
Unfortunately, you have 2 things working against you for this summer. First, people are having harder times finding employment. There are less internships out there this year than there were last year.
Second, you are starting late. You should have started several months ago to search for internships.
But good luck, otherwise.
From what I understand, it makes a lot of sense for some problems. Like, hard problems.
;)
Basicly, a FPGA can take up the properties of any chip that can be defined by VHDL or other such languages, with some restrictions, of course. So, theoretically, you use every last square inch of silicon for the problem at hand, minus whatever is there to make it reconfigurable.
So that's nice, because if you are doing floating point problems, you don't really need the integer unit. Things like that.
However, I suspect that the thing will, at least in the short term, be a pain in the arse to program efficently (Given that it's a completely different paradigm) and will probably be for specialized applications that suck on an ordinary computer.
And it isn't something that just one company thought up. It's been in the cookers in the academic part of the world for 5-6 years at least.
I mean, the best part about it is that all of your parts are off-the-shelf and cheap...
I just had an idea... ;)
How about we do patents sorta like Jurry duty. The Patent Office goes through the reputable jurried journals in a variety of different areas and makes a list. Then they pick randomly from the list a team of PhD's in the different areas. Each PhD would need to review X patents and give opinions. Put Y PhD per patent to ensure that there is enough difference in opinion.
The problem, of course, is that every quack-infested medical journal and every whacko PhD out there would insist that their publications would be included in the search. Which would then mean that they would need legal standards -- perhaps codifying that certain orginizations like the AMA, ACM, IEEE, etc. would need to approve of the journal, and that the PhD would have to be from a university with accreditation.
There are various legal avenues you can investigate. Any novel ideas can be patented and the rest locked up under a trade secret that interested parties need to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement on, as was stated before.
Why do I get the idea that the poser is trying to create some sort of weapon or another distasteful invention? Disruptive technology? Amoral company to invest in it?
I guess I should have seen this one comming, especially after the crew in the UIUC ACM's Be Users Group slowly dissapeared.
Remember, however, that this isn't a "Be Is Going Out Of Business" post. This is a "Be Is Out Of Money" post. And the ever-so-flamboyant Jean-Louis Gassee has always kept goalposts where they have until some date to make some money or else they fold. They may very well get jacked up.
The problem, of course, is that the BeOS itself, as a desktop OS, is not a viable concern anymore. Be didn't manage to grab the desktop mindshare, and instead, Linux is grabbing it. They were going for the multimedia market initially, but nobody ported any really good graphical tools over, which killed that avenue of expansion.
So now BeIA is the last best hope for BeOS. Which is highly dependent on a bunch of other companies wanting to buy it. Except that these other companies are also enthralled with Linux.
I don't have too much confidence in the ability of an Open BeOS to succeed. First, part of the reason for why BeOS is good is the careful and measured design. The success of an Open BeOS is dependent on Gassee being able to still guide the process or upon a new Linus-like cat-herding leader to take up the reigns and make sure that Open BeOS is done right. Second, there could be lots of patent/intellectual property/copyright issues that prevent them from opening up the code. Which means that they need to release a stripped version of BeOS that will require developers to re-implement functionality chunks.
I personally wish that Amiga, Be, and SGI had merged a few years back. But that's blue-sky and slightly irrational.
If that article is, in fact, true (I have some doubts about the veracity of it)...
;)
Obviously, straightforward scams like getting AOL accounts and cc numbers are much more productive than stupid pyramic schemes.
I suspect that what AOL really ought to do is "certify" certain open-source clients. Then make sure that all of the "certified" open source clients have ad banners, just like the real AIM.
;)
;)
And they could even use that to give the shaft to Micro$oft.
Of course, that's blue-sky dreaming. And everybody else has suggested the appropriate workaround -- make your users keep AIM.EXE in a specific location and/or query the server.. God I love machines that are owned by the user and can be tampered with!
It could be made to work. The DVD transfer rate is 1.32 megs/sec, so you need at least that much. Looking at the specs for Seagate DDS drives, they should have enough transfer, but you need to get a pretty high-end drive. Most of the cheaper drives don't have enough transfer rate. Remember that they generally show the transfer rate specs as compressed, and that's not going to work with already compressed MPEG2 data too well.
I have a sneaking suspicion, however, given that the cheapest DAT drive that's fast enough is over $1000 MSRP, you might get better results just using a DVD-RAM drive for your MPEG-ripping enjoyment. The media's either as expensive or a little more expensive than DAT (You can get DDS2 and DDS3 media, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the DDS4 -- $19 on PriceWatch -- media is required to get the required transfer rate) and the drives are $300-400.
So, really, the DAT drive seems to be a better deal. Unless you already have the drive, it's not worth getting one.
I've actually wanted one of those boxes for a while.
I would say that there is a LOT of potential there. You could have it synch with your addressbook and read the caller ID data. Thus, you would be able to tag who called and e-mail you that information.
I'd say that your best bet is to encode it in some sort of well-compressed file format, once you get it off of the modem. MPEG layer 3 would work just about anywhere, so you'd probably want to just use that as the file format.
I would say that for everything but the actual MP3 audio, and perhaps even the audio, you might just want to use PostGreSQL to store the data. It's accessible under Linux, and it's also accessible via ODBC with PsqlODBC. That way, you have the option for multiple interfaces. You can write a windows and Linux binary client, plus a web-client (Which is nice if you are at the office and want to check the home phone messages).
And, of course, check out Freshmeat to see if there's anything useful. I found KPhoneCenter and the VoiceModem Kit.
It's interesting that they made such a big announcement that their product actually works.. ;)
It's even funnier to see what their 2D Test Pattern is. ;)
That will be nice when they actually get it out and there are a few advances in memory. Unfortunately, it will probably not have the cool sort of holographic effects that they had in Star Wars and Star Trek.
But I bet that the folks who do military-grade radars will love it. Imagine being able to view the exact 3D position of an aircraft instead of just looking at the overhead view.
It's just odd to see that they are using SCSI to do the interfacing. SCSI's a lot slower than the AGP port, and you are transfering several hundered times the data.. ;)
Basicly, assume that they are trying to shaft you in various polite and businesslike ways.
The worst they can do if you ask for more money is tell you no. Always remember that. They will almost always offer you less than they will pay, generally in case you do demand more.
You also might want to have a lawyer take a peek at your contract in general. Sometimes contracts are not worth signing, if you are liable for more damages than you are paid. But contracts are boilerplate that is negotiable, so you can always try to get around that by having your lawyer creatively modify the meaning of a clause. The biggest bear is the recent influx of liability causes, which state that if somebody sues them, you generally end up footing the bill. Those can really get you.
I haven't heard of such a box and I'm not sure if anybody's made one yet. There are building security systems, but they generally require a whole specilized set of hardware.
On the other hand, there are options. The best one would be to get a USB or PS2 magstripe reader and attach it to an embeddable computer -- Check EMJ Embedded for systems. It's $500-600 for a system with USB, Ethernet, serial ports, and a decently fast Pentium processor. That should get you exactly what you want.
It's not as bad as you think. Remember that, as a rule, good non-media Science Fiction and Fantasy is not really a mass-market item. Which means that you don't have the massive lawyers scouting for intelectual property violations, because, in most cases, it will not be worth it. So you probably won't have a Harry Potter-style crackdown on fan sites.
Now, I think that, given the current situation, your best bet is to go for a real publisher. A real publisher gives you recognition that publishing online doesn't. I can read stuff online, but since there is an editor at the publishing company sifting through all of the crap, I tend to like stuff that I can purchase as a book. That way, I miss out on the mounds of author's (generally sexual) repression mascarading as fiction, poorly written trek fanfics, people with inflated egos writing in baby-talk, etc.
I don't think a pre-sale buzz is very good. Just about every SF and Fantasy novel is purchased by the publisher without much buzz. The only buzz that helps is if you have shorter works published in SF magazines.
Now, once the book is on sale, promote the hell out of it on your own. Make an official site for the book. Do signings and stuff.
Check out your contract. You are going to have to involve a lawyer if you actually get a deal, so this won't be an extra cost. Try to make sure that you have some amount of control over the whole thing, even if you don't get everything you want. For example, you probably wouldn't get too much resistance to them letting you put the book up online some amount of time after the book goes off the market. Things like that.
Make sure that you pay nothing to get your book published. Any reputable agent gets nothing up front, just a percentage of your royalties. Any reputable publisher will give you an advance and royalties. Make sure that you will receive your money.
Right now, sad to say, your best bet is the big SF/Fantasy publishing houses. Maybe in a few years, the online places will have something good, but that day is not here.
That's what I've been doing, except that one time my tower took a spill. Thankfully, nothing was damaged.
;)
I personally think that tweaking the eject spring in a floppy drive so that it goes flying across the room is signifigantly funnier, BTW.
Yes, I did mean casters.
;)
Why would you put a system with casters on top of your desk, out of curiosity? I keep my tower under the desk.
Besides, most good casters have a brake. The bad casters, of course, just break.
There's always getting a case with coasters on the bottom. I've wanted one of those for years. No lifting, and you can just put the monitor and stuff on top of it.. ;)
IANAL, but I have one in the family.
The best thing to do with annoying contracts is to X out the part that is too strictly worded and replace it with something that is ethical, fair, and non-restrictive.
And don't argue the point with the company lawyer. Just get your boss to sign it. The lawyers are paid to screw you over with contracts. Your boss is just there to work you to death.
I mean, a good example was my IP agreement. It said that anything I did in my spare time was their property. I replaced it with anything done in my spare time with no company resources, with the specific example of my 3D engine, belonged to me. The wording was a little vauge, so I might have not needed to do that, but it was a good measure of safety.
The same thing goes for non-compete clauses. You adjust the meaning to something that is fair. Because, face it, it's not exactly fair to your employer if they pay $10,000 training you in SAP or some similar valuable skillset and you quit the day after you are finished being trained. It isn't fair for you to take proprietary company information with you when you leave.
I don't look upon it as planning to quit. If your employer is free to fire you at will, you should be free to quit at will and not be burdened by unnecessary restrictions. Your employer should entice you to stay with benefits, not slavery.
Some of he parts are available, like laptop-sized CD/DVD drives, for example.
The problem is that laptops are too much trouble to customize, for a number of reasons.
The main one is that, in order to fit all of the pieces in a small case, everything has to fit together like a puzzle. There is no chance of this being standardized any time soon. Every model fits together in a slightly different fashion because the size requirements change.
Next, the parts are rather fragile. Sure laptops are getting pretty durable, but they use tiny ribon cables inside and such things. You really need to know what you are doing if you want to mess with the innards of them.
Finaly, laptops are a different business model than PCs. People don't upgrade laptops and they don't buy cheap ones, which is the main two reasons why you can buy the parts.
I'm a total advocate of the custom PC, but even I purchase off-the-shelf laptops. It's just not even worth bothering with.
Having said that, You might want to check out the related market of embedded computers. All of the PC/104, Single Board, etc. systems that are out there could be modified into a working laptop.
Well, first, you should probably check out DNA Lounge. jwz (of Mozilla fame) is working on it, and he has some interesting notions.
I think that one of the important features is that it's somewhere where geeks can socialize offline. I've been to cyber-cafes and they are pretty lame. I think that jwz had it right when he decided to not be a cyber-cafe, while still retaining the geekish computer-centric attitude.
I think that you are on the right track with the video games. That appeals to the population you want and enables you to have more than just a terminal room.
I would say that you should have music at your club, since most geeks that I know will really appreciate it. See about getting live bands and DJs. But, based on my geek-centric concert activities, you want to turn the volume down below the earsplitting level, especially off of the dance floor. Most of my geek friends seem to dislike places where they can't hold a conversation. But you might as well invest in excess capacity so that you have the potential to crank up if I'm making a generilization that doesn't hold.
You didn't mention where you were located. Location is very important, because you need to be in a place where there are a good number of geeks. Bay Area good, Podunk Illinois bad.
Make it no smoking and have a wide assortment of drinks -- both alchaholic and non. Most geeks tend to have more diverse tastes in both categories, plus a lot of geeks don't smoke. You can always tweak both depending on demand.
And finally, make it look geek. Not cheezy-geek, but geek-chic. Comfortable, yet futuristic. You get the idea.
Well, I see that somebody already posted about where to get LCD screens..
For the actual CPU module, I suggest you check out a place like EMJ Embedded systems (or a better deal you find via the web -- They are the only URL I've got).
Really, one of the MIPS or StrongARM heavily integrated processors with the LCD controller integrated would be rather nice. But it seems that nobody's selling general purpose SBCs based on those chips -- at least not as far as I can tell from my limited glances. Linux Devices might have some information you want, however.
Hope that helps. I've been yearning for inexpensive devices like you are wanting that because I'd love to put that sort of feature into my game.