I'm sorry, did he mention how he plans to make money? Surely this isn't the new model for web publishing if there is no revenue stream. And where he says "if people give away too many copies of the story for free", I have to think of comparisons to King's approach with The Plant, which as we all know was dumb:).
Also, what sort of formats will he be dealing with? Will it be a nasty IE-only site loaded up with Quicktime and Flash5 movies? If he makes it downloadable will it be in a nice portable format that I could use in my Rocket eBook, for example? That's what I think of when I see "downloadable format". (FYI, I'm reading King's traditional new novel Dreamcatcher that way.)
...it was an experiment. What contributions have you made to the electronic publishing arena? Anything, smart or otherwise? The only way to determine what will work and what won't is to have the testicular fortitude to try it. King was in a position to do it. Rumor among the publishing circles, by the way, is that he got bored with the story, not that the revenue model wasn't working. He's opened the door to everybody who was afraid to be first. Now we'll see some more experiments that might work out better.
On a different note, I wish Williams would hurry up and finish the Otherland series so I can stop buying the damn things. I don't like them anymore, but I feel that I've already invested so much time and money in the first 3 books that I have to see it through to the end.
Have you explored the web publishing options? You'd be surprised how active that realm is. And there's no rules against promoting yourself, either. Get your book onto a web site someplace, then start putting the name of the book (and a URL) into your sig. Now, go about your business. You'll drum up some pretty good traffic, I bet.
And without offending too many people, which is always nice. Just try to keep the sig under 4 lines:).
If you're publishing it electronically, then make up a PDF version and ship it off to lots of review sites. That's also more press for you.
In short, just getting it published isn't the end of the road. You still have to work to get your name recognized and get the eyeballs.
Decide what behaviors you want to reward. Examples:
Peer recognition. You want people who are respected by their teammates.
Role model. Do you have certain processes or paperwork that need to get done as part of projects? Do you have some people that do all the paperwork, and others that always skip it?
Being well rounded. Recognition often goes to coders who also have the communication skills to talk to the customer. Or who can write up a proposal. Or run a brown-bag lunch on a new tech topic for their teammates.
Hitting deadlines is good, don't blow it off because it might encourage bad code. If your process is in place then sloppy code won't pass your QA and your developers will know this. They need to hit the deadline AND pass inspection.
Find something you like to do. Find a place where you can do it. The more comfortable you are with that place as "your place", the more confident you will be when potential mates walk in the door. If you go to strange places with mating on the mind, then more often than not you'll be on the other person's turf, and it's much harder to 'make your move'.
Examples?
Bookstore. Everybody says this, but personally I never had it work. These days you can find an excuse for wandering around the store for a long time. When you see somebody you like, who happens to be in a section you know, sidle up near him/her to look at something different. When he/she picks up a book you know, offer a comment. See what happens. (I actually had this done to me once when I walked into a bookstore wearing a "Tao of Pooh" shirt. Two girls came over and asked me to explain it.)
Pool hall? A little harder if you don't like drinking since most of them are in bars. But you'll certainly see lots of members of the opposite sex. (I asked out a regular waitress at my regular place . She said no. But at least I got a chance to ask.)
Theatre. This is a little different, since you don't go to theatre to meet people. But, if you're experienced at going to theatre, then you have something to talk about when you need to come up with a date idea in a hurry. Example:
"Oh, you work in town? Do you ever get over to the theatre district?"
"yes, I'm going to see Les Mis next month."
"Ever see Blue Man Group?"
"No, not yet, but I want to."
"Want to go with me?"
"Yes."
I can confirm that one works -- three years later I married her.
Remember to ask yourself how geeky you want to get. That's why I threw the theatre in there. There's no rule that says geeks can only meet at sci-fi conventions. If you're a geek that happens to also like cars you might find a mate at a car show.
For a launch party a few years ago our bosses rented out a cyber cafe in Harvard Square. We spent a few hours having beer and wine, hot appetizers, and getting a chance to shoot our coworkers in a massive quake game. The big bosses (like senior VP level) even sat in and we got to frag their sorry asses.
A few years later we wanted to do it again, but the place had closed. Seems like you could make good money if you were prepared to rent yourself out as one of your main revenue streams.
Seems like a logical place to start would be Sears or Best Buy or some other store that uses them. Walk up to a register (or buy something) and see i there's a brand name on the scanner. If not, flip it over. I expect the cashier won't care. Find a company name or two and a quick web search should do the rest.
No. You're mistaken. You compare "install Linux" to "use Windows". You think most people can install Windows themselves? They can't. They rely on whatever comes with the computer. Many don't even differentiate the OS from the hardware. And MS created a monopoly for itself at the computer manufacturer level back in the late 80's early 90's with the predatory practices that eventually caused them to settle their original DOJ case.
I think that Microsoft has been behaving on the borderline for a long time. When was the first case against them, back in 1994? Just because they settled it doesn't mean the damage wasn't already done. They had an almost insurmountable head start. They pretty much admitted that they had been using predatory tactics to license their OS. The agreement that they reached with the DOJ during that case was a farce that allowed them to continue what they were doing, just with a small twist. If all the major computer manufacturers were given the deal "Sure, you can have windows at $X, but if you agree to put windows on every single computer you sell you can have it at $X/2," then they really had no choice. That's completely different from volume pricing. That's anti competitive.
It's reasonable to think that throughout the 80's and early 90's the only way for a person to research a computer was to go down to the local retail computer store and ask. What would they have seen? Windows, and Mac. Maybe OS/2, and of course a few flavors of DOS. How many people knew how to update an operating system, though? The OS makers had to rely on getting their product installed by the computer makers if they were going to make any inroads. And MS closed all those doors with their predatory agreements.
What bothers me most is when people point to the popularity of Windows as a way of saying "Look, Microsoft was good for the people." The only reason that this is demonstrably good for the consumer is because there's nothing else to compare it to! Let's look at what else MS has given us:
The ILOVEYOU virus and its infinite children. Though MS didn't write the virus, the existence of the hole combined with the monopoly they have in the OS market are what really caused the problem. If somebody wrote a virus for a tiny hole in BeOS would it have affected the world like this one did?
Incompatible file formats between its own products year after year. I love it when Office97 tells me "Oh, not everyone has Office97, you should save in Office95 format."
Machines that you expect to have to reboot every day.
People *ignore* these things, because they figure that it is just par for the course. Know what? It's not. I call it demonstrable harm to the consumer. People hate Windows, we know that. All day, on the subway, at lunch, in meetings, you can hear people commiserating over their latest crash or virus. But they never blame Microsoft. They never say "I'm not going to use MS products." Why?
Because they don't even know that other options exist, for the most part.
Why? Because MS is a monopoly.
Isn't that demonstrable harm to the consumer? This is not a case of "what they don't know won't hurt them". They don't know that better solutions exist. It's hurting them, they just don't know it.
I do not run Microsoft products. I pay less for hardware and software, my computer runs faster, and crashes less. That, too, would seem like demonstrable harm by Microsoft. When I point out Linux to users of Windows they do not argue the qualities of the software with me. Know what they say? "I have to run Office2000 because everyone else does." That, again, is a sign of the monopoly that MS has.
Toss out the applications, unless it's some industry specific thing. I don't care if you can use Word and Excel. Are you looking for a secretarial position?
List important skills up top in summary. Make sure that all skills you list are backed up by experience in the Work blocks! Don't say "Prolog" and then fail to tell me where and how you used Prolog. I will ask, and if you say "Oh, nothing much, I just downloaded a free Prolog compiler and hacked around a bit" I'm going to move on thinking that you tried to mislead me.
You're not expert in everything you think you are. Prune. I did a PKI system 4 years ago, and haven't really touched the field since then. So it goes low on my skill set, maybe off altogether if I think I don't have space.
If you're all over the place in your experience, then think about where you want your career going and shape it in that direction. A friend of mine with 10+ years in the biz showed me his resume the other day and asked what I thought of the "flow". It was very clear that he saw himself as a technical lead, specializing in Oracle, and all of his experience showed how he'd gotten to that position. It did NOT scream "I'm an ubergeek who can do anything you put in front of me."
Hobbies, personal, and all that other stuff is important and people will look at it. But it doesn't have to be on the first page. If you're going on that old "Make it fit in one page" rule, skip it, I don't really think it's valid for people with significant experience. It's valid for kids fresh out of college, but that's about it. 2 pages is fine. More than 2 and you start to lose your reader, I think.
Ask yourself "What's the thing that I'll bring to the table that is uniquely me?" Maybe your flexibility with new technologies is what yuo want to sell. Use that. Or maybe you really see yourself more as a mentor to younger geeks. Those are the sort of things that are not in the job description, but give the interviewer a good feeling for who you are over and above your technical skills.
Time starts to become your enemy. In my position I interview people for web positions. Every now and then I see a resume that goes back to the 1980's. While sometimes it's interesting to see a person's background (you worked on military simulators? Cooool), it's not worth spending an extra page or two. Especially if there's stuff *after* that that (like education, personal) you expect me to get to.
Ok, your file exists in a finite system where you have 8bit bytes:
Look for magic numbers and header info to see if the file is of a known format.
If not, execute rot X on it.
Repeat while X
It would be a quick test. Does that imply that the person knew you'd rot'd it first? Nope -- just that if you've got a finite variable over which you can test (mod the size of your byte) then at one point or another you should test it.
Even in an astronomically huge system, that's a good place to start. When you have a crypto puzzle in a magazine to solve, what's the first letter you look for? A or I, because you know that those are your 1-letter words (assuming that you know that your puzzle consists of english words in the first place). Then E because it's most common, and so on. Wherever you can get a hook, you don't lose anything by trying it out.
Think of it as a variation on "your security is only as strong as the weakest link." In this case, what could give you away is the 8bit nature of your data. Not to mention potential patterns in the nature of the image (don't many image file formats have large sections of constant data if you were to dump them out?)
Actually you proved my point. Just looking at the titles of the four courses you mentioned I know that I'd have no interest in any of them. And nothing close to those was in the CS curriculum I had back in my college days. I didn't expect the kid to learn every detail about every class, man, geez. But you can tell alot about whether you prefer CE or CS by whether a class like "Linear Systems and Signals" even sparks your interest.
See what the course load is like for both majors. Then look up the courses. See which ones you think you'd like better. Go for it.
Please for the love of God don't be asking which one will make you more money. People wonder why managers are farming out good jobs to India, it's because American kids are walking out of college and saying "Whaddya mean you're not gonna pay me $100k? What did I go to school for?"
Hopefully they really mean it. I just got WP for Christmas (my wife saw it on a shelf, knows enough to look for the "Linux" word, and got it. How sweet!) I like it better than StarOffice. But it's got errors like crazy (I can't print from presentations, for example). I'd love it to be stable enough that she can use it, instead of having to call me to the computer everytime she needs to make a sign or something. And I'd really like to feel comfortable installing updated versions of Wine.
In all my years of coding, the best way I can sum up the experience of trying to teach people to code is that one day they make a leap at which time things become obvious. Sometimes they can't make that leap. You see it in their eyes. I fondly remember the experience of teaching a consultant a new proprietary app server. He stared at me with glossy eyes. The next morning he was waiting for me in my cube. "I get it!" he cried, with a spark in his eyes. And I knew that he did. He went on to be one of the best resources that team had. For every good story like that, I have a dozen not so good ones of people who have to be told the same thing over and over and over again and just never grok it. We as mentors can probe and prod that particular area of the student's brain that controls the leap, but I've always found it to truly be a quantum thing. They either make it or they don't.
I'm in a position where I get handed problems after the team has pulled their hair out for days or longer. When I solve those problems, I send out an email detailing (or attempting to) my thinking process on solving the problem. It's weird, because on one hand I'm thinking "I'm writing down obvious things here, aren't I?" but obviously they're not. How do you teach that?
A consultant that floated through my place of business used a term I don't hear that much -- "The ability to internalize the code." I like that. If they don't internalize it, they'll never generate quality code.
It's got me curious -- her hypothesis is on whether white people will prefer the white barbie, but the article only breaks it up as adults versus children. I'd be very interested to know if she asked both white and black children, and if so, whether black children preferred the black barbie regardless of dress. Wouldn't that demonstrate racial preference from both directions? Why must we always assume that racism equals white people not liking black people?
In all my science fairs I was never allowed to just go off, do something, and have nobody look at it until it made it to the science fair floor. Surely some teacher must have been told "I plan to study racial bias in children" and had the option to say "Go ahead." Where is the commentary from that teacher? I refuse to believe that it got all the way to the science fair before somebody suddenly decided that it was in the best interest of the children to remove it.
For anybody interested in the subject, I suggest they check out "Hamlet on the Holodeck" by Janet Murray. She discusses the history and future of interactive storytelling, and uses many well known games as her examples. The issues are all the same -- how do you direct someone through your plot while still providing the freedom of true interactivity? And how do you keep your tree from geometrically exploding?
Always remember that the solution comes from two directions -- what the player gets to do, and what the game does around him. A good example is the cliche of the dropped business card during a murder mystery. Sure, maybe you as the player forget to pick it up, and that's what cheat sheets are all about. But if you're in a truly interactive game where the plot hasn't been completely laid out in advance, then maybe the character in question doesn't drop it, and then what happens? How do you continue to direct the story? Make it mandatory that the character always drops it? Or have some sort of internal consistency checker that makes the game always solvable by shifting to some other story line and providing a different clue?
On the contrary (to your latter point), it's sometimes easier. Go to something like rocket-library.com and count the number of mainstream publishers that are offering sampler chapters of their books for free. When I browse at the bookstore I can rarely do more than skim a few pages unless I plan to go sit in the coffee shop. But if I could download 3 chapters of 3 books and take them on the train with me, I'm much better off.
Still got a point on the whole dropping thing, though.
We just went through this with a large content repository software vendor. We'd been using the desktop client on their recommendation because their web client always sucked. Well, with the new version of the software, they fundamentally revamped both -- but internally,they kept a desktop development team and a web development team. So now depending on who you talk to they recommend one or the other solution, and neither is 100% -- they have some major overlap, but they come off looking like a Venn diagram where each tool can do certain things the other can't.
We wanted a web client. We have dozens of users spread across Boston and Chicago, both on the company net and wanting access from home. It's difficult to administer that sort of installation (especially once the software patches start coming out). The vendor wants us to use the web client, because most of the new features of the new version are in that client. Our existing customer wants us to keep using the desktop client because they already know that one and don't want to rock the boat.
The problem is that the web client stinks. LOTS of things wrong with it, not bug wise, but just bad-interface wise. So several times I day I utter the following sentence: "Wow, the web client is lousy at X. Does that mean we have to use the desktop client? But shoot, we can't, because the desktop client is lousy at Y." We're hoping to force the vendor to accept our list of changes and modify the web client, it's our only hope.
Did that answer your question? A web client, please. And DONT make it IE/5.5 only, we hate that. And please make sure that it's full featured, don't rush it out the door just because you want a web interface and then realize that there are fundamental features you forgot to support.
Since I just got a Rocket eBook I've had this conversation a few times recently. Something that my friend pointed out is "I can't loan you my ebook after I'm done with it." He's right -- when I buy them, they're hard coded to my device. Unless I loan him the reader, which would be in sticking with the old "book license" methodology that only one person can read it at a time. The problem, of course, is that then I can't read any books while he has my reader. That's no good. Something that's assumed about paper books that's different from ebooks is that paper books have the "reader" inherently installed. Each book is therefore a standalone thing. eBooks, at least for the moment, are not. You have to think of the book and the reader (the content and the display?) as two different things having two different licenses.
This is hardly new. The first love of my life I met online, back in the days of Compuserve's CB simulator, around about 1986 or so. I also spent a long, long time hanging out on the alt.romance group where the discussion is naturally quite popular.
People seem to think that the rules are different, that somehow the people they meet over the net are magically different from those they'd meet in real life. A woman meets a guy who admits to being married, but adds "Oh, I'm going to divorce her" and naturally the woman believes. These days, forget it -- ask for a picture and get a picture of a different person.
Once upon a time having long distance romances was ok -- you spent all your time talking and learning about the other person. These days people think they can use the net like a springboard into a new pool of eligible singles from around the world. The first conversation usually involves "Where are you from and how much do you weigh?" I mean, let's be frank -- people are still as much about the shallow and material things as they've ever been. At least the kids have it right -- they just blatantly running around asking "age sex location check?" (In my day it used to be just 'morf', for male-or-female, but I guess age and location are important now).
Once upon a time, when cyberspace was young and underpopulated, you had a very good chance that the person you were talking to was a kindred spirit. They'd probably come to the net (or other online world) for similar reasons that you had, work, school, whatever. And in those days you connected brain to brain, soul to soul, and you learned really fast who you were attracted to. We talked about religion, or philosophy, or math or movies or books. Maybe, eventually, out of curiosity, you'd ask where the other person was from. Maybe, eventually, out of curiosity, you'd think about meeting. That's all gone now. I know a young lady who trolled the net looking for a date for my wedding, and was prepared to bring someone from the opposite coast until he made it clear that if he shelled out for a plane ticket he was looking to get some. She was offended, but what did she expect? Is she blind? She'd talked to him for a week.
The net has turned into the singles bar that we all hated. What's the big complaint about the bar scene? That it's a meat market, all about looks and shallow people? So the first thing we do when we get on the net is ask for a picture and go to amihotornot.com? We've done it to ourselves. I know so many people now that are looking for love on the net. For years I've been telling them the same thing -- "Stop looking. Find a topic you are interested in. Find a forum or mailing list where they talk about that. Start talking. Before you know it you'll find someone you're attracted to, and guess what, they've got something in common with you." It works. I met many, many nice young ladies while hanging out in alt.romance (several of whom are still very dear friends, but my favorite was the one who emailed me "WHERE ARE YOU AND ARE YOU SINGLE???":)). But nobody wants my advice. They want to get laid. And right now.
Can it be cracked? I wouldn't be surprised. But ya know what? Why do you care? Of what benefit is it to make the publishers paranoid by continually telling them that their efforts to create eBooks are still crackable? I mean, do we want new technology like this or not? I do. I'm enjoying mine. I just downloaded a collection of Harlan Ellison stories I'd never read (yes I paid for them -- www.fictionwise.com). If these devices become either less available or more expensive because of knee-jerk reactions by the publishers over security holes, that'll be bad for us all.
I don't think it's appropriate here to argue "white hat hacking". Is it your intent to look for holes in the device's security so that they can be patched? Or rather are you just trying to scare the publishers so that they don't put any security on their books at all?
By the way, here's how the system works - you register your book and get back a userID. When you buy a book from powells.com, for example, they ask for that userID. Presumably they then go lookup your key on the RCA/Nuvomedia servers. I don't know whether they use symmetric (in which case just learning that key would be fine) or asymmetric (in which case that would be the public key and your private key stays on your device). Seems like the latter would be a bit more secure. There are free download places that don't encrypt their stuff, and at least one place makes you buy the stuff but never asks for your userID.
There is a weakness in the model. Once I've bought a paperback, I can loan it to someone, or flat out resell it (although the latter is arguably legal). The idea being that once I shell out the money it should be mine to do whatever I want. eBooks do change this -- once I've bought a book it has to go on that device, and that's it.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, what sort of formats will he be dealing with? Will it be a nasty IE-only site loaded up with Quicktime and Flash5 movies? If he makes it downloadable will it be in a nice portable format that I could use in my Rocket eBook, for example? That's what I think of when I see "downloadable format". (FYI, I'm reading King's traditional new novel Dreamcatcher that way.)
Duane
On a different note, I wish Williams would hurry up and finish the Otherland series so I can stop buying the damn things. I don't like them anymore, but I feel that I've already invested so much time and money in the first 3 books that I have to see it through to the end.
If you're publishing it electronically, then make up a PDF version and ship it off to lots of review sites. That's also more press for you.
In short, just getting it published isn't the end of the road. You still have to work to get your name recognized and get the eyeballs.
Examples?
- Bookstore. Everybody says this, but personally I never had it work. These days you can find an excuse for wandering around the store for a long time. When you see somebody you like, who happens to be in a section you know, sidle up near him/her to look at something different. When he/she picks up a book you know, offer a comment. See what happens. (I actually had this done to me once when I walked into a bookstore wearing a "Tao of Pooh" shirt. Two girls came over and asked me to explain it.)
- Pool hall? A little harder if you don't like drinking since most of them are in bars. But you'll certainly see lots of members of the opposite sex. (I asked out a regular waitress at my regular place . She said no. But at least I got a chance to ask.)
- Theatre. This is a little different, since you don't go to theatre to meet people. But, if you're experienced at going to theatre, then you have something to talk about when you need to come up with a date idea in a hurry. Example:
I can confirm that one works -- three years later I married her.
Remember to ask yourself how geeky you want to get. That's why I threw the theatre in there. There's no rule that says geeks can only meet at sci-fi conventions. If you're a geek that happens to also like cars you might find a mate at a car show.A few years later we wanted to do it again, but the place had closed. Seems like you could make good money if you were prepared to rent yourself out as one of your main revenue streams.
Seems like a logical place to start would be Sears or Best Buy or some other store that uses them. Walk up to a register (or buy something) and see i there's a brand name on the scanner. If not, flip it over. I expect the cashier won't care. Find a company name or two and a quick web search should do the rest.
No. You're mistaken. You compare "install Linux" to "use Windows". You think most people can install Windows themselves? They can't. They rely on whatever comes with the computer. Many don't even differentiate the OS from the hardware. And MS created a monopoly for itself at the computer manufacturer level back in the late 80's early 90's with the predatory practices that eventually caused them to settle their original DOJ case.
It's reasonable to think that throughout the 80's and early 90's the only way for a person to research a computer was to go down to the local retail computer store and ask. What would they have seen? Windows, and Mac. Maybe OS/2, and of course a few flavors of DOS. How many people knew how to update an operating system, though? The OS makers had to rely on getting their product installed by the computer makers if they were going to make any inroads. And MS closed all those doors with their predatory agreements.
- The ILOVEYOU virus and its infinite children. Though MS didn't write the virus, the existence of the hole combined with the monopoly they have in the OS market are what really caused the problem. If somebody wrote a virus for a tiny hole in BeOS would it have affected the world like this one did?
- Incompatible file formats between its own products year after year. I love it when Office97 tells me "Oh, not everyone has Office97, you should save in Office95 format."
- Machines that you expect to have to reboot every day.
People *ignore* these things, because they figure that it is just par for the course. Know what? It's not. I call it demonstrable harm to the consumer. People hate Windows, we know that. All day, on the subway, at lunch, in meetings, you can hear people commiserating over their latest crash or virus. But they never blame Microsoft. They never say "I'm not going to use MS products." Why?Because they don't even know that other options exist, for the most part.
Why? Because MS is a monopoly.
Isn't that demonstrable harm to the consumer? This is not a case of "what they don't know won't hurt them". They don't know that better solutions exist. It's hurting them, they just don't know it.
I do not run Microsoft products. I pay less for hardware and software, my computer runs faster, and crashes less. That, too, would seem like demonstrable harm by Microsoft. When I point out Linux to users of Windows they do not argue the qualities of the software with me. Know what they say? "I have to run Office2000 because everyone else does." That, again, is a sign of the monopoly that MS has.
Even in an astronomically huge system, that's a good place to start. When you have a crypto puzzle in a magazine to solve, what's the first letter you look for? A or I, because you know that those are your 1-letter words (assuming that you know that your puzzle consists of english words in the first place). Then E because it's most common, and so on. Wherever you can get a hook, you don't lose anything by trying it out.
Think of it as a variation on "your security is only as strong as the weakest link." In this case, what could give you away is the 8bit nature of your data. Not to mention potential patterns in the nature of the image (don't many image file formats have large sections of constant data if you were to dump them out?)
Actually you proved my point. Just looking at the titles of the four courses you mentioned I know that I'd have no interest in any of them. And nothing close to those was in the CS curriculum I had back in my college days. I didn't expect the kid to learn every detail about every class, man, geez. But you can tell alot about whether you prefer CE or CS by whether a class like "Linear Systems and Signals" even sparks your interest.
Please for the love of God don't be asking which one will make you more money. People wonder why managers are farming out good jobs to India, it's because American kids are walking out of college and saying "Whaddya mean you're not gonna pay me $100k? What did I go to school for?"
Hopefully they really mean it. I just got WP for Christmas (my wife saw it on a shelf, knows enough to look for the "Linux" word, and got it. How sweet!) I like it better than StarOffice. But it's got errors like crazy (I can't print from presentations, for example). I'd love it to be stable enough that she can use it, instead of having to call me to the computer everytime she needs to make a sign or something. And I'd really like to feel comfortable installing updated versions of Wine.
I'm in a position where I get handed problems after the team has pulled their hair out for days or longer. When I solve those problems, I send out an email detailing (or attempting to) my thinking process on solving the problem. It's weird, because on one hand I'm thinking "I'm writing down obvious things here, aren't I?" but obviously they're not. How do you teach that?
A consultant that floated through my place of business used a term I don't hear that much -- "The ability to internalize the code." I like that. If they don't internalize it, they'll never generate quality code.
It's got me curious -- her hypothesis is on whether white people will prefer the white barbie, but the article only breaks it up as adults versus children. I'd be very interested to know if she asked both white and black children, and if so, whether black children preferred the black barbie regardless of dress. Wouldn't that demonstrate racial preference from both directions? Why must we always assume that racism equals white people not liking black people?
In all my science fairs I was never allowed to just go off, do something, and have nobody look at it until it made it to the science fair floor. Surely some teacher must have been told "I plan to study racial bias in children" and had the option to say "Go ahead." Where is the commentary from that teacher? I refuse to believe that it got all the way to the science fair before somebody suddenly decided that it was in the best interest of the children to remove it.
Always remember that the solution comes from two directions -- what the player gets to do, and what the game does around him. A good example is the cliche of the dropped business card during a murder mystery. Sure, maybe you as the player forget to pick it up, and that's what cheat sheets are all about. But if you're in a truly interactive game where the plot hasn't been completely laid out in advance, then maybe the character in question doesn't drop it, and then what happens? How do you continue to direct the story? Make it mandatory that the character always drops it? Or have some sort of internal consistency checker that makes the game always solvable by shifting to some other story line and providing a different clue?
Still got a point on the whole dropping thing, though.
We wanted a web client. We have dozens of users spread across Boston and Chicago, both on the company net and wanting access from home. It's difficult to administer that sort of installation (especially once the software patches start coming out). The vendor wants us to use the web client, because most of the new features of the new version are in that client. Our existing customer wants us to keep using the desktop client because they already know that one and don't want to rock the boat.
The problem is that the web client stinks. LOTS of things wrong with it, not bug wise, but just bad-interface wise. So several times I day I utter the following sentence: "Wow, the web client is lousy at X. Does that mean we have to use the desktop client? But shoot, we can't, because the desktop client is lousy at Y." We're hoping to force the vendor to accept our list of changes and modify the web client, it's our only hope.
Did that answer your question? A web client, please. And DONT make it IE/5.5 only, we hate that. And please make sure that it's full featured, don't rush it out the door just because you want a web interface and then realize that there are fundamental features you forgot to support.
So, in short, you weren't looking for romance, and it just sorta happened after 2 years? Thanks for demonstrating that my system works. :)
Since I just got a Rocket eBook I've had this conversation a few times recently. Something that my friend pointed out is "I can't loan you my ebook after I'm done with it." He's right -- when I buy them, they're hard coded to my device. Unless I loan him the reader, which would be in sticking with the old "book license" methodology that only one person can read it at a time. The problem, of course, is that then I can't read any books while he has my reader. That's no good. Something that's assumed about paper books that's different from ebooks is that paper books have the "reader" inherently installed. Each book is therefore a standalone thing. eBooks, at least for the moment, are not. You have to think of the book and the reader (the content and the display?) as two different things having two different licenses.
People seem to think that the rules are different, that somehow the people they meet over the net are magically different from those they'd meet in real life. A woman meets a guy who admits to being married, but adds "Oh, I'm going to divorce her" and naturally the woman believes. These days, forget it -- ask for a picture and get a picture of a different person.
Once upon a time having long distance romances was ok -- you spent all your time talking and learning about the other person. These days people think they can use the net like a springboard into a new pool of eligible singles from around the world. The first conversation usually involves "Where are you from and how much do you weigh?" I mean, let's be frank -- people are still as much about the shallow and material things as they've ever been. At least the kids have it right -- they just blatantly running around asking "age sex location check?" (In my day it used to be just 'morf', for male-or-female, but I guess age and location are important now).
Once upon a time, when cyberspace was young and underpopulated, you had a very good chance that the person you were talking to was a kindred spirit. They'd probably come to the net (or other online world) for similar reasons that you had, work, school, whatever. And in those days you connected brain to brain, soul to soul, and you learned really fast who you were attracted to. We talked about religion, or philosophy, or math or movies or books. Maybe, eventually, out of curiosity, you'd ask where the other person was from. Maybe, eventually, out of curiosity, you'd think about meeting. That's all gone now. I know a young lady who trolled the net looking for a date for my wedding, and was prepared to bring someone from the opposite coast until he made it clear that if he shelled out for a plane ticket he was looking to get some. She was offended, but what did she expect? Is she blind? She'd talked to him for a week.
The net has turned into the singles bar that we all hated. What's the big complaint about the bar scene? That it's a meat market, all about looks and shallow people? So the first thing we do when we get on the net is ask for a picture and go to amihotornot.com? We've done it to ourselves. I know so many people now that are looking for love on the net. For years I've been telling them the same thing -- "Stop looking. Find a topic you are interested in. Find a forum or mailing list where they talk about that. Start talking. Before you know it you'll find someone you're attracted to, and guess what, they've got something in common with you." It works. I met many, many nice young ladies while hanging out in alt.romance (several of whom are still very dear friends, but my favorite was the one who emailed me "WHERE ARE YOU AND ARE YOU SINGLE???" :)). But nobody wants my advice. They want to get laid. And right now.
I don't think it's appropriate here to argue "white hat hacking". Is it your intent to look for holes in the device's security so that they can be patched? Or rather are you just trying to scare the publishers so that they don't put any security on their books at all?
By the way, here's how the system works - you register your book and get back a userID. When you buy a book from powells.com, for example, they ask for that userID. Presumably they then go lookup your key on the RCA/Nuvomedia servers. I don't know whether they use symmetric (in which case just learning that key would be fine) or asymmetric (in which case that would be the public key and your private key stays on your device). Seems like the latter would be a bit more secure. There are free download places that don't encrypt their stuff, and at least one place makes you buy the stuff but never asks for your userID.
There is a weakness in the model. Once I've bought a paperback, I can loan it to someone, or flat out resell it (although the latter is arguably legal). The idea being that once I shell out the money it should be mine to do whatever I want. eBooks do change this -- once I've bought a book it has to go on that device, and that's it.