why would they give up the money? they'd still charge you for the textbooks AND you won't be able to lend them (you can't lend just one of your books, you'd have to lend them all, and that usually doesn't work) AND you won't be able to resell them at the end of the semester.
I think the schoolbook publishing industry will jump in with both feet here, basically completely cutting out the used market and any sort of sharing of books, 1 student = 1 book every semester, it will make them a ton of money; roll it in in the college tuition and it will work even better for them in terms of guaranteed income.
...if people at least learned to turn off their monitors and put their screensavers to 'blank screen', unlike several of my coworkers who leave their PCs on all night with the monitors on and the screensaver set to something 'cool' which taxes their CPU/GPU to the max.
check the new terms of service (that came out around February 2009), it specifically says you are allowed to use the US iTunes ONLY if you are within the US, and that Apple is allowed to use technology verification to make sure you are.
I think you missed the news a little while ago where the American iTunes store will NOT allow you to purchase anything if your originating IP is not within the US (regardless if you have a US c/c or not). It wouldn't surprise me if the same restriction started on Amazon at some point.
Not available in the Canadian app-store (or in Europe).
I really am saddened by this aspect of 'progress', you can order physical CDs, DVDs, kindles, anything from all over the world and nobody has an issue with that, but the second anything becomes distributed electronically boom, we're transported to this strange super-protectionistic world where things do not move freely anymore.
I fear for tomorrow's world, where instead of being exposed to music, shows, books, tv, from other countries you will just be able to read, listen and watch to things 'approved' by some company somewhere.
And let's not talk about people learning a foreign language: say you're studying German and you'd love to read some German books and watch some shows from Amazon.de, sorry, no way. Or maybe you live in Brazil and you'd like to improve your English by reading books, listening to music and watching shows over the internet, nossiree, not gonna happen.
It seems that modern technology is more and more used as a 'control' technology, vs an 'enabling' technology, which is quite sad as it just promotes an extremely insular world, instead of the free exchange of information.
I really hope that, as it happened to the music DRM, at some point the 'powers that be' will realize that this attitude is completely wrong, but given the latest salvo by the book authors about the kindle's text-to-speech functionality (which could've helped a lot of blind or non-native-English speakers) I am really not sure if it will ever happen.
I think Apple going with an internal battery has a lot more to do with not having to waste space/weight making the battery 'safe' on its own (I bet batteries have to pass all sort of puncture/drop/freezing/other tests).
Having the battery inside the aluminum shell enables them to leverage the computer case to pass whichever test they need to, which means less material used to user-proof the battery, which means more capacity.
And why wouldn't they make it easy to change? After all they do plan to be able to if they service your laptop...
my 'original' microsoft natural keyboard (bought in 1994, still working just perfectly) cost me $250 or so from what I remember, and the latest natural keyboard 4000 I bought for the office was only $60...
The 'original' says it's made in Mexico, I wonder when the production was moved... I also don't see why keyboards have to be so cheap, it's not like you change it every day: I can totally see myself using this keyboard for another 15 years easily (assuming that in 15 years I can find a ps/2-whatever converter, that is my only worry)
you do know you can get studded tires for bikes as well right? With some good nokian on an mtb you can ride pretty much anywhere at any time even with snow/ice/...
what does that have to do with anything? If I pay customs at the Canadian border on my US purchase, that money for sure will not go to the MPAA/RIAA/...
I would suggest you work on improving your non-technical qualifications: competent coders/developers are not that hard to find, competent coders/developers that have good people skills and gel well in a team are a completely different thing.
As much as some people, especially here on/., think that coding prowess is the be-all and end-all, in the end for a team to work well there needs to be a good personality mesh, culture and so on; otherwise you end up with petty tyrants, fiefdoms and people writing everything in the most obscure possible with no docs to 'technologically one up' the others.
Your 'gut reaction' should have been 'I am sorry I do not meet your qualifications, this said, could you please tell me which area(s) you think I could work on to improve?'. 'relevant to the position' here could have definitely included 'reacts well to criticism, is willing to take action to improve, is humble and easy to work with', all things you definitely did not show with your behaviour.
I think you need to look more at parry-gibbing and at just how many things you need to give up as a DK to dual wield effectively. Dual wield tanking is at the moment not feasible at all.
Death knight tanks depend on parry rather than block.
There isn't enough parry gear in LK to sustain a DK tank. I play a healer, i know these things. They take way too much damage a
dude, my main is a healer and I play a dk, yeah, dk tanks take damage a little more spike-ly than a warrior/paladin (less so if they know how to play and juggle all CDs properly) but they are awesome tanks also.
Not to mention that all tanks depend on DEFENSE, and if you are not defense capped in a heroic all the parry in the world won't help you when the boss crits you and gg. The main issue with DKs now is that due to tanking with a 2h and not having a tanking sigil, we have to make up all the defense that warriors/paladins get on 1h swords, shields and ranged: blizzard is aware of it and it will likely be fixed via buffs to frost presence and a new sigil.
This explains why Blizzard is making major tanking changes in next patch because DK tanks suck. Also, damage dealing wise, they deal out way too much damage. Light years away from being balanced. PS: I play a Death Knight and I think the class is a horrible tank and too good DPS.
I think it's more along the lines that you play a dk and don't know how to tank (or have a bad spec), and group up with puggies that don't know how to dps (there are people at 80 that even have trouble breaking 1k dps)
Play with competent people and you'll see that DKs tank quite well (as unholy, blood is hopeless, frost is so-so as your gear improves) and as much as they are good they are definitely not top dps by a long shot.
Tailoring, Leatherworking, Blacksmithing, and Engineering should have high level (BoP) armor sets, but none of them do.
says who? do you think they wanted a repeat of TBC where you crafted your frozen shadowweave and didn't get any upgrades until T5/T6 completely skipping the normal-heroic-kara gear progression?
The crafted items in TBC were way too good, I didn't replace my pmc+whitemend until badge+ loot, and I had been wearing those FOREVER, so much so that I hated every time something decent dropped healing-wise because I didn't want to break the set bonus.
I personally think WOTLK is amazingly well done (making even more obvious what a half-finished unfun thing WAR is/was), if at all I have to say that despite the spell power changes levelling as a healer still sucks, and this is why my first 80 will be my DK (which is a LOT of fun to play).
is what I use and works great for that (as long as you give it a few weeks to acclimatize your 'sit bones' on), no numbness whatsoever regardless how long you ride.
I am not so sure about how fun it will be, when I read that end game RvR is all small instanced PQs I stopped playing WAR entirely and went back to WoW.
As much as blizz made some mistakes in wow over the years, I think they are going in the right direction with wotlk, while WAR was shaping up to be pretty interesting (I did buy it after all) but in the end is a big let down for me due to the very very very grind-y feeling and complete lack of community (I wonder who came up with the idea of not having any sort of tier-wide chat in-game, it feels like playing oblivion and alt-tabbing to wow for a bg)
People don't actually enjoy the process of going through the game, they just think "how can I get to the 'end?' How can I get max level?!" and they never remember any fun in between.
hmm, yeah, you mean how people are having fun levelling up in WAR? Oh wait, everybody is just sitting in the warcamp(s) waiting for scenarios to pop, and PQs and RvR are empty wastelands in T2-T3...
I have an original librie in fact, and Sony not providing an updated FW that supports pdf (and epub) despite the librie being pretty much the same hw wise as the ereader is the reason why I am never going to buy any other sony ereader product.
yes, I did use makelrf and html converters, but it was always a hassle (try to convert the original format to txt, then convert to lrf, then upload, then rebuild the index), and there is still no way to convert pdf besides installing the printer driver and printing the pdf to it, which just generates huge bitmaps and upload those.
The reading interface is also not very good, with user-created books missing chapters and capability to jump to a particular page (you better never stop halfway 'war and peace' and by mistake select 'read from the beginning' vs 'continue reading'), not to mention the 0.5-1s refresh between page changes.
Compare this to the touch, where you can just browse feedbooks and/or ereader directly, download them in one step to the device, page refresh is fast, etc. etc. the only drawback of the touch is that the screen is a bit small, but that is also an advantage since I can stick it in my pocket, which I could never do with a librie or a kindle.
? batteries on the ipod touch last about 5-6 hours of reading, and if you make the font small enough (and read landscape) you can fit about 1/3rd to 1/2 of a standard paperback page on the screen. I am a very fast reader (120-140 paperback pages/hour usually) and I haven't noticed any decrease in reading speed using the touch, it was more of an issue on the librie since changing pages took 0.5-1 seconds, which is an eternity.
the librie did not fail, sony just rebadged it and upgraded the firmware and sold it all over the world (instead of just in Japan), they could have easily upgraded the librie FW to support pdf also but they didn't.
as much as I agree that the batteries in my librie last longer, I wouldn't say 'weeks' unless you leave it off all the time: from my experience reading about an hour a day I had to change the batteries on my librie every 2 weeks, and recharge my ipod maybe once a week (turning it off after reading).
The thing is, though, if you ever added wifi to the e-ink reader its battery life would get a lot lower, not to mention that turning pages on an e-ink display is so slow as to be distracting (ok, I am a fast reader, slower readers might not notice as much)
The other point is that getting people to carry an e-book reader *in addition* to their cellphones and/or laptops is going to be a very hard sell: this is why IMHO the iphone (and ipod touch) are the way of the future in terms of ebook penetration; are they perfect? not at all, but they sure are 'good enough' and this is what really matters.
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why would they give up the money? they'd still charge you for the textbooks AND you won't be able to lend them (you can't lend just one of your books, you'd have to lend them all, and that usually doesn't work) AND you won't be able to resell them at the end of the semester.
I think the schoolbook publishing industry will jump in with both feet here, basically completely cutting out the used market and any sort of sharing of books, 1 student = 1 book every semester, it will make them a ton of money; roll it in in the college tuition and it will work even better for them in terms of guaranteed income.
...if people at least learned to turn off their monitors and put their screensavers to 'blank screen', unlike several of my coworkers who leave their PCs on all night with the monitors on and the screensaver set to something 'cool' which taxes their CPU/GPU to the max.
what about the one theoretically coming from Disney this year? (Star Guitarist) the video on wired is amazing
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/01/finally-a-guita.html
from amazon.com of course, just like I can get German books from amazon.de, etc. etc. there have been people in Canada with kindles for a while.
check the new terms of service (that came out around February 2009), it specifically says you are allowed to use the US iTunes ONLY if you are within the US, and that Apple is allowed to use technology verification to make sure you are.
I think you missed the news a little while ago where the American iTunes store will NOT allow you to purchase anything if your originating IP is not within the US (regardless if you have a US c/c or not). It wouldn't surprise me if the same restriction started on Amazon at some point.
Not available in the Canadian app-store (or in Europe).
I really am saddened by this aspect of 'progress', you can order physical CDs, DVDs, kindles, anything from all over the world and nobody has an issue with that, but the second anything becomes distributed electronically boom, we're transported to this strange super-protectionistic world where things do not move freely anymore.
I fear for tomorrow's world, where instead of being exposed to music, shows, books, tv, from other countries you will just be able to read, listen and watch to things 'approved' by some company somewhere.
And let's not talk about people learning a foreign language: say you're studying German and you'd love to read some German books and watch some shows from Amazon.de, sorry, no way. Or maybe you live in Brazil and you'd like to improve your English by reading books, listening to music and watching shows over the internet, nossiree, not gonna happen.
It seems that modern technology is more and more used as a 'control' technology, vs an 'enabling' technology, which is quite sad as it just promotes an extremely insular world, instead of the free exchange of information.
I really hope that, as it happened to the music DRM, at some point the 'powers that be' will realize that this attitude is completely wrong, but given the latest salvo by the book authors about the kindle's text-to-speech functionality (which could've helped a lot of blind or non-native-English speakers) I am really not sure if it will ever happen.
I think Apple going with an internal battery has a lot more to do with not having to waste space/weight making the battery 'safe' on its own (I bet batteries have to pass all sort of puncture/drop/freezing/other tests).
Having the battery inside the aluminum shell enables them to leverage the computer case to pass whichever test they need to, which means less material used to user-proof the battery, which means more capacity.
And why wouldn't they make it easy to change? After all they do plan to be able to if they service your laptop...
my 'original' microsoft natural keyboard (bought in 1994, still working just perfectly) cost me $250 or so from what I remember, and the latest natural keyboard 4000 I bought for the office was only $60...
The 'original' says it's made in Mexico, I wonder when the production was moved... I also don't see why keyboards have to be so cheap, it's not like you change it every day: I can totally see myself using this keyboard for another 15 years easily (assuming that in 15 years I can find a ps/2-whatever converter, that is my only worry)
you do know you can get studded tires for bikes as well right? With some good nokian on an mtb you can ride pretty much anywhere at any time even with snow/ice/...
what does that have to do with anything? If I pay customs at the Canadian border on my US purchase, that money for sure will not go to the MPAA/RIAA/...
I can order CDs, DVDs, you name it, from amazon.com and they will happily ship things to Canada.
I can't buy the same music/shows online due to 'copyright issues'.
Why is it that the physical media is treated differently from the electronic media for the exact same content?
I would suggest you work on improving your non-technical qualifications: competent coders/developers are not that hard to find, competent coders/developers that have good people skills and gel well in a team are a completely different thing.
As much as some people, especially here on /., think that coding prowess is the be-all and end-all, in the end for a team to work well there needs to be a good personality mesh, culture and so on; otherwise you end up with petty tyrants, fiefdoms and people writing everything in the most obscure possible with no docs to 'technologically one up' the others.
Your 'gut reaction' should have been 'I am sorry I do not meet your qualifications, this said, could you please tell me which area(s) you think I could work on to improve?'. 'relevant to the position' here could have definitely included 'reacts well to criticism, is willing to take action to improve, is humble and easy to work with', all things you definitely did not show with your behaviour.
I think you need to look more at parry-gibbing and at just how many things you need to give up as a DK to dual wield effectively. Dual wield tanking is at the moment not feasible at all.
Death knight tanks depend on parry rather than block.
There isn't enough parry gear in LK to sustain a DK tank. I play a healer, i know these things. They take way too much damage a
dude, my main is a healer and I play a dk, yeah, dk tanks take damage a little more spike-ly than a warrior/paladin (less so if they know how to play and juggle all CDs properly) but they are awesome tanks also.
Not to mention that all tanks depend on DEFENSE, and if you are not defense capped in a heroic all the parry in the world won't help you when the boss crits you and gg. The main issue with DKs now is that due to tanking with a 2h and not having a tanking sigil, we have to make up all the defense that warriors/paladins get on 1h swords, shields and ranged: blizzard is aware of it and it will likely be fixed via buffs to frost presence and a new sigil.
This explains why Blizzard is making major tanking changes in next patch because DK tanks suck. Also, damage dealing wise, they deal out way too much damage. Light years away from being balanced. PS: I play a Death Knight and I think the class is a horrible tank and too good DPS.
I think it's more along the lines that you play a dk and don't know how to tank (or have a bad spec), and group up with puggies that don't know how to dps (there are people at 80 that even have trouble breaking 1k dps)
Play with competent people and you'll see that DKs tank quite well (as unholy, blood is hopeless, frost is so-so as your gear improves) and as much as they are good they are definitely not top dps by a long shot.
Tailoring, Leatherworking, Blacksmithing, and Engineering should have high level (BoP) armor sets, but none of them do.
says who? do you think they wanted a repeat of TBC where you crafted your frozen shadowweave and didn't get any upgrades until T5/T6 completely skipping the normal-heroic-kara gear progression?
The crafted items in TBC were way too good, I didn't replace my pmc+whitemend until badge+ loot, and I had been wearing those FOREVER, so much so that I hated every time something decent dropped healing-wise because I didn't want to break the set bonus.
I personally think WOTLK is amazingly well done (making even more obvious what a half-finished unfun thing WAR is/was), if at all I have to say that despite the spell power changes levelling as a healer still sucks, and this is why my first 80 will be my DK (which is a LOT of fun to play).
I haven't ridden a bike in years because of this
why haven't you investigated some bike saddles especially designed to solve this issue? For example the adamo
http://www.ismseat.com/products.htm
is what I use and works great for that (as long as you give it a few weeks to acclimatize your 'sit bones' on), no numbness whatsoever regardless how long you ride.
I am not so sure about how fun it will be, when I read that end game RvR is all small instanced PQs I stopped playing WAR entirely and went back to WoW.
As much as blizz made some mistakes in wow over the years, I think they are going in the right direction with wotlk, while WAR was shaping up to be pretty interesting (I did buy it after all) but in the end is a big let down for me due to the very very very grind-y feeling and complete lack of community (I wonder who came up with the idea of not having any sort of tier-wide chat in-game, it feels like playing oblivion and alt-tabbing to wow for a bg)
People don't actually enjoy the process of going through the game, they just think "how can I get to the 'end?' How can I get max level?!" and they never remember any fun in between.
hmm, yeah, you mean how people are having fun levelling up in WAR? Oh wait, everybody is just sitting in the warcamp(s) waiting for scenarios to pop, and PQs and RvR are empty wastelands in T2-T3...
I have an original librie in fact, and Sony not providing an updated FW that supports pdf (and epub) despite the librie being pretty much the same hw wise as the ereader is the reason why I am never going to buy any other sony ereader product.
yes, I did use makelrf and html converters, but it was always a hassle (try to convert the original format to txt, then convert to lrf, then upload, then rebuild the index), and there is still no way to convert pdf besides installing the printer driver and printing the pdf to it, which just generates huge bitmaps and upload those.
The reading interface is also not very good, with user-created books missing chapters and capability to jump to a particular page (you better never stop halfway 'war and peace' and by mistake select 'read from the beginning' vs 'continue reading'), not to mention the 0.5-1s refresh between page changes.
Compare this to the touch, where you can just browse feedbooks and/or ereader directly, download them in one step to the device, page refresh is fast, etc. etc. the only drawback of the touch is that the screen is a bit small, but that is also an advantage since I can stick it in my pocket, which I could never do with a librie or a kindle.
? batteries on the ipod touch last about 5-6 hours of reading, and if you make the font small enough (and read landscape) you can fit about 1/3rd to 1/2 of a standard paperback page on the screen. I am a very fast reader (120-140 paperback pages/hour usually) and I haven't noticed any decrease in reading speed using the touch, it was more of an issue on the librie since changing pages took 0.5-1 seconds, which is an eternity.
the librie did not fail, sony just rebadged it and upgraded the firmware and sold it all over the world (instead of just in Japan), they could have easily upgraded the librie FW to support pdf also but they didn't.
as much as I agree that the batteries in my librie last longer, I wouldn't say 'weeks' unless you leave it off all the time: from my experience reading about an hour a day I had to change the batteries on my librie every 2 weeks, and recharge my ipod maybe once a week (turning it off after reading).
The thing is, though, if you ever added wifi to the e-ink reader its battery life would get a lot lower, not to mention that turning pages on an e-ink display is so slow as to be distracting (ok, I am a fast reader, slower readers might not notice as much)
The other point is that getting people to carry an e-book reader *in addition* to their cellphones and/or laptops is going to be a very hard sell: this is why IMHO the iphone (and ipod touch) are the way of the future in terms of ebook penetration; are they perfect? not at all, but they sure are 'good enough' and this is what really matters.