Try cancelling a cell phone
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 4, Interesting
When my wife tried to cancel her cell phone (she had gone to another service), there line of excuses went:
"We can't" "We can, but it your contract must run the rest of the year" "Maybe there was no contract, but there's a $50 service charge" "Maybe there is no service charge, but you'll have to clear it with the Loyalty department"
At this point my wife is mentions how the Loyalty department has tones of "1984". The service representative says he never saw the movie. *sigh*.
The Loyalty department:
"How about another month's contract just in case you really do need it" "How about a month's free service" (!) "How about three months' free service" (!!!) "Why do you want to cancel?" "Can you give a better reason?" (!)
Finally, they refused to cancel the service for three months. They'd just stop billing us and if we didn't use the service, it would expire...
Now after all that (which makes for great anecdotes at parties, even if it took a while), they did actually keep their word and we saw no more bills.
Now here's an interesting point. In essence, any time you purchase any MS software, you really need to factor in the cost of maintaining 100% license compliance. I figure (given how machines move around, etc.) that this has got to be at least $50-$100 per machine per year for the life of the machine. After all, that sort of 100% accurate record keeping does not come cheap. I wouldn't want to have 1 person handling more than 500 machines (imagine, he get's to track down exactly what software is on each machine that school has in closets, loaned to a teacher, moved to new lab, etc.!)
I suspect that if the price of software was put in those terms to schools any time they purchased Microsoft software, they might start seriously looking at alternatives. Compared to the base (education) software price, the compliance price might be many times higher.
Besides, what teacher wants to have the cost of the compliance agent subtracted from his budget each and every year?
Re:They MUST change the name
on
GeekPAC
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Indeed, given that legislation that throws widows and orphans onto the street would probably be named the "Human Mobility and Properity Act", names do mean something in the minds of senators.
Since in America government, business is what really counts, we need something business-like in its name.
How about InnoPAC?
"InnoPAC. Brought to you by the *real* innovators."
Given that an exploitable system is not just a danger to oneself, but also a danger to others, it's quite possible to justify expiring software the same way that one justifies enforced adherence to safety measures. Its quite common to force companies to upgrade equipment to current safety standards. This is merely a mechanism to protect the community.
While it doesn't necessarily justify forcing users to upgrade, this debate is not an entirely one-sided.
First, start with a dismissal of this asburd court case. Make it clear that unless the case is immediately dismissed, Microsoft will no longer sell or support any product in the USA. Delist MS from the American stock market (or threaten to) and refuse to sell product to the international operations of any company that continues to list on an American stock market. Losing (or the threat of losing) every major successful tech company causes a market crash that makes people remember 1929 as blip. This means the elimination of all major American PC producers and the elimination (or elimination of expansion) of any business that depends on MS technology (almost all of them). Make certain the it is known that when the American gov't buckles, any PC company that sold alternate OS's will never sell an MS product again. Likewise with companies that flirted with alternate solutions are to be denied access to technology.
Once the USA is looking at a depression to make the 1930's look like a walk in the park, we can assume that the gov't will see reason. (Of course, this costs MS a pretty penny, but they can live on international sales alone for as long as it takes.)
Once that's over with, it's time to party. First, buy Sun and Apple and immediately kill them. Make it publically known that any possible competitor that starts rising through the ranks wil be bought and their customers orphaned. It will only cost you a lot once or twice. After that, nobody is going to bother buying from a competitor. If it's any good, your assured of buying an orphan-to-be product.
Now finally we come to the open-source strategy... *phew*. Make a deal with the hardware manufacturers. CPUs, chipsets and motherboards are modified so that they either run MS Windows only (MS Win ROMS anyone), or you can never run Windows. Hardware companies can choose: either MS alone, or never. If they don't like it, there's a dozen others ready to take their place. Good luck living off the Linux market alone:-). If it actually look like somehow someone's making some money on the non-intel based systems, buy them and burn 'em. After that, only fanatics willing to pay 5 or 10 times what an Windows machine cost will be running them. (By this point, non-MS companies have no economies of scale to subsidize Linux sales.)
Large company licenses require companies to justify any non-MS tech investments or face double or triple costs. MS will of course, approve of tech investments in fields where they don't have offerings.
Finally, modify Windows so that it will not run non-approved software, except for high-priced development systems that require strict licensing and some special hardware. A software redistribution license requires strict approval by MS, $100,000 testing fee, 15% royalties and a right to allow MS to purchase the software at an agreed upon price.
Lastly, once companies are used to renting their software yearly, make the cost of an MS license (for public companies) 1-2% of outstanding stock in lieu of payment. Those that wish to forego the expense of course have the option of ceasing to use computers.
After 50 years, MS stock is a rather more real currency that the US dollar and Open Source software, it a weird memory from a time when individuals programmed.
Oh, you meant what would *we* like to see MS's OSS strategy be. Oops:-).
Given the amount of data needed in a one-time pad, I can just imagine someone in the CIA firing up his computer program and saying "Give me 500 pages of one-time codes":-).
My parents always taught me "Before you do anything, think about what the world would be like if EVERYONE did that thing. Before you toss that gum wrapper out of the car window, think about what the street would look like if everyone did it.
"Well, I was going to take the 401 into work today, but with 6 billion people on it, maybe I'll stick with the subway..."
Why is it that all of the *new* media content has attracted so much bad practise
Because people have learned, in Old Media, all the way they could have screwed the author, the consumer, and the public, if only they had known. But they accidentally let all these roadblocks, legal and social, arise that raise expectations in Old Media. Ahhhh, but in New Media, there are no such blocks.
Actually, there's a slightly less pernicious possibility. Lots of companies are scared pea green that something they don't anticipate will slap them upside the head and destroy them in one fell swoop.
The only way to be able to handle the unforseen is to have all the power yourself, allowing you to react as necessary. Don't want to find out that new "mind-imprinting technology" that didn't exist last year is going to render your multi-billion dollar investment in books and movies worthless? Then make damn sure you own the rights to use the the content you publish in any new medium. Make certain you have the right to make any changes necessary in order to make the content compatible. Make certain you have clauses that can allow you to dump the content that is now valueless without forking over any more money than you've already paid...
Old media was based on the assumption of long-term stability. Technology has taken that away and made it possible to turn huge assets into so much waste in a matter of months.
[Of course, that's complete bunk, but have enough people yelling at you that you're going to go bankrupt because of this or that new technology and big suprise, you protect yourself.]
Of course, once you've got that power, it's pretty tempting to corporate executives (who now hold a lot more power over editors than in the past) to actually use it to boost profits. Absolute power and all that...
In the past, when an author signed a contract with a publisher, he or she could safely assume that the book under contract would be published. However, as a general rule, most publishers now insist upon a clause that relieves them of that obligation. More specifically, if a publisher chooses for any reason not to publish a given book, the author can keep the portion of the advance that has been paid. But that's all. And in some instances, if the author resells the book to another publisher, even that partial advance must be repaid. In other words, the standard publishing contract today is nothing more than a one-sided option to publish--obligating the author, but not the publisher.
Actually, a clause like that has always been there. The difference is that before it took a catastrophe of major proportion to make a publisher actually invoke the clause. Nowadays, when a publisher is in peril (or at least its profits are), it invokes those clauses much more easily. A favourite for fiction publishers is the due date clause. Most fiction authors are perennially late, and this clause (which has always existed) can allow you to can a substantial number of books for only half their advance.
Of course, publishers that play dirty games soon become publishers of last resort among those in the know. The name of the game here is to keep up on industry gossip! Join any author associations that you can and mingle with established authors.
Also note that the rules for bestselling authors are so different from beginning authors that there's not much to be learned from them. Find a midlist author (or three) who's work you like (most authors are very amenable to heartfelt complements:-)) and pump them for advice...
This is absolutely essential advice. Once you have a contract in hand, it's not terribly difficult to get an agent. (It can be very difficult to get one without a contact. It can also be very difficult to get a publisher to read your book without an agent. Both sides want to use the other as a filter. Catch-22!)
However, to elaborate on that advice:
Find an agent with experience in your field.
The best bet is to try and find out the agents of people who are publishing with your prospective publisher (most authors are very forthcoming, and industry publications often list author's agents...)
The clout of an agent lies with the number of clients he has with a given publisher. The agent's angle is that if the publisher tries to force an outrageous contract on a weak author, the agent will decide to yank more established authors away from that house. No editor wants to be on a powerful agents black list. (And almost every agent has a few houses they won't deal with because they damaged one of their clients...)
Your job is to find an agent who your prospective publishing house doesn't want to anger (and then persuade him or her to represent you).
Of course, an agent will cost you between 10-15% and there's a good chance that they won't make it up by increasing the advance. However, they can usually get most of the ridiculous conditions removed. They've been playing this field for a long time, so they know what's recent foolishness and what's "time-honoured" contract conditions.
It is only thought provoking if you are like most americans that have never travelled outside the US to see these kinds of things first hand. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's new or newsworthy.
You come across as rather self-aggrandizing as well as patronizing.
First, if you know this is occurring all along and think it's a problem, I would imagine that you would be happy to see this get publicity in order that perhaps some corrective action might be taken. Instead you take the opportunity to point out that you personally knew about the "disposal of computer" problem beforehand, so everyone should have already been aware of it.
Anything that a large part of the population doesn't already know may well be considered newsworthy. Perhaps you should have said that it is sad that this *is* newsworthy.
Secondly, a visit to a particular less-developed countries does not automatically confer knowledge of various environmental disasters in all other countries. Your post really had the tone of "all eco-disasters in third world countries are alike". Each problem may have a separate cause and sure as anything has a different solution. Certainly, different disasters are worth different stories. I'd hate to think a single "Western goods cause echo-disaster" story is all one needs to know on the entire subject.
Lastly, the Americans may be famous for their insularity, but I'd bet money that the BBC was mostly addressing this to Europeans that were unaware of the problem. I know from personal experience that they could certainly have addressed this particular issue to Canadians.
But, I'm always amazed at the "why do people do..." questions. Its as if they expect the world to think the exact same way they do.
I think you've got it exactly backwards. If a person is taking on a project that to my eyes seems redundant, I would likely assume that they see something that I do not and ask them "why do you..." in order to seek enlightenment.
My first impulse when I see something that seems wrong to me is to try and find out how it seems right to someone else.
However, often enough, a genuine question does seem to be construed as an attack. I guess that a lot of people assume that we've already got our minds made up, therefore a question is really an probe for weakness.
I suspect that product placement will not be enough to recover anywhere near the revenues that they have now.
I'm pretty certain that if PVRs take off, we will see half screen TV shows with the margins (or the left/right half of the screen) filled with advertisements. It's the sort of thing that would have been unthinkable 5-10 years ago. Then again, so would plastering one's logo all over the bottom-right corner of the screen. People will put up with almost anything for their free TV as long as there isn't an alternative.
On the plus side, maybe they'll give up on program interrupting commercials altogether. Or they'll put random 10-20 second commercials every few minutes. There are ways around PVRs, although I suspect they may be worse than the current free TV solution.
Everyone seems to assume that most C# programs will not have unsafe constructs, making it generally practical to disallow code with unsafe constructs.
I'm willing to bet that most C# code will contain unsafe constructs. Programmers mostly come from a C background and, like all other humans, are basically lazy. Since unsafe code is both faster and easier to write, there will be tremendous impetus to write unsafe code so as "to get it done now".
With enough code that has unsafe constructs in it, system admins/users will end up allowing unsafe code to run by default.
In almost all cases, users want the maximum features and least security possible. Java's "least secure" mode is a lot better than "C#"s. Therefore Java is likely to be a lot more secure than C#. Blame the users? Sure. But it's the security that is actually used that counts, not what's available.
Well, I haven't noticed that the phone company tells me that the my local calling service is limited, but if everyone stayed on 24-hours a day, the local exchange would explode.
[Now that I think about it, the phone companies *were* having trouble of this kind when flat-rate modem pricing came around. Suddenly they were trying to switch line-hogs to business phone lines... Still I haven't noticed the phone companies advertising any limitations to their local service.]
I think that the mistake that these guys are making, and they will find it out pretty soon, is that the people who pirate their software will not use their software if they where forced to pay for it, The reality is that people who pirate their software are an assent in mindshare.
This may be true for expensive products where the home user is not the market. However, it is absolutely not true for inexpensive products where the pirate *is* the target market. Based on experience with my company's product (software for students), I'd estimate that probably 25% of the people trying to reactivate pirated software would register if the screen came up indicating that
it's pirated,
you're obviously think it's worth using,
you're putting the author's newborn out on the street:-).
At that point, many (even including students!) will fork out $25 so that they don't have to feel like complete weasels...
(Caveat: Our experience is with students phoning for technical support on the pirated software...)
Also, with Ambrosia, they're already providing part of the game free, so they're gaining little extra mindshare with people pirating the whole thing.
While limos, first class flights, and a new nicely designed building might seem outrageous, one should keep in mind that sites that look pedestrian and work on basic research rarely get corporate funding.
Every company wants to donate money to a "successful" department and, like it or not, a lot of people controlling the money determine success by the outward signs. Likewise, good research that doesn't have some flash/publicity potential isn't worth a whole lot when it comes to getting donations. It's why some of the wierder projects are very important from a fund-raising point of view. They get you noticed.
Of course, you can go too far, start looking ostentatious and have your projects look like time wasters. It's a careful balance and not an obvious one at that.
For me, the biggest question will be the format of the extra material.
I suspect that the will have the "deleted scenes" in the DVD coming out in August. However, I would love to see the extra scenes actually integrated into the movie. We will probably have to wait until the boxed set for that.
I would certainly buy the boxed set if they had a version of the movie without the CGI in Galadriel's ring speech. Cate Blanchett certainly didn't need it and I weep for what the scene could have been...
My personal experience has been that OO is a big win when a problem is subject to factoring. By factoring, I mean that when you take each element involved in the problem, you can find common factors between them. In that case, you get a natural class hierarchy by moving the common elements into parent classes with each individual element being a subclass. The reduction in code size decreases the number of bugs substantially.
One way you can detect this is if you are doing a lot of cutting, pasting and modifying during development. Often this is an indication that a better design would be to have one copy of the base code. All the other elements that had copies would now essentially inherit the base code and then override the parts that need to be changed for that particular element.
If your project is not going to involve a lot of inheritance, then OO is really only useful if you are in a large project, in which case it acts as a useful way of delineating responsabilities. (i.e. all I have to do is implement and test these interfaces and I don't have to worry about stepping on other people's toes.)
This is all a great simplification, but it covers my experience in a nutshell.
It's not really a suprise that ownership pool of webviews has shrunk. Essentially, only the largest corporations still have money to throw away. It's not as if *anyone* is making money off the internet. Basically, everyone involved is taking a bath, from the connection providers to the content providers. (Yea, yea, a few people took the money and ran, but I'm talking about making a profit, not suckering investors.)
Only a large company still has money to throw down the drain into supplying cheap bandwidth and free (okay advertiser supported) web sites in the hopes that some day, this will magically make money.
The last few years has, in my opinion, seen the largest transfer of money from investors to customers (in the form of below cost services) in the history of commerce. No suprise only the wealthy can afford to continue giving away money to their customers.
Why remove the repair of Aragorne's sword? It would seem to be critical later on.
I only realized why they delayed the reforging after my second viewing. They have made a major (and in my opinion, successful) change from the book. Aragorn has not taken the throne because of his fear that his blood is not strong enough for the task. It is in response Boromir's death-bed fear that he vows to take the throne and protect Gondor. (I *love the entire scene. It's among the best in the movie...) If he had had the sword reforged before, then the Boromir's death would have been entirely superfluous and devoid of the weight that it has in the movie.
I must admit I'm quite apprehensive about FotR's commercial success. It's certainly not going to lose money (everybody will see it at least once). However, there are two factors that might prevent it from matching Harry Potter, et al.
They didn't mess with the story in any major way. It ends just as the book did, which is perhaps not the most uplifting of endings. Nobody's going to be bouncing out of the theatre.
More importantly. The directory stayed true to the themes of the book. There's no postmodernism here. Not an ounce of irony. This is a movie about obligation, duty and sacrifice. Not exactly themes that strike a chord with large number of people nowadays. I don't think I've seen a movie meant for an adult audience as unambiguously earnest in a long time.
Of course, that's exactly why I loved the movie...
I was fortunate enough to see the movie in late November. (no spoilers follow)
They did not do the impossible. The length and breadth of Fellowship of the Ring could not be compressed into a 3 hour movie. Nor could they manage to please of all us Tolkein fans, each of whom brings a mental picture of what Elves/Frodo/Gandalf/Dwarves/ Aragorn/etc. *really* looked/acted like.
I will guarantee that each of you will walk away disappointed in *some* aspect of the movie. I also expect it to be a *different* piece of the movie for each person.
What they managed was the remarkable. The movie works, and works well. They have successfully translated a book almost totally unsuited for a movie into a rivetting, astonishingly beautiful piece of cinema.
In other words, keep expectations in check, and you should enjoy yourself immensely. Go, waiting to see what part they adulterated/messed up, and you risk letting your inevitable disappointment in one section overshadow the considerable success of the movie as a whole.
As an aside, I suspect that there's a lot of (non-existent) advertising revenue in a site that allows each user to vote on the five things that they feel the film did wrong. I figure there'd be at least five hundred possible complaints. On the other hand, my comparison with other people's list have found an almost complete lack of unity about what the points are! (How could nobody else realize that they've totally destroyed the Shire scenes by making Bilbo's eyes the wrong color:-))
People at work will backstab you every chance they get, report you to the boss, spy for the boss, even lie about you to move up.
Okay, this is getting ridiculous. One post with this attitude is enough. A dozen (from the same person) is going overboard.
If people really were like this everywhere, civilization would never have made it past hunter/gatherer.
There may be people like that. There may even be organizations that operate like that (and not suprisingly, fail amazingly quickly). But to label every workplace as a hellhole of murderous intent is to risk becoming a parody of yourself.
You forget that most people's goal is to be happy and that for most people, being a conniving backstabber doesn't make them happy.
Besides, taken only a little bit futher and we can assume that since everyone is out for themselves in work and out. Soon it's
Slashdot Mirror
When my wife tried to cancel her cell phone (she had gone to another service), there line of excuses went:
"We can't"
"We can, but it your contract must run the rest of the year"
"Maybe there was no contract, but there's a $50 service charge"
"Maybe there is no service charge, but you'll have to clear it with the Loyalty department"
At this point my wife is mentions how the Loyalty department has tones of "1984". The service representative says he never saw the movie. *sigh*.
The Loyalty department:
"How about another month's contract just in case you really do need it"
"How about a month's free service" (!)
"How about three months' free service" (!!!)
"Why do you want to cancel?"
"Can you give a better reason?" (!)
Finally, they refused to cancel the service for three months. They'd just stop billing us and if we didn't use the service, it would expire...
Now after all that (which makes for great anecdotes at parties, even if it took a while), they did actually keep their word and we saw no more bills.
Now here's an interesting point. In essence, any time you purchase any MS software, you really need to factor in the cost of maintaining 100% license compliance. I figure (given how machines move around, etc.) that this has got to be at least $50-$100 per machine per year for the life of the machine. After all, that sort of 100% accurate record keeping does not come cheap. I wouldn't want to have 1 person handling more than 500 machines (imagine, he get's to track down exactly what software is on each machine that school has in closets, loaned to a teacher, moved to new lab, etc.!)
I suspect that if the price of software was put in those terms to schools any time they purchased Microsoft software, they might start seriously looking at alternatives. Compared to the base (education) software price, the compliance price might be many times higher.
Besides, what teacher wants to have the cost of the compliance agent subtracted from his budget each and every year?
Indeed, given that legislation that throws widows and orphans onto the street would probably be named the "Human Mobility and Properity Act", names do mean something in the minds of senators.
Since in America government, business is what really counts, we need something business-like in its name.
How about InnoPAC?
"InnoPAC. Brought to you by the *real* innovators."
Given that an exploitable system is not just a danger to oneself, but also a danger to others, it's quite possible to justify expiring software the same way that one justifies enforced adherence to safety measures. Its quite common to force companies to upgrade equipment to current safety standards. This is merely a mechanism to protect the community.
While it doesn't necessarily justify forcing users to upgrade, this debate is not an entirely one-sided.
First, start with a dismissal of this asburd court case. Make it clear that unless the case is immediately dismissed, Microsoft will no longer sell or support any product in the USA. Delist MS from the American stock market (or threaten to) and refuse to sell product to the international operations of any company that continues to list on an American stock market. Losing (or the threat of losing) every major successful tech company causes a market crash that makes people remember 1929 as blip. This means the elimination of all major American PC producers and the elimination (or elimination of expansion) of any business that depends on MS technology (almost all of them). Make certain the it is known that when the American gov't buckles, any PC company that sold alternate OS's will never sell an MS product again. Likewise with companies that flirted with alternate solutions are to be denied access to technology.
:-). If it actually look like somehow someone's making some money on the non-intel based systems, buy them and burn 'em. After that, only fanatics willing to pay 5 or 10 times what an Windows machine cost will be running them. (By this point, non-MS companies have no economies of scale to subsidize Linux sales.)
:-).
Once the USA is looking at a depression to make the 1930's look like a walk in the park, we can assume that the gov't will see reason. (Of course, this costs MS a pretty penny, but they can live on international sales alone for as long as it takes.)
Once that's over with, it's time to party. First, buy Sun and Apple and immediately kill them. Make it publically known that any possible competitor that starts rising through the ranks wil be bought and their customers orphaned. It will only cost you a lot once or twice. After that, nobody is going to bother buying from a competitor. If it's any good, your assured of buying an orphan-to-be product.
Now finally we come to the open-source strategy... *phew*. Make a deal with the hardware manufacturers. CPUs, chipsets and motherboards are modified so that they either run MS Windows only (MS Win ROMS anyone), or you can never run Windows. Hardware companies can choose: either MS alone, or never. If they don't like it, there's a dozen others ready to take their place. Good luck living off the Linux market alone
Large company licenses require companies to justify any non-MS tech investments or face double or triple costs. MS will of course, approve of tech investments in fields where they don't have offerings.
Finally, modify Windows so that it will not run non-approved software, except for high-priced development systems that require strict licensing and some special hardware. A software redistribution license requires strict approval by MS, $100,000 testing fee, 15% royalties and a right to allow MS to purchase the software at an agreed upon price.
Lastly, once companies are used to renting their software yearly, make the cost of an MS license (for public companies) 1-2% of outstanding stock in lieu of payment. Those that wish to forego the expense of course have the option of ceasing to use computers.
After 50 years, MS stock is a rather more real currency that the US dollar and Open Source software, it a weird memory from a time when individuals programmed.
Oh, you meant what would *we* like to see MS's OSS strategy be. Oops
Given the amount of data needed in a one-time pad, I can just imagine someone in the CIA firing up his computer program and saying "Give me 500 pages of one-time codes" :-).
My parents always taught me "Before you do anything, think about what the world would be like if EVERYONE did that thing. Before you toss that gum wrapper out of the car window, think about what the street would look like if everyone did it.
"Well, I was going to take the 401 into work today, but with 6 billion people on it, maybe I'll stick with the subway..."
Why is it that all of the *new* media content has attracted so much bad practise
Because people have learned, in Old Media, all the way they could have screwed the author, the consumer, and the public, if only they had known. But they accidentally let all these roadblocks, legal and social, arise that raise expectations in Old Media. Ahhhh, but in New Media, there are no such blocks.
Actually, there's a slightly less pernicious possibility. Lots of companies are scared pea green that something they don't anticipate will slap them upside the head and destroy them in one fell swoop.
The only way to be able to handle the unforseen is to have all the power yourself, allowing you to react as necessary. Don't want to find out that new "mind-imprinting technology" that didn't exist last year is going to render your multi-billion dollar investment in books and movies worthless? Then make damn sure you own the rights to use the the content you publish in any new medium. Make certain you have the right to make any changes necessary in order to make the content compatible. Make certain you have clauses that can allow you to dump the content that is now valueless without forking over any more money than you've already paid...
Old media was based on the assumption of long-term stability. Technology has taken that away and made it possible to turn huge assets into so much waste in a matter of months.
[Of course, that's complete bunk, but have enough people yelling at you that you're going to go bankrupt because of this or that new technology and big suprise, you protect yourself.]
Of course, once you've got that power, it's pretty tempting to corporate executives (who now hold a lot more power over editors than in the past) to actually use it to boost profits. Absolute power and all that...
From the article:
:-)) and pump them for advice...
In the past, when an author signed a contract with a publisher, he or she could safely assume that the book under contract would be published. However, as a general rule, most publishers now insist upon a clause that relieves them of that obligation. More specifically, if a publisher chooses for any reason not to publish a given book, the author can keep the portion of the advance that has been paid. But that's all. And in some instances, if the author resells the book to another publisher, even that partial advance must be repaid. In other words, the standard publishing contract today is nothing more than a one-sided option to publish--obligating the author, but not the publisher.
Actually, a clause like that has always been there. The difference is that before it took a catastrophe of major proportion to make a publisher actually invoke the clause. Nowadays, when a publisher is in peril (or at least its profits are), it invokes those clauses much more easily. A favourite for fiction publishers is the due date clause. Most fiction authors are perennially late, and this clause (which has always existed) can allow you to can a substantial number of books for only half their advance.
Of course, publishers that play dirty games soon become publishers of last resort among those in the know. The name of the game here is to keep up on industry gossip! Join any author associations that you can and mingle with established authors.
Also note that the rules for bestselling authors are so different from beginning authors that there's not much to be learned from them. Find a midlist author (or three) who's work you like (most authors are very amenable to heartfelt complements
GET AN AGENT
This is absolutely essential advice. Once you have a contract in hand, it's not terribly difficult to get an agent. (It can be very difficult to get one without a contact. It can also be very difficult to get a publisher to read your book without an agent. Both sides want to use the other as a filter. Catch-22!)
However, to elaborate on that advice:
Find an agent with experience in your field.
The best bet is to try and find out the agents of people who are publishing with your prospective publisher (most authors are very forthcoming, and industry publications often list author's agents...)
The clout of an agent lies with the number of clients he has with a given publisher. The agent's angle is that if the publisher tries to force an outrageous contract on a weak author, the agent will decide to yank more established authors away from that house. No editor wants to be on a powerful agents black list. (And almost every agent has a few houses they won't deal with because they damaged one of their clients...)
Your job is to find an agent who your prospective publishing house doesn't want to anger (and then persuade him or her to represent you).
Of course, an agent will cost you between 10-15% and there's a good chance that they won't make it up by increasing the advance. However, they can usually get most of the ridiculous conditions removed. They've been playing this field for a long time, so they know what's recent foolishness and what's "time-honoured" contract conditions.
It is only thought provoking if you are like most americans that have never travelled outside the US to see these kinds of things first hand.
Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's new or newsworthy.
You come across as rather self-aggrandizing as well as patronizing.
First, if you know this is occurring all along and think it's a problem, I would imagine that you would be happy to see this get publicity in order that perhaps some corrective action might be taken. Instead you take the opportunity to point out that you personally knew about the "disposal of computer" problem beforehand, so everyone should have already been aware of it.
Anything that a large part of the population doesn't already know may well be considered newsworthy. Perhaps you should have said that it is sad that this *is* newsworthy.
Secondly, a visit to a particular less-developed countries does not automatically confer knowledge of various environmental disasters in all other countries. Your post really had the tone of "all eco-disasters in third world countries are alike". Each problem may have a separate cause and sure as anything has a different solution. Certainly, different disasters are worth different stories. I'd hate to think a single "Western goods cause echo-disaster" story is all one needs to know on the entire subject.
Lastly, the Americans may be famous for their insularity, but I'd bet money that the BBC was mostly addressing this to Europeans that were unaware of the problem. I know from personal experience that they could certainly have addressed this particular issue to Canadians.
Oddly enough, I've usually heard a Window's cluster referred to as a "pane".
:-).
Didn't make sense to me, but the sys admins certainly were adamant
But, I'm always amazed at the "why do people do..." questions. Its as if they expect the world to think the exact same way they do.
I think you've got it exactly backwards. If a person is taking on a project that to my eyes seems redundant, I would likely assume that they see something that I do not and ask them "why do you..." in order to seek enlightenment.
My first impulse when I see something that seems wrong to me is to try and find out how it seems right to someone else.
However, often enough, a genuine question does seem to be construed as an attack. I guess that a lot of people assume that we've already got our minds made up, therefore a question is really an probe for weakness.
I suspect that product placement will not be enough to recover anywhere near the revenues that they have now.
I'm pretty certain that if PVRs take off, we will see half screen TV shows with the margins (or the left/right half of the screen) filled with advertisements. It's the sort of thing that would have been unthinkable 5-10 years ago. Then again, so would plastering one's logo all over the bottom-right corner of the screen. People will put up with almost anything for their free TV as long as there isn't an alternative.
On the plus side, maybe they'll give up on program interrupting commercials altogether. Or they'll put random 10-20 second commercials every few minutes. There are ways around PVRs, although I suspect they may be worse than the current free TV solution.
Everyone seems to assume that most C# programs will not have unsafe constructs, making it generally practical to disallow code with unsafe constructs.
I'm willing to bet that most C# code will contain unsafe constructs. Programmers mostly come from a C background and, like all other humans, are basically lazy. Since unsafe code is both faster and easier to write, there will be tremendous impetus to write unsafe code so as "to get it done now".
With enough code that has unsafe constructs in it, system admins/users will end up allowing unsafe code to run by default.
In almost all cases, users want the maximum features and least security possible. Java's "least secure" mode is a lot better than "C#"s. Therefore Java is likely to be a lot more secure than C#. Blame the users? Sure. But it's the security that is actually used that counts, not what's available.
Well, I haven't noticed that the phone company tells me that the my local calling service is limited, but if everyone stayed on 24-hours a day, the local exchange would explode.
[Now that I think about it, the phone companies *were* having trouble of this kind when flat-rate modem pricing came around. Suddenly they were trying to switch line-hogs to business phone lines... Still I haven't noticed the phone companies advertising any limitations to their local service.]
This may be true for expensive products where the home user is not the market. However, it is absolutely not true for inexpensive products where the pirate *is* the target market. Based on experience with my company's product (software for students), I'd estimate that probably 25% of the people trying to reactivate pirated software would register if the screen came up indicating that
At that point, many (even including students!) will fork out $25 so that they don't have to feel like complete weasels...
(Caveat: Our experience is with students phoning for technical support on the pirated software...)
Also, with Ambrosia, they're already providing part of the game free, so they're gaining little extra mindshare with people pirating the whole thing.
While limos, first class flights, and a new nicely designed building might seem outrageous, one should keep in mind that sites that look pedestrian and work on basic research rarely get corporate funding.
Every company wants to donate money to a "successful" department and, like it or not, a lot of people controlling the money determine success by the outward signs. Likewise, good research that doesn't have some flash/publicity potential isn't worth a whole lot when it comes to getting donations. It's why some of the wierder projects are very important from a fund-raising point of view. They get you noticed.
Of course, you can go too far, start looking ostentatious and have your projects look like time wasters. It's a careful balance and not an obvious one at that.
For me, the biggest question will be the format of the extra material.
I suspect that the will have the "deleted scenes" in the DVD coming out in August. However, I would love to see the extra scenes actually integrated into the movie. We will probably have to wait until the boxed set for that.
I would certainly buy the boxed set if they had a version of the movie without the CGI in Galadriel's ring speech. Cate Blanchett certainly didn't need it and I weep for what the scene could have been...
My personal experience has been that OO is a big win when a problem is subject to factoring. By factoring, I mean that when you take each element involved in the problem, you can find common factors between them. In that case, you get a natural class hierarchy by moving the common elements into parent classes with each individual element being a subclass. The reduction in code size decreases the number of bugs substantially.
One way you can detect this is if you are doing a lot of cutting, pasting and modifying during development. Often this is an indication that a better design would be to have one copy of the base code. All the other elements that had copies would now essentially inherit the base code and then override the parts that need to be changed for that particular element.
If your project is not going to involve a lot of inheritance, then OO is really only useful if you are in a large project, in which case it acts as a useful way of delineating responsabilities. (i.e. all I have to do is implement and test these interfaces and I don't have to worry about stepping on other people's toes.)
This is all a great simplification, but it covers my experience in a nutshell.
It's not really a suprise that ownership pool of webviews has shrunk. Essentially, only the largest corporations still have money to throw away. It's not as if *anyone* is making money off the internet. Basically, everyone involved is taking a bath, from the connection providers to the content providers. (Yea, yea, a few people took the money and ran, but I'm talking about making a profit, not suckering investors.)
Only a large company still has money to throw down the drain into supplying cheap bandwidth and free (okay advertiser supported) web sites in the hopes that some day, this will magically make money.
The last few years has, in my opinion, seen the largest transfer of money from investors to customers (in the form of below cost services) in the history of commerce. No suprise only the wealthy can afford to continue giving away money to their customers.
Why remove the repair of Aragorne's sword? It would seem to be critical later on.
I only realized why they delayed the reforging after my second viewing. They have made a major (and in my opinion, successful) change from the book. Aragorn has not taken the throne because of his fear that his blood is not strong enough for the task. It is in response Boromir's death-bed fear that he vows to take the throne and protect Gondor. (I *love the entire scene. It's among the best in the movie...) If he had had the sword reforged before, then the Boromir's death would have been entirely superfluous and devoid of the weight that it has in the movie.
Of course, that's exactly why I loved the movie...
I was fortunate enough to see the movie in late November. (no spoilers follow)
:-))
They did not do the impossible. The length and breadth of Fellowship of the Ring could not be compressed into a 3 hour movie. Nor could they manage to please of all us Tolkein fans, each of whom brings a mental picture of what Elves/Frodo/Gandalf/Dwarves/ Aragorn/etc. *really* looked/acted like.
I will guarantee that each of you will walk away disappointed in *some* aspect of the movie. I also expect it to be a *different* piece of the movie for each person.
What they managed was the remarkable. The movie works, and works well. They have successfully translated a book almost totally unsuited for a movie into a rivetting, astonishingly beautiful piece of cinema.
In other words, keep expectations in check, and you should enjoy yourself immensely. Go, waiting to see what part they adulterated/messed up, and you risk letting your inevitable disappointment in one section overshadow the considerable success of the movie as a whole.
As an aside, I suspect that there's a lot of (non-existent) advertising revenue in a site that allows each user to vote on the five things that they feel the film did wrong. I figure there'd be at least five hundred possible complaints. On the other hand, my comparison with other people's list have found an almost complete lack of unity about what the points are! (How could nobody else realize that they've totally destroyed the Shire scenes by making Bilbo's eyes the wrong color
People at work will backstab you every chance they get, report you to the boss, spy for the boss, even lie about you to move up.
Okay, this is getting ridiculous. One post with this attitude is enough. A dozen (from the same person) is going overboard.
If people really were like this everywhere, civilization would never have made it past hunter/gatherer.
There may be people like that. There may even be organizations that operate like that (and not suprisingly, fail amazingly quickly). But to label every workplace as a hellhole of murderous intent is to risk becoming a parody of yourself.
You forget that most people's goal is to be happy and that for most people, being a conniving backstabber doesn't make them happy.
Besides, taken only a little bit futher and we can assume that since everyone is out for themselves in work and out. Soon it's
"Trust nobody. Keep your laser handy!".
Then where are we?