Well, I supposed it makes it easier to hide the stupid things some of us may have posted (especially in university) to Usenet back in the 80s and early 90s. Mind you, those "features" allowed me to resurrect some semi-useful postings I had made:
No kidding! Of course, it's probably meaningless to most of the readers, who are clueless about the eighties. (As opposed to us, who were clueless in the eighties.)
This brings up an interesting point, though. I've often wondered if the number of unique words in a song's refrain had any correlation with its popularity ranking. I mean, look at songs like "One More Night" or "Sussudio"... No! More songs of the 80s running through my head!
Aren't most satellite channels commercial-free? That would seem like a good reason to me. Besides, even if there are dozens of channels in your area, there may not be any you really like.
... for something good to watch on all those channels I have. I suppose this could make me turn off the TV more quickly and pick up a good book instead.
I wonder how they'll make money on this? Maybe they'll do the picture-in-picture thing and show a relevant commercial while you're watching the video clip. (AdWords would work better, but you'd need to be able to click on links.)
Re:Here's how I got my mom to verify
on
Gone Phishing?
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Well, sometimes my friends will send me links and sometimes I'll still click on those... but yeah, these days it's safer to copy and paste links instead of clicking on them.
Eric
Re:Knowing is half the battle
on
Gone Phishing?
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· Score: 1
with URL spoofing in IE, it's an even bigger problem
Has anyone developed any anti-phishing plugins for the various browsers? It should be easy to do for Firefox and Mozilla, of course, and you can even write an ActiveX (cough) browser handler for IE, if I recall my MSDN documentation correctly. The plugins wouldn't be perfect, of course, but they could detect some obvious cases like numeric-only IP addresses being clicked, or maybe even do some analysis of your hosts file. Better than nothing, it seems to me...
Re:Here's how I got my mom to verify
on
Gone Phishing?
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· Score: 1
Same thing with my wife -- because I've warned her, she's been on the lookout for these things. The bank scams are pretty obvious for us, since we're not based in the US and the ones we get are for US banks, but the Paypal ones are the tricky ones. It's going to get to the point where you just don't click on a link you get in an email.
Again, I wasn't trying to say that there actually is a need for a new book, or that the new book is better, I was just trying to explain why someone would publish another book on a given topic. I'm sure Larry's book still does well.
was there really a market for another beginner's book in Perl?
In a free market -- not to be confused with a GPL market -- this is called competition. Just because there's already a good book out doesn't mean that a better one can't be written. Not to say that this one is better than the other. Also, publishers like to fill in their catalogs with books on all the hot/important/niche topics on the chance that one of them will really fly and to make themselves appear current and relevant to book buyers.
Also, with computer books there's a definite shelf life for most books. All my published books are way too old, for example, to be considered current anymore, though a lot of the info I put in them is still valid. People looking at Learning Perl might think it's too old as well, since the third edition was published in 2001. It's hard to write books that aren't out-of-date before they're even shipped to the store, but when the copyright date is no longer in the same or previous year, it gets harder to sell them... The rule of thumb I've heard is that for most computer books the first sixth months are the most critical, that's when you'll see the most copies. That's why it's important to get good reviews up on Amazon as early as possible and to promote the book like crazy around its publication time. As with anything, there are exceptions to this, like the venerable C Programming Language.
According to the ISBN buried in the BN.com link, it's an Apress book by James Lee and Peter Wainwright. See GoPriceIt for more details. Or just go straight to the Amazon entry for the book.
Never hurts to educate yourself with some techie business books. I like Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore, especially the way he talks about the "whole product" customer proposition. The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen was also a fun read, though it's not directly related to your problem per se.
Forgot to mention: Steve Punter's Southern Ontario Cell Phone Page is a great resource for information on the North American cellphone market from the consumer viewpoint. (Well, it's really about the Canadian market, but the same technologies are used in the US.) He has a good explanation of the various technologies available in the North American market, and links to all the carriers in Canada. I find the coverage maps (like this one for my area) pretty useful.
At least the BlackBerry is designed and built here, so we're not totally behind!
Absolutely. The North American market is very different. Competing technologies (CDMA, TDMA, GSM, iDEN) mean there is less choice in terms of handsets, plus they're locked for the most part to the carrier that sells them. Costs are often more than landlines. You pay to make AND receive calls. Coverage can be spotty due to geographic extent. Analog coverage is still a factor. Lots of different things.
This is the next step from applications that exist today. For example, J2ME-enabled phones can run Piranha Pricecheck. I even wrote up a simple book price check application that I was going to use for an article but never went too far with it.
This stuff is quite easy to do with Amazon's web services. On a mobile phone, oddly enough, the ISBN is also really easy to enter from the keypad, since it's all digits except for the trailing X that sometimes occurs (modulo 11 check digit) and you can infer that.
Sorry, you're right, I missed that bit about the conditional comments. Yeesh, what a kludge! Anyhow, my original intent was to show people how to detect if Firefox was being used and to show a "Spread Firefox!" button instead of a "Get Firefox!" button but some non-IE users took offense at the implication that they should be getting Firefox too. Can't please everyone, I guess!
Hopefully some viewers learn something new when they read the article (and the HTTP header viewer).
All I'm doing is showing how you can do a little server-side scripting to decide whether or not to show a "Get Firefox!" image or link to encourage IE users to switch to Firefox. (Just do it gently and politely.) Yes, you can also do this in JavaScript, but my little article doesn't deal with client-side detection at all.
That's why I say in the article "I'm keeping it really simple so you don't need to use JSTL or any other tag library". If this is something that you want to do often, you should move it into tags, or install a filter to set request properties, or whatever.
Mind you, I don't subscribe to the party line that all scriptlets are evil. Most of the time you shouldn't use scriptlets, but there are exceptions to everything. Nothing wrong with the occasional one-off here and there -- but you gotta know the rules to know when to break them. But that's just my opinion.
My point was that these kinds of books are increasing significantly in popularity, and they're going beyond simple "intro to technology" type books. I expect that at some point "programming" books will be a small subset of the larger "computer book" category. Maybe they won't even be called "computer books" anymore.
Different mindset. We see "Computers and Internet" and think "programming", others see "Computers and Internet" and see "games, browsing, and chatting". "Computers and Internet" is now a very broad category.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I supposed it makes it easier to hide the stupid things some of us may have posted (especially in university) to Usenet back in the 80s and early 90s. Mind you, those "features" allowed me to resurrect some semi-useful postings I had made:
Reading C Declarations: A Guide for the Mystified
The ANSI Standard: A Summary for the C Programmer
EricThanks for getting that song stuck in my head.
No kidding! Of course, it's probably meaningless to most of the readers, who are clueless about the eighties. (As opposed to us, who were clueless in the eighties.)
This brings up an interesting point, though. I've often wondered if the number of unique words in a song's refrain had any correlation with its popularity ranking. I mean, look at songs like "One More Night" or "Sussudio"... No! More songs of the 80s running through my head!
EricSome BlackBerry programming stuff
Another misleading article title! I thought maybe Wal-Mart was selling defective cameras. Now I have to go look elsewhere for my Christmas shopping...
EricJavaScript is not Java!
Aren't most satellite channels commercial-free? That would seem like a good reason to me. Besides, even if there are dozens of channels in your area, there may not be any you really like.
EricHow to make money with Vioxx
... for something good to watch on all those channels I have. I suppose this could make me turn off the TV more quickly and pick up a good book instead.
I wonder how they'll make money on this? Maybe they'll do the picture-in-picture thing and show a relevant commercial while you're watching the video clip. (AdWords would work better, but you'd need to be able to click on links.)
EricView your browser's HTTP headers here
Ah, a way to identify geeks at birth!
EricReading C Declarations: A Guide for the Mystified
Well, sometimes my friends will send me links and sometimes I'll still click on those... but yeah, these days it's safer to copy and paste links instead of clicking on them.
Ericwith URL spoofing in IE, it's an even bigger problem
Has anyone developed any anti-phishing plugins for the various browsers? It should be easy to do for Firefox and Mozilla, of course, and you can even write an ActiveX (cough) browser handler for IE, if I recall my MSDN documentation correctly. The plugins wouldn't be perfect, of course, but they could detect some obvious cases like numeric-only IP addresses being clicked, or maybe even do some analysis of your hosts file. Better than nothing, it seems to me...
EricWhy the Vioxx recall reduced spam (humor)
Same thing with my wife -- because I've warned her, she's been on the lookout for these things. The bank scams are pretty obvious for us, since we're not based in the US and the ones we get are for US banks, but the Paypal ones are the tricky ones. It's going to get to the point where you just don't click on a link you get in an email.
EricHow to masquerade your browser
Indeed, reading The Innovator's Dilemma shows you how often a disruptive technology can be misjudged. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20.
EricYou know, the one where the guy is chasing his MP3 player down the street. I didn't realize that they were turbine Energizer batteries. Duh!
EricSee your HTTP headers here
Transparent aluminum gets closer and closer!
EricWilliam Shatner on my cereal box
Again, I wasn't trying to say that there actually is a need for a new book, or that the new book is better, I was just trying to explain why someone would publish another book on a given topic. I'm sure Larry's book still does well.
Ericwas there really a market for another beginner's book in Perl?
In a free market -- not to be confused with a GPL market -- this is called competition. Just because there's already a good book out doesn't mean that a better one can't be written. Not to say that this one is better than the other. Also, publishers like to fill in their catalogs with books on all the hot/important/niche topics on the chance that one of them will really fly and to make themselves appear current and relevant to book buyers.
Also, with computer books there's a definite shelf life for most books. All my published books are way too old, for example, to be considered current anymore, though a lot of the info I put in them is still valid. People looking at Learning Perl might think it's too old as well, since the third edition was published in 2001. It's hard to write books that aren't out-of-date before they're even shipped to the store, but when the copyright date is no longer in the same or previous year, it gets harder to sell them... The rule of thumb I've heard is that for most computer books the first sixth months are the most critical, that's when you'll see the most copies. That's why it's important to get good reviews up on Amazon as early as possible and to promote the book like crazy around its publication time. As with anything, there are exceptions to this, like the venerable C Programming Language.
EricAccording to the ISBN buried in the BN.com link, it's an Apress book by James Lee and Peter Wainwright. See GoPriceIt for more details. Or just go straight to the Amazon entry for the book.
EricNever hurts to educate yourself with some techie business books. I like Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore, especially the way he talks about the "whole product" customer proposition. The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen was also a fun read, though it's not directly related to your problem per se.
EricForgot to mention: Steve Punter's Southern Ontario Cell Phone Page is a great resource for information on the North American cellphone market from the consumer viewpoint. (Well, it's really about the Canadian market, but the same technologies are used in the US.) He has a good explanation of the various technologies available in the North American market, and links to all the carriers in Canada. I find the coverage maps (like this one for my area) pretty useful.
At least the BlackBerry is designed and built here, so we're not totally behind!
EricBasic info about BlackBerry development
must be really behind with phones
Absolutely. The North American market is very different. Competing technologies (CDMA, TDMA, GSM, iDEN) mean there is less choice in terms of handsets, plus they're locked for the most part to the carrier that sells them. Costs are often more than landlines. You pay to make AND receive calls. Coverage can be spotty due to geographic extent. Analog coverage is still a factor. Lots of different things.
EricThis is the next step from applications that exist today. For example, J2ME-enabled phones can run Piranha Pricecheck. I even wrote up a simple book price check application that I was going to use for an article but never went too far with it.
This stuff is quite easy to do with Amazon's web services. On a mobile phone, oddly enough, the ISBN is also really easy to enter from the keypad, since it's all digits except for the trailing X that sometimes occurs (modulo 11 check digit) and you can infer that.
EricSee what your browser is sending
Sorry, you're right, I missed that bit about the conditional comments. Yeesh, what a kludge! Anyhow, my original intent was to show people how to detect if Firefox was being used and to show a "Spread Firefox!" button instead of a "Get Firefox!" button but some non-IE users took offense at the implication that they should be getting Firefox too. Can't please everyone, I guess!
Hopefully some viewers learn something new when they read the article (and the HTTP header viewer).
EricAll I'm doing is showing how you can do a little server-side scripting to decide whether or not to show a "Get Firefox!" image or link to encourage IE users to switch to Firefox. (Just do it gently and politely.) Yes, you can also do this in JavaScript, but my little article doesn't deal with client-side detection at all.
EricThat's why I say in the article "I'm keeping it really simple so you don't need to use JSTL or any other tag library". If this is something that you want to do often, you should move it into tags, or install a filter to set request properties, or whatever.
Mind you, I don't subscribe to the party line that all scriptlets are evil. Most of the time you shouldn't use scriptlets, but there are exceptions to everything. Nothing wrong with the occasional one-off here and there -- but you gotta know the rules to know when to break them. But that's just my opinion.
EricMy point was that these kinds of books are increasing significantly in popularity, and they're going beyond simple "intro to technology" type books. I expect that at some point "programming" books will be a small subset of the larger "computer book" category. Maybe they won't even be called "computer books" anymore.
EricCheck out the hilarious Dating Design Patterns. (Your spouse may wonder why you're reading it, though.)
EricDifferent mindset. We see "Computers and Internet" and think "programming", others see "Computers and Internet" and see "games, browsing, and chatting". "Computers and Internet" is now a very broad category.
Eric