So a well known member of a community was paid off to sacrifice their reputation in order to recommend a bad book. You find that to be the probable situation because, though you've not read this book, you know it's poorly written and edited because of the publisher.
I'll never understand the thought process that leads to this kind of idiocy. And I wouldn't care but Melissa took the time to read and write the review and then has to put up with this kind of nonsense.
I don't know her, but I know what it's like to post a review here and have morons pop in to decry the effort because the only possible explanation for the review is some kind of monetary conspiracy.
Packt works with reviewers in a method pretty much identical to other tech publishers. I'd be interested in hearing what you think constitutes a "shill review" and how you know this is one.
I'm like you - I get a kick out of doing reviews. I review stuff at Amazon, I've had a few book reviews posted here at Slashdot.
I was invited into Vine a while back. There is zero communication about how many people are in it or what the criteria are. The Amazon folks are very tight lipped about the whole thing - and when you get in, that doesn't change at all. I have no idea why they asked me in, but I quit last month - so maybe there is another spot open now and you'll get it.
When I quit I sent an email to them telling them I enjoyed being in the program but I was leaving the country so I could not continue to participate. But I said thanks for letting me do it for a while. The response that came back was canned and it apologized that I was upset with the selection of products available via vine. I don't think there's a lot of human interaction with the program from the Amazon side.
It can be very cool if you get in as there are some pretty amazing items - but I never felt it necessary to give anything other than my honest opinion. Was the fact that I got stuff enough to subconsciously influence my vote? Could be I guess, though I wrote positive and negative reviews the whole time I was in.
And the greatest stuff is very difficult to get. I got some nice items but not some of the nicest - never had a chance for most of that stuff.
Book reviewers get free copies of books. Film reviewers go to free screenings of films. Video games - the same. People who make the full purchase themselves are the exception, not the rule.
I was in Vine for 2 or 3 years. I wrote honest reviews - good and bad for what I was given.
There is zero pressure to give a good review from Amazon and not really any contact from the source of the items. The closest I guess, was that some items had a little letter with them to the Vine member asking them to get in touch with the manufacturer (don't remember any of these with books) to see if the problem could be fixed. I never had to do that though.
There is a tendency for Vine members to get unhelpful ratings from other Vine members trying to push the "competition" down in the reviewer standings. The Vine forums are an interesting place with lots and lots of complaining at Amazon and other reviewers.
I don't think that one of the issues interfering with reform is that illegals are voting now- but I do think a strategic consideration is that amnesty could provide large numbers of future votes. How much that weighs in, I'm not sure but I think it's part of the mix. I think a bigger part is the financial gain that comes from being able to give illegal aliens substandard pay and treatment. I don't really care who is driving it or which party is part of the problem. I think people ought to pressure all politicians to take meaningful steps to correct what is currently a shameful situation.
The laws are broken. They need to be fixed. The status quo hurts the immigrants and it hurts American citizens. There needs to be sensible change but I see no indications that such change is anywhere in the near future.
Years ago I was taking a Java class. My wife was writing software for a synthetic aperture radar system and one of the key portions of her work was done by a physicist that did all his work in MS Excel. Then her employer would hire an intern to type the output from the spreadsheet (columns of numbers) into a flat file that their software could read.
I had a lot of fun showing her how to write something that could open and read the spreadsheets. While I helped her do that I got to see a bit of this guy's work and it was impressive as all get out.
I sat on a jury years ago. It was a bank robbery case and so it was in federal court. The FBI were involved but they had really screwed the pooch by basically being lazy and doing a crappy job. But the primary thing I remember is that they brought up surveillance video from the bank at some point. I don't remember how it came up but at some point it did, and the prosecution couldn't find the tapes.
At that point the judge told us, the jury, that if the tape couldn't be found we would need to assume that it contained information that helped the defendant. He said it was due to some prior case and missing evidence. In this specific case they did end up finding the video but it didn't help determine anything either way. Due to the FBI's failure to follow through on some simple stuff it ended up a hung jury.
At the time though, I felt comforted knowing that prosecution couldn't destroy or hide evidence and then use it against someone - but rather that lost evidence had to be presumed to help the defendant. Apparently that's not the case here, but it's really messed up as you say, if this guy goes to prison based on something that they don't even have.
Australia is mostly empty. The populations of the U.S.A. is 14 times larger than the population of Australia. Australia is not a big country in any of the ways that are relevant to the difficulty of converting over to a new measurement system.
I'm part of an organization that is global. My department here in the U.S. works with and supports offices all over the world. We realize we could do a much better job than we have in the past and part of what we are trying is having team members in the countries we support.
In some cases Americans go and work in the offices, in others we have nationals doing the job. I'll be moving to Hungary this summer to work in our Eastern Europe office.
So it isn't a problem for us. This is the way we want to work, we are just trying to do a better job of it.
I never said I didn't want "anything" in the cloud. In fact the word I used was "everything". I also placed that word in italics to emphasize that I meant some things I would rather maintain on my own machines, but not all things.
One of us has rather poor reading skills. That may be the one that is "moronic".
Furthermore, you have no idea what I do or where most of it takes place. To assert that you do is, well, rather short sighted. One might almost be inclined to say moronic.
And to decide that the security of one's data is properly handled should be a matter of luck. There has to be a good word for that view, let me think on it a bit and I'm sure it will come to me.
Oh, and if being called moronic makes you feel bothered at all, I'd recommend keeping that in mind when you throw the word at others. I'm no rocket scientist but that kind of slur really isn't called for.
Reading the wikipedia article, I got the impression that the current searchers benefited from the previous work to help them narrow down where to look.
This does remind me of another issue with the phone though. For whatever reason, it doesn't work as a mass storage device via usb unless the drivers are downloaded and installed from Samsung first. There are a completely set of different drivers that need to be installed for using Keis. Again, this is completely lame. What's worse is there are none released for Linux. To get that to work I need to use the Android SDK.
I'm glad your GPS works well, but I think we can both agree that a very large number of people don't share your experience. Googling "fix vibrant gps" returns about 348,000 results and so far the one fix that is supposed to be the most reliable is in the xda forums and involves opening up the phone and messing with the gps antenna or something. I didn't read it all because I new I wouldn't do it.
Based on my experience with my Galaxy S - I'm not going to be buying a Samsung phone again real soon.
I just got 2.2 and the manner to upgrade was pretty lame. (Requires a PC and software that only runs on 32 bit windows) I don't expect to ever get 2.3 on it. When I bought it 2.2 was "just around the corner", which turned out to be around a year.
The GPS is busted, Samsung has never, to my knowledge, addressed the issue and I've just come to accept that my phone doesn't have GPS. I've seen some fixes that involve opening up the phone and messing with some parts, but I'm not interested.
The screen is gorgeous, a lot of things work well, but for what I payed ($500) I expect all of it to work well and for decent support.
Interesting Idea. I'll give it some thought, though I'm one of those 'douches' so it might be a touch hypocritical.
I don't tag them as me though. Maybe people who post photos of kids and tag them as someone else are the real problem here. Then again, any of their friends can tag the photo in most cases. So it's tough to nail down the perpetrator.
Maybe you could mull it over and give me better criteria on who to unfriend?
The photo thing has been around for a long time and it sucks. I travel and have wanted to connect to facebook when in a different country, and it decides I need to prove who I am. So I have to match a certain number of pictures with the right person. The summary makes it sound clever and good, it is anything but.
It's been a few months since last time I did it, so I don't remember exact numbers but I had to get something like 4 out of 5 right. Then they start showing photos, and there is a list of 4 or 5 friend names below. It is up to you to pick the right friend to go with the photo.
What's the biggest problem? Well, you don't get pictures of the persons face as the summary says. What you get are pictures tagged with that persons name. The first one I did was their face, and I thought, "o.k. - no problem.".
The next one was some kid. A relative of one of my friends? A neigbor of one of my friends? Shoot could have even be one of my friends as a kid, I have no idea. All I know is I've got a 1 in 4 chance of guessing who this belongs to and if I'm wrong I've just used up my one wrong answer.
Next photo is an inanimate object. I don't know remember what it was any more. A pie or some food of some kind I think. Which friend is this?! I don't know. Best guess it is something one of my friends ate once. Who does it belong to? Once again, I haven't the slightest, but as you can guess, I wasn't allowed to log in.
A smaller problem is that I am not super close friends with every one of my friends on facebook. My barrier to entry on the friendship front is pretty low. I'm friends with people I knew in jr. high, highschool, worked with once, went to church with them years ago, etc. I know them but am not intimately close with them. Facebook is a good way to keep in touch while maintaining a comfortable distance. But will I be able to identify them in every pic of themselves they've uploaded to facebook? I doubt it. Not to mention the fad a bit back to change your profile pic to a cartoon character. I'll bet dollars to donuts those go into the rotation. Which of your friends was underdog and which was optimus prime? I don't remember.
It's a horrid system. A co-worker of mine on the same trip ran into it too. He mocked me for not knowing my friends well enough and then almost put his laptop through a window when he couldn't log into facebook. He had almost an identical experience, a picture of some 6 or 7 year old kid he didn't know and a bike or something.
When I was a student in Chicago, I took the train regularly to visit family in south-west Michigan. It was affordable and I didn't have a car.
I enjoyed it so much I thought I'd take the train home to Arizona for one of my breaks. It would take days and cost 3 or 4 times as much as flying. (This was in the early 90's - I don't think it's changed much.) So even if I didn't mind the time problem, I couldn't afford it.
I think a decent rail system would be great, but I'm skeptical it will happen in my lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
So a well known member of a community was paid off to sacrifice their reputation in order to recommend a bad book. You find that to be the probable situation because, though you've not read this book, you know it's poorly written and edited because of the publisher.
I'll never understand the thought process that leads to this kind of idiocy. And I wouldn't care but Melissa took the time to read and write the review and then has to put up with this kind of nonsense.
I don't know her, but I know what it's like to post a review here and have morons pop in to decry the effort because the only possible explanation for the review is some kind of monetary conspiracy.
Packt works with reviewers in a method pretty much identical to other tech publishers. I'd be interested in hearing what you think constitutes a "shill review" and how you know this is one.
I'm like you - I get a kick out of doing reviews. I review stuff at Amazon, I've had a few book reviews posted here at Slashdot.
I was invited into Vine a while back. There is zero communication about how many people are in it or what the criteria are. The Amazon folks are very tight lipped about the whole thing - and when you get in, that doesn't change at all. I have no idea why they asked me in, but I quit last month - so maybe there is another spot open now and you'll get it.
When I quit I sent an email to them telling them I enjoyed being in the program but I was leaving the country so I could not continue to participate. But I said thanks for letting me do it for a while. The response that came back was canned and it apologized that I was upset with the selection of products available via vine. I don't think there's a lot of human interaction with the program from the Amazon side.
It can be very cool if you get in as there are some pretty amazing items - but I never felt it necessary to give anything other than my honest opinion. Was the fact that I got stuff enough to subconsciously influence my vote? Could be I guess, though I wrote positive and negative reviews the whole time I was in.
And the greatest stuff is very difficult to get. I got some nice items but not some of the nicest - never had a chance for most of that stuff.
That's not true at all.
Book reviewers get free copies of books. Film reviewers go to free screenings of films. Video games - the same. People who make the full purchase themselves are the exception, not the rule.
I was in Vine for 2 or 3 years. I wrote honest reviews - good and bad for what I was given.
There is zero pressure to give a good review from Amazon and not really any contact from the source of the items. The closest I guess, was that some items had a little letter with them to the Vine member asking them to get in touch with the manufacturer (don't remember any of these with books) to see if the problem could be fixed. I never had to do that though.
There is a tendency for Vine members to get unhelpful ratings from other Vine members trying to push the "competition" down in the reviewer standings. The Vine forums are an interesting place with lots and lots of complaining at Amazon and other reviewers.
I don't think that one of the issues interfering with reform is that illegals are voting now- but I do think a strategic consideration is that amnesty could provide large numbers of future votes. How much that weighs in, I'm not sure but I think it's part of the mix. I think a bigger part is the financial gain that comes from being able to give illegal aliens substandard pay and treatment. I don't really care who is driving it or which party is part of the problem. I think people ought to pressure all politicians to take meaningful steps to correct what is currently a shameful situation.
The laws are broken. They need to be fixed. The status quo hurts the immigrants and it hurts American citizens. There needs to be sensible change but I see no indications that such change is anywhere in the near future.
One more reason we need immigration reform. There needs to be a sane guest worker program that will help us get a handle on this problem.
Years ago I was taking a Java class. My wife was writing software for a synthetic aperture radar system and one of the key portions of her work was done by a physicist that did all his work in MS Excel. Then her employer would hire an intern to type the output from the spreadsheet (columns of numbers) into a flat file that their software could read.
I had a lot of fun showing her how to write something that could open and read the spreadsheets. While I helped her do that I got to see a bit of this guy's work and it was impressive as all get out.
He doesn't have to prove he is innocent. They have to prove he is guilty.
If all they have is that he faked a call from his wife, in my mind that doesn't prove anything.
I sat on a jury years ago. It was a bank robbery case and so it was in federal court. The FBI were involved but they had really screwed the pooch by basically being lazy and doing a crappy job. But the primary thing I remember is that they brought up surveillance video from the bank at some point. I don't remember how it came up but at some point it did, and the prosecution couldn't find the tapes.
At that point the judge told us, the jury, that if the tape couldn't be found we would need to assume that it contained information that helped the defendant. He said it was due to some prior case and missing evidence. In this specific case they did end up finding the video but it didn't help determine anything either way. Due to the FBI's failure to follow through on some simple stuff it ended up a hung jury.
At the time though, I felt comforted knowing that prosecution couldn't destroy or hide evidence and then use it against someone - but rather that lost evidence had to be presumed to help the defendant. Apparently that's not the case here, but it's really messed up as you say, if this guy goes to prison based on something that they don't even have.
I love watching hockey. Don't play it though.
Giving Canadians a hard time about the small population is all I have left now that the CD is on par with the USD.
It's a lot easier when the 12 of you just have to agree to switch while you have a beer during the hockey game.
Australia is mostly empty. The populations of the U.S.A. is 14 times larger than the population of Australia. Australia is not a big country in any of the ways that are relevant to the difficulty of converting over to a new measurement system.
I'm part of an organization that is global. My department here in the U.S. works with and supports offices all over the world. We realize we could do a much better job than we have in the past and part of what we are trying is having team members in the countries we support.
In some cases Americans go and work in the offices, in others we have nationals doing the job. I'll be moving to Hungary this summer to work in our Eastern Europe office.
So it isn't a problem for us. This is the way we want to work, we are just trying to do a better job of it.
I never said I didn't want "anything" in the cloud. In fact the word I used was "everything". I also placed that word in italics to emphasize that I meant some things I would rather maintain on my own machines, but not all things.
One of us has rather poor reading skills. That may be the one that is "moronic".
Furthermore, you have no idea what I do or where most of it takes place. To assert that you do is, well, rather short sighted. One might almost be inclined to say moronic.
And to decide that the security of one's data is properly handled should be a matter of luck. There has to be a good word for that view, let me think on it a bit and I'm sure it will come to me.
Oh, and if being called moronic makes you feel bothered at all, I'd recommend keeping that in mind when you throw the word at others. I'm no rocket scientist but that kind of slur really isn't called for.
and that's why I don't want everything in the cloud.
Reading the wikipedia article, I got the impression that the current searchers benefited from the previous work to help them narrow down where to look.
I loaded Keis on my 64 bit, win 7 machine and it would not recognize that the phone was connected. I couldn't figure out the issue until I found a post on the t-mobile site that said it had issues on 64 bit machines. ( Here is the thread http://forums.t-mobile.com/t5/Samsung-Vibrant/Samsung-Vibrant-software-upgrade-to-Android-2-2-Froyo-now/td-p/678871 )
This does remind me of another issue with the phone though. For whatever reason, it doesn't work as a mass storage device via usb unless the drivers are downloaded and installed from Samsung first. There are a completely set of different drivers that need to be installed for using Keis. Again, this is completely lame. What's worse is there are none released for Linux. To get that to work I need to use the Android SDK.
I'm glad your GPS works well, but I think we can both agree that a very large number of people don't share your experience. Googling "fix vibrant gps" returns about 348,000 results and so far the one fix that is supposed to be the most reliable is in the xda forums and involves opening up the phone and messing with the gps antenna or something. I didn't read it all because I new I wouldn't do it.
Based on my experience with my Galaxy S - I'm not going to be buying a Samsung phone again real soon.
I just got 2.2 and the manner to upgrade was pretty lame. (Requires a PC and software that only runs on 32 bit windows) I don't expect to ever get 2.3 on it. When I bought it 2.2 was "just around the corner", which turned out to be around a year.
The GPS is busted, Samsung has never, to my knowledge, addressed the issue and I've just come to accept that my phone doesn't have GPS. I've seen some fixes that involve opening up the phone and messing with some parts, but I'm not interested.
The screen is gorgeous, a lot of things work well, but for what I payed ($500) I expect all of it to work well and for decent support.
Interesting Idea. I'll give it some thought, though I'm one of those 'douches' so it might be a touch hypocritical.
I don't tag them as me though. Maybe people who post photos of kids and tag them as someone else are the real problem here. Then again, any of their friends can tag the photo in most cases. So it's tough to nail down the perpetrator.
Maybe you could mull it over and give me better criteria on who to unfriend?
I don't have that option yet, must be rolling it out I guess.
The photo thing has been around for a long time and it sucks. I travel and have wanted to connect to facebook when in a different country, and it decides I need to prove who I am. So I have to match a certain number of pictures with the right person. The summary makes it sound clever and good, it is anything but.
It's been a few months since last time I did it, so I don't remember exact numbers but I had to get something like 4 out of 5 right. Then they start showing photos, and there is a list of 4 or 5 friend names below. It is up to you to pick the right friend to go with the photo.
What's the biggest problem? Well, you don't get pictures of the persons face as the summary says. What you get are pictures tagged with that persons name. The first one I did was their face, and I thought, "o.k. - no problem.".
The next one was some kid. A relative of one of my friends? A neigbor of one of my friends? Shoot could have even be one of my friends as a kid, I have no idea. All I know is I've got a 1 in 4 chance of guessing who this belongs to and if I'm wrong I've just used up my one wrong answer.
Next photo is an inanimate object. I don't know remember what it was any more. A pie or some food of some kind I think. Which friend is this?! I don't know. Best guess it is something one of my friends ate once. Who does it belong to? Once again, I haven't the slightest, but as you can guess, I wasn't allowed to log in.
A smaller problem is that I am not super close friends with every one of my friends on facebook. My barrier to entry on the friendship front is pretty low. I'm friends with people I knew in jr. high, highschool, worked with once, went to church with them years ago, etc. I know them but am not intimately close with them. Facebook is a good way to keep in touch while maintaining a comfortable distance. But will I be able to identify them in every pic of themselves they've uploaded to facebook? I doubt it. Not to mention the fad a bit back to change your profile pic to a cartoon character. I'll bet dollars to donuts those go into the rotation. Which of your friends was underdog and which was optimus prime? I don't remember.
It's a horrid system. A co-worker of mine on the same trip ran into it too. He mocked me for not knowing my friends well enough and then almost put his laptop through a window when he couldn't log into facebook. He had almost an identical experience, a picture of some 6 or 7 year old kid he didn't know and a bike or something.
Speaking for the pigeons, we approve. We don't want to sniff or otherwise inspect your packets. We just want to deliver them and get our feed.
When I was a student in Chicago, I took the train regularly to visit family in south-west Michigan. It was affordable and I didn't have a car.
I enjoyed it so much I thought I'd take the train home to Arizona for one of my breaks. It would take days and cost 3 or 4 times as much as flying. (This was in the early 90's - I don't think it's changed much.) So even if I didn't mind the time problem, I couldn't afford it.
I think a decent rail system would be great, but I'm skeptical it will happen in my lifetime.