"I have dreams of writing a toy operating system..."
input a "Please pull the string."
if a=1 print "The cow says... MOOO!"
if a=2 print "The duck says... QUAAACK!"
if a=3 print "The horse says... NEEEIGH!"
end if
There's no way brick and mortar stores beat online. Going to your local book store is great if you want John Grisham's latest book, but when was the last time you saw Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle or The Prestige by Christopher Priest in a local bookstore? Or how about even Call of Cthulhu and other Weird Stories by Lovecraft? These are not obscure titles in any way, yet it's impossible to find any of them in a physical store.
Amazon.com has free shipping on books over $25; Chapters.ca and amazon.ca have free shipping over $39 CAD. If you wait until you have two or three books you want to buy, you can get free shipping, plus amazon.ca (at least) has online coupons, usually $5 off on an order. Sure, it takes about a week to get here, but it saves a ton of cash.
Every year I spend between $500-1000 on books, and all of that money (save one or two books locally) is spent on online booksellers. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I save a few hundred dollars on books every year just for waiting a few days for a shipment to show up. Bottom line: if you want to save money, buy online.
FYI, the "A" at the end of those to acronyms stand for "America." The fact that this guy is a brit is in BOLD at the TOP of the linked article. Good grief; I guess mods don't read articles either.
Too bad there isn't a plugin that spoofs your user agent info to say you're using IE or whatever other crap browser they want you to use. I'm running the same browser and get hassled by this crap from time to time.
Opera does this.
SCO... nice knowing ya
on
SCO Offline
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· Score: 1
Because, of course, if their website is offline, nobody will show up for work on Monday, right? Um... no.
Gotcha. As soon as I register for a class, I always e-mail the profs and ask them what books are going to be required for the course; this is usually a month and a half in advance. I've not had one prof that isn't more than happy to share with me their book list for the course.
Otherwise I agree with you - that "free shipping" takes forever, don't it?
'the piece ends on a snappy note, courtesy Deus Ex creator Warren Spector, who proclaims: "Finding ways to broaden range of emotions you can experience and express in games is the future of games as far as I?m concerned...'
You know what, Warren? You're absolutely right! You *are* the future! You want to know what I felt when I played Deus Ex 2? FRUSTRATION THAT THE FRAME RATE DIDN'T GO ABOVE 10! On ANY config!
"Amazon can be a good idea, but it's not always the magic bullet. Two of my engineering textbooks this semester were actually cheaper at the bookstore after factoring in shipping."
Whoa, hold on, cowboy. In the states, if you order more than $25 USD worth of goods, shipping is free. So, either your books are less than $25, in which case you have no right to complain, or they're more than $25 and you're flat-out lying.
Screw the profs. If they want you to pay $150 for the 17th edition when it doesn't have any significant changes from the 16th, then get the 16th. I've *never* run into a situation where this was a problem.
A textbook of mine was about $115 CAD this semester; I ordered a used copy from Powells for $12 USD; I included a few other books and got free shipping. It cost me $72 CAD for four books instead of $115 (plus tax) for one new one. To sum: Powells is wonderful, esp. for Canadians, as they charge GST at the source which doesn't hold up customs.
ABEBooks is another great place to shop - they're a collection of used booksellers across NA and Europe and as such usually have everything you could ever want. You really need to watch some booksellers on shipping - one seller in Cali wanted $15 USD for shipping on a book that should only cost $3-5 USD (media book rate int'l), for example, but if you're careful you can still save a bundle.
Finally, sometimes Amazon or Barnes & Noble or other large retailers have better prices than the uni's bookstore, important for when you absolutely need that 17th edition.
To put all this into perspective: if I had bought all my books new this semester at the local store, it would have cost about $350 CAD + 13% tax; as it was, using the above methods I spent about $125 CAD total.
One final note: to do this properly you need to talk to your future profs about a month and a half before the class starts (i.e. as soon as you're registered) to get a book list, as some booksellers can take longer than others, esp. if you need to order internationally. Keep in mind that big sellers (even powells) usually ships within 24 hours. Good luck! Hope this saves you all some cash!
They've got these lovely things called satellites, dear. Satellite TV and Internet can come from them. Sure, cutting off the backbone can help, but what about air waves? How about a huge 802.11b tower sitting just outside of China?
Re:Cell phones... can't live with them x 2
on
KISS
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· Score: 1
Saskatchewan, Canada. The Great White North state. Still, $0.50 once a day is still cheaper than a cell phone and monthly rate, right?
if the chinese government really wants to censor the internet, maybe they should consider scrapping ISPs and build their own Intranet, one which has no access with the outside world -- non-compatible e-mail systems, incompatible HTML/XML markup, integrated browsers, etc. etc. Even looking at the above, I still don't think it's possible to block the outside world.
Maybe they should start working on propaganda - China rules and the rest of the world sucks. Non-Chinese news sources are fallacious and biased against China, that sort of thing. I've been kicking around the idea of fascism in our post-industrial world, but as yet I've not come up with an idea that would truly work. A closed media system is impossible to achieve, esp. in a country as large as China.
This is all, of course, for fun; the intellectual exercise is more interesting to me than applying my ideas to reality.
Cell phones... can't live with them x 2
on
KISS
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Y'know what I like about the explosion of cell phones? I don't need to invest in one. Every single time I've had car trouble, there are fellow drivers tripping over each other to lend me theirs. When I need to make a call at school, I either use a pay phone (I know, an entire *quarter* for one call! amazing!) or borrow a friend's, because they all not only have a cell, but have an unlimited usage plan.
What happens if somebody needs to get ahold of me? They call my house and leave a message. It's amazing how that works.
If they made a cell phone *just* for making calls, no extended contracts, a monthly fee of $15 for unlimited use and a phone that costs $50, I'd get a cell phone. Until then, I'll stick to my landline and the ubiquous pay phone.
What do we do now to protect our computer from spyware? Regularly update and run adaware. What will we do with WinFS? Regularly update and run adaware longhorn. No problem. I haven't had spy/adware in freaking years; of course, it helps that I've switched to a superior browser...
Make them give away 3.2bn worth of Windows 95 and 3.11 copies. Better yet, send five copies of each to every household in the EU. Good grief, what right does the EU have to fine a global company 10% of their global profits? At the very most, fine them 10% of the profit they make in the EU; that at least makes sense!
In principle I agree with you, but it seriously hurts to do your employer a favour and help them out w/written notice if they've been gorram bastards. Maybe just tell future employers that your NDA was so restrictive that you can't even give out the name of the company that you worked for (but detail exactly what you did, and drop enough veiled hints to help them figure it out)? Ya, I know, I like my life to be *WAY* too complicated;)
... I absolutely refuse to work overtime. No matter what the job, incl. jobs in IT, after eight hours I call it quits. My boss a few years ago asked me to stay for OT and I said I couldn't, end of story. We had a project we were working on that needed to get done (waaaay overschedule, but blame the ambitious marketing dept for that), but honestly, my spare time is *precious* to me, and it can't be replaced with some chump change.
Of course, I make it my personal mission to work as hard as I can while I'm at work so that nobody has an excuse to can me, but I've never been fired, I'm not short on money, and I've got plenty of time to spend with my family, read books, and post on/.
If I *were* to give you some advice, I'd say forget about it until you decide to quit or move on - and just simply stop showing up for work. If they don't give you the decency to pay you OT, then why should you give them the decency of 2 weeks/1 month's notice? If they call up and ask where the hell you are, just say "Oh, mmmm, yeah, about that, I've decided to quit, mmmkay? Did you get the memo?"
Hey buddy, give me $60/copy and I'll reuse those copies of win98 too, backwards compatible with office, photoshop, autocad etc. etc. - it's called installing windows 98 on an unpartitioned hard drive.
I'm using a now-defunct (as in, Apple sued the crap out of the developer and he had to stop production) program called YzDock and a light utility that hides the taskbar. It provides an OSX-like "dock" at the bottom of the screen (or top, or side, or whatever) that holds all of my frequently-used shortcuts, as well as a CPU monitor, calendar, weather, and shutdown/restart buttons.
I can also use the Windows key to bring up my start menu, if I need to. My entire desktop is just the dock at the bottom of the screen and a nice desktop picture... very soothing as compared to other "busy" desktops.
You have no idea how much I hate men because of what I've learned in GTA! I'm able to gun them down with an Uzi, run them over with a car, or even take out a chainsaw and cut them to pieces! In fact, I think I'm going to go take out a few masculine vagina oppressors RIGHT NOW!
Slashdot Mirror
input a "Please pull the string."
if a=1 print "The cow says... MOOO!"
if a=2 print "The duck says... QUAAACK!"
if a=3 print "The horse says... NEEEIGH!"
end if
I meant the 1999 reprint, not the original pulp.
Agreed. Super Smash Bros and Metroid are *still* worth $30, for example, and these games *still* blow away gamers' minds.
Amazon.com has free shipping on books over $25; Chapters.ca and amazon.ca have free shipping over $39 CAD. If you wait until you have two or three books you want to buy, you can get free shipping, plus amazon.ca (at least) has online coupons, usually $5 off on an order. Sure, it takes about a week to get here, but it saves a ton of cash.
Every year I spend between $500-1000 on books, and all of that money (save one or two books locally) is spent on online booksellers. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I save a few hundred dollars on books every year just for waiting a few days for a shipment to show up. Bottom line: if you want to save money, buy online.
Damn! How can I flame somebody so polite :) My car just died; forgive my anger, grasshopper.
/me goes into a corner and cries.
FYI, the "A" at the end of those to acronyms stand for "America." The fact that this guy is a brit is in BOLD at the TOP of the linked article. Good grief; I guess mods don't read articles either.
Imagine a beowulf clus... oh, wait, they were using one. Kinda. Never mind!
Opera does this.
Because, of course, if their website is offline, nobody will show up for work on Monday, right? Um... no.
Otherwise I agree with you - that "free shipping" takes forever, don't it?
You know what, Warren? You're absolutely right! You *are* the future! You want to know what I felt when I played Deus Ex 2? FRUSTRATION THAT THE FRAME RATE DIDN'T GO ABOVE 10! On ANY config!
Whoa, hold on, cowboy. In the states, if you order more than $25 USD worth of goods, shipping is free. So, either your books are less than $25, in which case you have no right to complain, or they're more than $25 and you're flat-out lying.
A textbook of mine was about $115 CAD this semester; I ordered a used copy from Powells for $12 USD; I included a few other books and got free shipping. It cost me $72 CAD for four books instead of $115 (plus tax) for one new one. To sum: Powells is wonderful, esp. for Canadians, as they charge GST at the source which doesn't hold up customs.
ABEBooks is another great place to shop - they're a collection of used booksellers across NA and Europe and as such usually have everything you could ever want. You really need to watch some booksellers on shipping - one seller in Cali wanted $15 USD for shipping on a book that should only cost $3-5 USD (media book rate int'l), for example, but if you're careful you can still save a bundle.
Finally, sometimes Amazon or Barnes & Noble or other large retailers have better prices than the uni's bookstore, important for when you absolutely need that 17th edition.
To put all this into perspective: if I had bought all my books new this semester at the local store, it would have cost about $350 CAD + 13% tax; as it was, using the above methods I spent about $125 CAD total.
One final note: to do this properly you need to talk to your future profs about a month and a half before the class starts (i.e. as soon as you're registered) to get a book list, as some booksellers can take longer than others, esp. if you need to order internationally. Keep in mind that big sellers (even powells) usually ships within 24 hours. Good luck! Hope this saves you all some cash!
They've got these lovely things called satellites, dear. Satellite TV and Internet can come from them. Sure, cutting off the backbone can help, but what about air waves? How about a huge 802.11b tower sitting just outside of China?
Saskatchewan, Canada. The Great White North state. Still, $0.50 once a day is still cheaper than a cell phone and monthly rate, right?
Maybe they should start working on propaganda - China rules and the rest of the world sucks. Non-Chinese news sources are fallacious and biased against China, that sort of thing. I've been kicking around the idea of fascism in our post-industrial world, but as yet I've not come up with an idea that would truly work. A closed media system is impossible to achieve, esp. in a country as large as China.
This is all, of course, for fun; the intellectual exercise is more interesting to me than applying my ideas to reality.
What happens if somebody needs to get ahold of me? They call my house and leave a message. It's amazing how that works.
If they made a cell phone *just* for making calls, no extended contracts, a monthly fee of $15 for unlimited use and a phone that costs $50, I'd get a cell phone. Until then, I'll stick to my landline and the ubiquous pay phone.
What do we do now to protect our computer from spyware? Regularly update and run adaware. What will we do with WinFS? Regularly update and run adaware longhorn. No problem. I haven't had spy/adware in freaking years; of course, it helps that I've switched to a superior browser...
Make them give away 3.2bn worth of Windows 95 and 3.11 copies. Better yet, send five copies of each to every household in the EU. Good grief, what right does the EU have to fine a global company 10% of their global profits? At the very most, fine them 10% of the profit they make in the EU; that at least makes sense!
In principle I agree with you, but it seriously hurts to do your employer a favour and help them out w/written notice if they've been gorram bastards. Maybe just tell future employers that your NDA was so restrictive that you can't even give out the name of the company that you worked for (but detail exactly what you did, and drop enough veiled hints to help them figure it out)? Ya, I know, I like my life to be *WAY* too complicated ;)
Of course, I make it my personal mission to work as hard as I can while I'm at work so that nobody has an excuse to can me, but I've never been fired, I'm not short on money, and I've got plenty of time to spend with my family, read books, and post on /.
If I *were* to give you some advice, I'd say forget about it until you decide to quit or move on - and just simply stop showing up for work. If they don't give you the decency to pay you OT, then why should you give them the decency of 2 weeks/1 month's notice? If they call up and ask where the hell you are, just say "Oh, mmmm, yeah, about that, I've decided to quit, mmmkay? Did you get the memo?"
You obviously haven't been paying attention in the past few years, when MS *has* given up a few billion dollars and hasn't changed their ways either.
"At the very least it will make the stockholders take notice and perhaps even dump if MS doesn't change their ways under a significant penalty."
Like *any* MS stockholder with a brain would try to sell MS stock, unless they're trading it for a boat, or an airplane, or a small country.
I can also use the Windows key to bring up my start menu, if I need to. My entire desktop is just the dock at the bottom of the screen and a nice desktop picture... very soothing as compared to other "busy" desktops.
You have no idea how much I hate men because of what I've learned in GTA! I'm able to gun them down with an Uzi, run them over with a car, or even take out a chainsaw and cut them to pieces! In fact, I think I'm going to go take out a few masculine vagina oppressors RIGHT NOW!