If you can convince a publisher to grant you and advance on the book...
What many people don't realize is what is called an "advance" is not a payment to the author in advance of future sales of a book, it is a loanagainst future sales of a book. And often it is a loan at a fairly high percentage rate. Most publishing houses only run (e.g. "print") a book for about three years. If the sales for a given book haven't been as good as projected, it is entirely possible for the author to actually owe the publisher money at the end of the run. What makes this particularly nasty is if your first book didn't sell all that well, it is highly unlikely that the publisher will want your second book. And just to add insult to injury, they probably won't release the rights to your first book until you have paid them back in full. At this point, you either start flipping burgers to survive or find a family member or friend who is willing to support you until you can get that second book out.
Most publishers are experienced enough where they can well judge the sales potential of a book. The advance is well-calculated so when the book reaches the end of its useful run life (again, about three years), the amount made is pretty much equal to the original advance. It really isn't until the second or third book that an author actually starts making money on his/her craft. Hopefully, that author can get their second book out before the first book stops being printed and begin actually making money.
I created a single mailbox to handle email from websites that ask for an account sign up. For each website, I created a unique email alias for that single account that is delivered to my consumer email account. The idea being, once I started receiving unwanted spam in that account, I would simply delete the email alias that was receiving that junk email. This was based on the idea from the early days of email, where you created a totally separate email account for each thing you signed up for in order to avoid spamming. Aliases are far more flexible, and do not use up a limited number of email accounts available from one's ISP. My intent was that this would be come my "email honeypot" and use it to collect domains that I would add to my email blacklist. I also intended that it would reveal which companies were selling my email address to spammers and I would dutifully report these companies to the internet, getting them pretty much blacklisted.
Over a number of years, I've amassed nearly 150 email aliases that point to the consumer account. Of all the email accounts I have—a couple are pushing past twenty-years-old now—this consumer account with nearly 150 different email aliases draws in the least amount of junk email than any and all my other accounts. In fact, it garners almost no junk email at all! My oldest email address brings in more junk email in a month than my consumer address brings in since the time I created it!
Clearly, my expectation of this account sucking in all unwanted email turned out to be a complete failure. My intent of revealing companies that were taking the low moral road came to naught. What it did reveal was that the web sites I signed onto were actually taking care to ensure that my email address was not revealed and these companies were dutifully trying to keep me from being harassed by slimy, junk-mail-producing parasites. Indeed, there were a few sites I signed onto with the expectation that I would be absolutely flooded with junk email within a month of signing on. These proved to be the quietest sites among the many.
In the end, I must confess to being impressed that many companies truly are honoring subscribers' privacy. I do get email from these sites, but the email is pertinent of the products being sold by the site from which the email is coming. So, I count these emails as being legitimate. I have never gotten third-party email (illegitimate) through these addresses. When I opted out of a given company's email list, by golly they actually respected the request and the email stopped!
All this showed me that—as one poster above stated—companies have realized it is in their better interest to keep their email lists private than try to make a profit selling these email lists to others. It doesn't take much intelligence to think this through, either. If you sell your email lists to a marketer, that marketer will sell the emails to your competitors, telling them that these emails came from a company that makes similar products. Sell your email lists, and you could find your customers being poached away by your competitors.
True, the new aristocracy in the US will need a breeding pool to fill the new slave– er labor caste once Congress repeals more of the Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation.
With all the political calls saying we should go to the Moon or Mars, I've been an advocate that our next big manned mission should be to an asteroid for evaluating how to mine it. Sadly, the conservative parties in the US seem hellbent on dumbing down the American public and emptying their pockets and minds than they are at building up the country and making it productive again.
Earth is running very short on critical metals and rare earths that we need to support our current civilization and future growth. More than ever, space exploration needs to show economic return to those communities supporting the endeavor. I've not heard any evidence of the moon containing any needed mineral deposits we need. Mars, we've just barely scratched the surface (pun intended) and we don't know what is to be found on that planet. Considering how expensive it is to send things there, much less people, we need to be able to show as much of an economic return as a scientific return.
The Moon does lend itself well to a base to practice techniques needed elsewhere. Where better to work out the techniques needed to mine and smelt ore in an airless, low gravity environment than a place where help and rescue is just a few days away, instead of a few months? It also lends itself well for scientific uses, such as setting up a major astronomical observatory. Improved astronomical observation brings a longterm economic return by improving our understanding of how the physics of our universe works and how to possibly circumvent our current limitations, such as gravity or the speed of light. Also, it improves our chances of finding another world to populate before Earth becomes uninhabitable.
While there is no solid proof aside from meteorites that have made it to Earth's surface, there is evidence that there are many asteroids that may be rich in metals needed by our current civilizations. My opinion is we should be turning our attention to finding these gold mines among the stars and exploiting them. That's certainly worth more than ruining the environment we currently need to survive!
my father, who is a bit of a luddite, absolutely loves his iPad. Indeed, he uses it much more than he uses his desktop computer!
He was looking for a portable computer to use for taking notes as secretary for a community organization he volunteered to help. I was trying to steer him toward the MacBook Air, but suggested he take a look at the iPad as an alternative. To my surprise, he chose the iPad. His reasoning being, if he didn't like it, he could always return it within Apple's trial period and trade it for an Air.
It took him a few weeks to get used to using it. Once he got the hang of it, it became a vital tool. He uses it for most of his email needs. He keeps it on the end table next to him while watching the news and uses it to call up maps or supplement information an whatever story is being reported. He reads more news on his iPad than he does on the newspaper, and has already read a few books as well.
And, yes, he does use it to keep the minutes during meetings with the community organization, which was the reason he bought it in the first place.
Tablet computers a bubble? No! The market tablet computers serve is those people who don't like or are not comfortable using a computer. Or, for those that just don't need a computer. Considering that Acer has so far failed to bring a successful tablet computer to market, such comments come across as "sour grapes".
I've found that the Android interface is quite well-polished compared to the web interface.
That's good to know! Thank you for the information. I'm looking forward to when it is available for my phone.
It's probably a wise move on Google's part to put emphasis on the mobile interface, as Android and iOS devices are a very strong market for any social networking product to set a foundation.
Ironic, as I'm leaving Facebook for privacy concerns and moving to Google+. With Facebook, I never quite know what is going to be publicly revealed and displayed—intentionally or not. Google+ is taking aims to ensure it is easy to control who sees what when I post something. With Facebook, it's always been a crapshoot as to what may be considered private one week and public the next.
Before anyone really gets up in a tizzy about privacy, the point behind these two services is to broadcast to a given collection of people—the world, friends, or family—the activities in which you are participating. With G+, I can fine tune who sees what.
I will say that the Google+ interface isn't quite as matured as Facebook's. But they've done a good job for right out of the gate! I also believe that once G+ gets more people, we will better be able to judge how well it works.
And executives wonder why there isn't any employee loyalty in a company any more? Perfect example of why the only way to get a raise is to take your skills and get a job with another company.
What's next for Skype? Easy: get rid of the superfluous programmers—you know, the guys that made Skype work—and hire telemarketers at less than 20% of the engineers' salaries to push the new business. Better: I'm willing to bet that this "private equity firm" owns a marketing business, which will soon get a nice, fat contract to promote Skype. Once it is drained dry, Microsoft will probably drop it citing failure to perform. I predict whatever is left of Skype will implode over the next one to two years.
How can the average homeowner tell if their cable modem/router is IPv6 capable? Or, is this a non-issue?
I can ping6 the various computers on my home network that support v6, but currently cannot ping6 outside addresses. Hence, my question for those with the expertise to answer.
Not trust a government corporation not to read my mail? What country in the world has a government run corporation where the government doesn't have access to private communication? Clearly, the US Post Office has nothing to do with the U.S. Government!
As has been mentioned above, email is inherently insecure. It's broadcast out in the open and can be read by anyone either with access to the server or simply by snooping traffic coming out of a given port. It's been known for centuries that even traditional, hardcopy mail can be intercepted and read. Look how often mail coming from soldiers in the theater of war during WWII had their mail blatantly opened and censored. Wax seals and signet rings came about as a way to try and show that a document was sealed and not intercepted and tampered with by some third party. If you want to communicate something that you would consider personally compromising, email or mail are definitely not the answer.
As also mentioned above, if you wish to keep your words absolutely secure, PGP (or the open alternative, GPG) is easily available to encrypt your potentially damning script. If I was going to be sending any email to an individual whom a given government might have suspicions or concerns, I would prefer that my text be out in the open so that anyone could read it without any misinterpretations. Sending an encrypted message—even if it was only a request for a secret family recipe for a marinade for a steak barbecue—would only serve to raise the suspicions of a paranoid government.
If the government in question is open and transparent in their policies towards privacy and legitimate security or crime enforcement issues, then I would have no problems using a government supplied email system. If the government had a history of or was trying to suppress or subjugate the population, then I might think twice about using such a system. Or, at least, I would be careful about what communication I passed through their system.
Essentially what is being described in the article is good coaching. A good coach doesn't necessarily have the skills or abilities of a star athlete, but he knows how to manage his players to get the best performance out of them. The best manager I ever worked for summed it up in one glorious line: "You're the expert, that's why I hired you." He would basically tell us what he needed done, and then would get out of our way so we could do it. He was technically savvy enough to understand the basics of what we were trying to do, so we could discuss a given project with him if we were stuck. He would simply ask questions on various aspects until we began to bring light on why things were stuck. He also had a great attitude that went with "Do what it takes to get the job done." As long as we were getting the work done, he had no problems with us sitting around and shooting the breeze when things were slow. To be quite frank, some of the best ideas that went on to become products came out of those bullshit sessions. For the record, his background was Marketing.
Another company where I was employed, Lechmere, originally had a great management style. The mantra of managers was, "It's my job to manage the environment in which you make money for the company." The company was doing great. So well, that a buyer popped up and bought them. Well, the new management's mantra was, "You are mindless, idiot drones are a bunch of pions who are only good enough for boxing or selling the crap this company sells, and you clearly aren't as qualified as we are—being MBAs—for the pittance we are paying you." That company is now out of business. They went out of business after two years of doing everything they could to get rid of long term employees with expertise whom they thought were overpaid. By the time they were done with the company, it was so worthless it wasn't even worth trying to sell it—not that they could have found any buyers for it. If anyone came to my company and their resume showed they had mid- or upper-level management experience with Lechmere, I would drop their resume into the shredder.
So– Managers of businesses are complaining that these college graduates aren't well prepared for the workplace, yet why do they seem to hold onto the notion that any high school kid can do the work they are asking of these professionals? Or at least, they seem to insist on paying their professional IT staff like they were only high school graduates.
I did some work with one company where the CEO brought in his fourteen-year-old son to build the company's web site. Later, he dragged in the IT staff on the carpet and gave them a forty-minute long tongue lashing because the web site wasn't working. There was no javascript menus, the purchasing system was non-existent. He complained that it looked amateurish! They all walked out on him after his tirade was complete. I guess it is needless to say that the company no longer exists.
Upon further reading, I discovered what the problem was:
It wasn't just the recipe that got copied, it was an entire article that got copied. That does make this a copyright violation issue.
And—no—I do not agree with the assertion that any article that is put up on the internet can be considered public domain. Yes, it may be available for the public to read for free, but that doesn't make it right for another company to make money off someone else's work. Look at it this way: if you put up an article on your blog and it took you three hours to write that article, how would you feel if you paid for a news magazine and discovered your article was the feature article printed in that magazine, word for word, and they had put someone else's name on it? That magazine just made money off all the advertising for that publication and paid someone else their paycheck for that week, all on the work that you did the week before.
Consider Newsweek Magazine as a model. Their circulation-base rate (number of readers) is almost 2 million (I'm rounding figures). On the newstand, Newsweek Magazine costs $6. So that is roughly $12 million per week. For a full-page , four-color ad, a business must pay US$165,000 per week to run that ad. If there are an average of ten full-color ads in the magazine each week (a fair assumption), then that is conservatively another US$1.6 million per week, for a total of $13 million per week.
You don't think that such a magazine could pay you for the time and effort it took you to write that article? Or at least have called to ask permission to print your article? Yes, Cooks Source was a small operation and didn't have much resources. But that certainly doesn't excuse them from doing a copy-and-paste without permission or compensation to the author. The assertion that anything put on the internet is public domain is not correct. Yes, it is available to be read for free by anyone—sort of, many blogs run Google Ads and make small amounts of money for the owner of the site. But, that doesn't excuse publications from plagiarism, nor compensating writers for their work.
You are correct: recipes are not considered copyrightable. Nor are the patentable. For this reason, Coca-Cola keeps their recipe for Coca-Cola soda one of the most tightly guarded secrets in commercial industry.
One could go through several different recipe books, lift favored recipes and compile them into one's own recipe book entitled, Recipes I lifted From Other Peoples' Recipe Books, and legally publish it . So, while Cooks' comments could be taken as insensitive, they are technically correct.
Ultimately, this is a highly personal choice. What works for one person won't work for another. What Eepok posted above,
I can't buy keyboards online anymore because I just need to test it out myself.
is probably the best advice on the forum. Go the the local computer store and place your hands on some of the keyboards. Even type a few phrases to see how it feels. I will type out a paragraph on the sample keyboard just to see how it feels to type for an extended period. This will really give you an idea how it will feel. You asked a good question, because that may help you narrow down the possible choices. But in the end, you must still try out any given keyboard to see if it works for you.
Slifox also had good advice about looking for an alternative to your mouse. I found using the mouse caused more problems for me than typing ever did. I switched to a large, Kennsington trackball and that worked well for me. But, better than the trackball was the touchpad on my MacBook Pro. I would even suggest giving Apple's Magic Trackpad some consideration. (I don't know if it would work with a non-Apple PC.)
I've gone through several keyboards over the years. I did use one of those ergonomic keyboards for a couple of years, but I really didn't find it all that much of an improvement. I did switch to using a Dvorak keyboard layout, which I have found over the years to be preferable for myself than using the Qwerty layout. My favorite to date? The low-profile keyboard on my MacBook Pro. It's fairly quiet and doesn't require too much force to depress a key, yet offers enough mechanical feedback so you know you have made the keypress. Contrary to this, I know several people who complained that they don't like the Mac keyboard. I haven't tried Apple's newest keyboard style extensively, but I admit it worked better than I thought it would.
Apple's iChat works excellently for me for long-distance connectivity. We connect via Jabber rather than Apple's MobileMe ($$$$!) service. It works flawlessly, in my opinion.
Once again, RIAA (along with others) is seeking a way to force its business plan/model into law. I can only say, if your business plan isn't working, it's time to change the way you do business or close the doors. NOT change the law!
If people don't want your product or the way it is packaged, they won't buy it. If you want people to buy your product, then offer them something they actually want! Don't try to force consumers to buy something by forcing them to buy it because it is the law. Sink or Swim!
I never left personal files or data on the computers at work. I would shunt anything personal to a server I had running at home. For any personal journal writing or private data, I would SSH into the server and create it there. I went to great pains to ensure that I left nothing personal or private on the company's property.
I'm not comfortable storing sensitive personal information off site with some online service. My preference is to store important data in a small RAID I set up in a fireproof area in my basement. Come tornado or conflagration, my data will still be accessible after doing a little digging with a backhoe. If the server was still alive, I could retrieve it wirelessly!
If I really wanted off site storage, I would rather put it in a relative's house. They get use of a really good computer, and I have an off site server where I can mirror important files.
I have never read an introductory O'Reilly or "...for Dummies" book that was better than the multitude of online tutorials out there. Introductory books are, in my opinion, wastes of money.
I'm inclined to agree on this point. I find I get much more mileage out of online tutorials and references than I do out of a book for beginners.
But I do like "cookbook" style books where they address numerous common problems and present solutions for solving these problems. I find it easy to extrapolate what I may need to do when finding an example that similarly addresses my project goal. When trying to move from one language to another, I find these cookbooks very helpful in showing me the proper setup for the new language. One example would be making a MySQL call from PHP versus doing the same from C. While it is brain-dead simple in PHP, C requires a lot more setup before you can successfully make the call. So look for a book that covers various examples for algorithms in your targeted language that you already know how to do in your familiar programming languages. By comparing the differences in how you would go about addressing a known task in the new language, you should be able to easily pick up on what is needed to write a successful program in that new language.
I truly hate the.99 gimick. I actually wish they'd roll tax into the prices so what you see on the label is what you pay and its a nice round number $X.10 $X.20 $X.50 $X.00. Worse is the stupid gas stations with 9/10's of a cent. Why is it they can charge a fraction of a penny you can't possibly pay, ensuring they skim 10ths of a cent gazillions of times. I think they did that in Superman III or something. How is it after all these years, they're still stealing money?
I hate it too. But the reason retailers do this is because $9.99 still looks cheaper than $10.00.
A lot of retailers use the cents on the price to signal the status of the product sold:
"98" if an item is on sale.
"97" if an item is being discounted for some reason other than a sale.
"96" if an item is sold at a clearance sale.
I do wish that someday I could look at the price and see it nicely rounded to the nearest whole number value, rather than some slightly off value. And, yes, the extra nine-tenths of a cent on the gas price is merely to make you think it is actually a cent cheaper than it really is. (See my first paragraph above)
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If you can convince a publisher to grant you and advance on the book...
What many people don't realize is what is called an "advance" is not a payment to the author in advance of future sales of a book, it is a loan against future sales of a book. And often it is a loan at a fairly high percentage rate. Most publishing houses only run (e.g. "print") a book for about three years. If the sales for a given book haven't been as good as projected, it is entirely possible for the author to actually owe the publisher money at the end of the run. What makes this particularly nasty is if your first book didn't sell all that well, it is highly unlikely that the publisher will want your second book. And just to add insult to injury, they probably won't release the rights to your first book until you have paid them back in full. At this point, you either start flipping burgers to survive or find a family member or friend who is willing to support you until you can get that second book out.
Most publishers are experienced enough where they can well judge the sales potential of a book. The advance is well-calculated so when the book reaches the end of its useful run life (again, about three years), the amount made is pretty much equal to the original advance. It really isn't until the second or third book that an author actually starts making money on his/her craft. Hopefully, that author can get their second book out before the first book stops being printed and begin actually making money.
I created a single mailbox to handle email from websites that ask for an account sign up. For each website, I created a unique email alias for that single account that is delivered to my consumer email account. The idea being, once I started receiving unwanted spam in that account, I would simply delete the email alias that was receiving that junk email. This was based on the idea from the early days of email, where you created a totally separate email account for each thing you signed up for in order to avoid spamming. Aliases are far more flexible, and do not use up a limited number of email accounts available from one's ISP. My intent was that this would be come my "email honeypot" and use it to collect domains that I would add to my email blacklist. I also intended that it would reveal which companies were selling my email address to spammers and I would dutifully report these companies to the internet, getting them pretty much blacklisted.
Over a number of years, I've amassed nearly 150 email aliases that point to the consumer account. Of all the email accounts I have—a couple are pushing past twenty-years-old now—this consumer account with nearly 150 different email aliases draws in the least amount of junk email than any and all my other accounts. In fact, it garners almost no junk email at all! My oldest email address brings in more junk email in a month than my consumer address brings in since the time I created it!
Clearly, my expectation of this account sucking in all unwanted email turned out to be a complete failure. My intent of revealing companies that were taking the low moral road came to naught. What it did reveal was that the web sites I signed onto were actually taking care to ensure that my email address was not revealed and these companies were dutifully trying to keep me from being harassed by slimy, junk-mail-producing parasites. Indeed, there were a few sites I signed onto with the expectation that I would be absolutely flooded with junk email within a month of signing on. These proved to be the quietest sites among the many.
In the end, I must confess to being impressed that many companies truly are honoring subscribers' privacy. I do get email from these sites, but the email is pertinent of the products being sold by the site from which the email is coming. So, I count these emails as being legitimate. I have never gotten third-party email (illegitimate) through these addresses. When I opted out of a given company's email list, by golly they actually respected the request and the email stopped!
All this showed me that—as one poster above stated—companies have realized it is in their better interest to keep their email lists private than try to make a profit selling these email lists to others. It doesn't take much intelligence to think this through, either. If you sell your email lists to a marketer, that marketer will sell the emails to your competitors, telling them that these emails came from a company that makes similar products. Sell your email lists, and you could find your customers being poached away by your competitors.
True, the new aristocracy in the US will need a breeding pool to fill the new slave– er labor caste once Congress repeals more of the Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation.
With all the political calls saying we should go to the Moon or Mars, I've been an advocate that our next big manned mission should be to an asteroid for evaluating how to mine it. Sadly, the conservative parties in the US seem hellbent on dumbing down the American public and emptying their pockets and minds than they are at building up the country and making it productive again.
Earth is running very short on critical metals and rare earths that we need to support our current civilization and future growth. More than ever, space exploration needs to show economic return to those communities supporting the endeavor. I've not heard any evidence of the moon containing any needed mineral deposits we need. Mars, we've just barely scratched the surface (pun intended) and we don't know what is to be found on that planet. Considering how expensive it is to send things there, much less people, we need to be able to show as much of an economic return as a scientific return.
The Moon does lend itself well to a base to practice techniques needed elsewhere. Where better to work out the techniques needed to mine and smelt ore in an airless, low gravity environment than a place where help and rescue is just a few days away, instead of a few months? It also lends itself well for scientific uses, such as setting up a major astronomical observatory. Improved astronomical observation brings a longterm economic return by improving our understanding of how the physics of our universe works and how to possibly circumvent our current limitations, such as gravity or the speed of light. Also, it improves our chances of finding another world to populate before Earth becomes uninhabitable.
While there is no solid proof aside from meteorites that have made it to Earth's surface, there is evidence that there are many asteroids that may be rich in metals needed by our current civilizations. My opinion is we should be turning our attention to finding these gold mines among the stars and exploiting them. That's certainly worth more than ruining the environment we currently need to survive!
my father, who is a bit of a luddite, absolutely loves his iPad. Indeed, he uses it much more than he uses his desktop computer!
He was looking for a portable computer to use for taking notes as secretary for a community organization he volunteered to help. I was trying to steer him toward the MacBook Air, but suggested he take a look at the iPad as an alternative. To my surprise, he chose the iPad. His reasoning being, if he didn't like it, he could always return it within Apple's trial period and trade it for an Air.
It took him a few weeks to get used to using it. Once he got the hang of it, it became a vital tool. He uses it for most of his email needs. He keeps it on the end table next to him while watching the news and uses it to call up maps or supplement information an whatever story is being reported. He reads more news on his iPad than he does on the newspaper, and has already read a few books as well.
And, yes, he does use it to keep the minutes during meetings with the community organization, which was the reason he bought it in the first place.
Tablet computers a bubble? No! The market tablet computers serve is those people who don't like or are not comfortable using a computer. Or, for those that just don't need a computer. Considering that Acer has so far failed to bring a successful tablet computer to market, such comments come across as "sour grapes".
Good luck, Rob! I hope your next endeavor meets with as much success as /. did!
I've found that the Android interface is quite well-polished compared to the web interface.
That's good to know! Thank you for the information. I'm looking forward to when it is available for my phone.
It's probably a wise move on Google's part to put emphasis on the mobile interface, as Android and iOS devices are a very strong market for any social networking product to set a foundation.
Ironic, as I'm leaving Facebook for privacy concerns and moving to Google+. With Facebook, I never quite know what is going to be publicly revealed and displayed—intentionally or not. Google+ is taking aims to ensure it is easy to control who sees what when I post something. With Facebook, it's always been a crapshoot as to what may be considered private one week and public the next.
Before anyone really gets up in a tizzy about privacy, the point behind these two services is to broadcast to a given collection of people—the world, friends, or family—the activities in which you are participating. With G+, I can fine tune who sees what.
I will say that the Google+ interface isn't quite as matured as Facebook's. But they've done a good job for right out of the gate! I also believe that once G+ gets more people, we will better be able to judge how well it works.
And executives wonder why there isn't any employee loyalty in a company any more? Perfect example of why the only way to get a raise is to take your skills and get a job with another company.
What's next for Skype? Easy: get rid of the superfluous programmers—you know, the guys that made Skype work—and hire telemarketers at less than 20% of the engineers' salaries to push the new business. Better: I'm willing to bet that this "private equity firm" owns a marketing business, which will soon get a nice, fat contract to promote Skype. Once it is drained dry, Microsoft will probably drop it citing failure to perform. I predict whatever is left of Skype will implode over the next one to two years.
Nice! Another reason to live my life vicariously through CmdrTaco!
Any übergeeks out there that could get Rob into NASA for the Atlantis launch?
How can the average homeowner tell if their cable modem/router is IPv6 capable? Or, is this a non-issue?
I can ping6 the various computers on my home network that support v6, but currently cannot ping6 outside addresses. Hence, my question for those with the expertise to answer.
Not trust a government corporation not to read my mail? What country in the world has a government run corporation where the government doesn't have access to private communication? Clearly, the US Post Office has nothing to do with the U.S. Government!
As has been mentioned above, email is inherently insecure. It's broadcast out in the open and can be read by anyone either with access to the server or simply by snooping traffic coming out of a given port. It's been known for centuries that even traditional, hardcopy mail can be intercepted and read. Look how often mail coming from soldiers in the theater of war during WWII had their mail blatantly opened and censored. Wax seals and signet rings came about as a way to try and show that a document was sealed and not intercepted and tampered with by some third party. If you want to communicate something that you would consider personally compromising, email or mail are definitely not the answer.
As also mentioned above, if you wish to keep your words absolutely secure, PGP (or the open alternative, GPG) is easily available to encrypt your potentially damning script. If I was going to be sending any email to an individual whom a given government might have suspicions or concerns, I would prefer that my text be out in the open so that anyone could read it without any misinterpretations. Sending an encrypted message—even if it was only a request for a secret family recipe for a marinade for a steak barbecue—would only serve to raise the suspicions of a paranoid government.
If the government in question is open and transparent in their policies towards privacy and legitimate security or crime enforcement issues, then I would have no problems using a government supplied email system. If the government had a history of or was trying to suppress or subjugate the population, then I might think twice about using such a system. Or, at least, I would be careful about what communication I passed through their system.
Well, that's why Antarctica is one of the best places in the world to find meteorites. :)
VERY cool, RG! I'll try this in my pool as the ice melts!
That had better be banta drool on Luke's landspeeder!
Essentially what is being described in the article is good coaching. A good coach doesn't necessarily have the skills or abilities of a star athlete, but he knows how to manage his players to get the best performance out of them. The best manager I ever worked for summed it up in one glorious line: "You're the expert, that's why I hired you." He would basically tell us what he needed done, and then would get out of our way so we could do it. He was technically savvy enough to understand the basics of what we were trying to do, so we could discuss a given project with him if we were stuck. He would simply ask questions on various aspects until we began to bring light on why things were stuck. He also had a great attitude that went with "Do what it takes to get the job done." As long as we were getting the work done, he had no problems with us sitting around and shooting the breeze when things were slow. To be quite frank, some of the best ideas that went on to become products came out of those bullshit sessions. For the record, his background was Marketing.
Another company where I was employed, Lechmere, originally had a great management style. The mantra of managers was, "It's my job to manage the environment in which you make money for the company." The company was doing great. So well, that a buyer popped up and bought them. Well, the new management's mantra was, "You are mindless, idiot drones are a bunch of pions who are only good enough for boxing or selling the crap this company sells, and you clearly aren't as qualified as we are—being MBAs—for the pittance we are paying you." That company is now out of business. They went out of business after two years of doing everything they could to get rid of long term employees with expertise whom they thought were overpaid. By the time they were done with the company, it was so worthless it wasn't even worth trying to sell it—not that they could have found any buyers for it. If anyone came to my company and their resume showed they had mid- or upper-level management experience with Lechmere, I would drop their resume into the shredder.
So– Managers of businesses are complaining that these college graduates aren't well prepared for the workplace, yet why do they seem to hold onto the notion that any high school kid can do the work they are asking of these professionals? Or at least, they seem to insist on paying their professional IT staff like they were only high school graduates.
I did some work with one company where the CEO brought in his fourteen-year-old son to build the company's web site. Later, he dragged in the IT staff on the carpet and gave them a forty-minute long tongue lashing because the web site wasn't working. There was no javascript menus, the purchasing system was non-existent. He complained that it looked amateurish! They all walked out on him after his tirade was complete. I guess it is needless to say that the company no longer exists.
Upon further reading, I discovered what the problem was:
It wasn't just the recipe that got copied, it was an entire article that got copied. That does make this a copyright violation issue.
And—no—I do not agree with the assertion that any article that is put up on the internet can be considered public domain. Yes, it may be available for the public to read for free, but that doesn't make it right for another company to make money off someone else's work. Look at it this way: if you put up an article on your blog and it took you three hours to write that article, how would you feel if you paid for a news magazine and discovered your article was the feature article printed in that magazine, word for word, and they had put someone else's name on it? That magazine just made money off all the advertising for that publication and paid someone else their paycheck for that week, all on the work that you did the week before.
Consider Newsweek Magazine as a model. Their circulation-base rate (number of readers) is almost 2 million (I'm rounding figures). On the newstand, Newsweek Magazine costs $6. So that is roughly $12 million per week. For a full-page , four-color ad, a business must pay US$165,000 per week to run that ad. If there are an average of ten full-color ads in the magazine each week (a fair assumption), then that is conservatively another US$1.6 million per week, for a total of $13 million per week.
You don't think that such a magazine could pay you for the time and effort it took you to write that article? Or at least have called to ask permission to print your article? Yes, Cooks Source was a small operation and didn't have much resources. But that certainly doesn't excuse them from doing a copy-and-paste without permission or compensation to the author. The assertion that anything put on the internet is public domain is not correct. Yes, it is available to be read for free by anyone—sort of, many blogs run Google Ads and make small amounts of money for the owner of the site. But, that doesn't excuse publications from plagiarism, nor compensating writers for their work.
You are correct: recipes are not considered copyrightable. Nor are the patentable. For this reason, Coca-Cola keeps their recipe for Coca-Cola soda one of the most tightly guarded secrets in commercial industry.
One could go through several different recipe books, lift favored recipes and compile them into one's own recipe book entitled, Recipes I lifted From Other Peoples' Recipe Books, and legally publish it . So, while Cooks' comments could be taken as insensitive, they are technically correct.
Ultimately, this is a highly personal choice. What works for one person won't work for another. What Eepok posted above,
I can't buy keyboards online anymore because I just need to test it out myself.
is probably the best advice on the forum. Go the the local computer store and place your hands on some of the keyboards. Even type a few phrases to see how it feels. I will type out a paragraph on the sample keyboard just to see how it feels to type for an extended period. This will really give you an idea how it will feel. You asked a good question, because that may help you narrow down the possible choices. But in the end, you must still try out any given keyboard to see if it works for you.
Slifox also had good advice about looking for an alternative to your mouse. I found using the mouse caused more problems for me than typing ever did. I switched to a large, Kennsington trackball and that worked well for me. But, better than the trackball was the touchpad on my MacBook Pro. I would even suggest giving Apple's Magic Trackpad some consideration. (I don't know if it would work with a non-Apple PC.)
I've gone through several keyboards over the years. I did use one of those ergonomic keyboards for a couple of years, but I really didn't find it all that much of an improvement. I did switch to using a Dvorak keyboard layout, which I have found over the years to be preferable for myself than using the Qwerty layout. My favorite to date? The low-profile keyboard on my MacBook Pro. It's fairly quiet and doesn't require too much force to depress a key, yet offers enough mechanical feedback so you know you have made the keypress. Contrary to this, I know several people who complained that they don't like the Mac keyboard. I haven't tried Apple's newest keyboard style extensively, but I admit it worked better than I thought it would.
Apple's iChat works excellently for me for long-distance connectivity. We connect via Jabber rather than Apple's MobileMe ($$$$!) service. It works flawlessly, in my opinion.
Once again, RIAA (along with others) is seeking a way to force its business plan/model into law. I can only say, if your business plan isn't working, it's time to change the way you do business or close the doors. NOT change the law!
If people don't want your product or the way it is packaged, they won't buy it. If you want people to buy your product, then offer them something they actually want! Don't try to force consumers to buy something by forcing them to buy it because it is the law. Sink or Swim!
I never left personal files or data on the computers at work. I would shunt anything personal to a server I had running at home. For any personal journal writing or private data, I would SSH into the server and create it there. I went to great pains to ensure that I left nothing personal or private on the company's property.
I'm not comfortable storing sensitive personal information off site with some online service. My preference is to store important data in a small RAID I set up in a fireproof area in my basement. Come tornado or conflagration, my data will still be accessible after doing a little digging with a backhoe. If the server was still alive, I could retrieve it wirelessly!
If I really wanted off site storage, I would rather put it in a relative's house. They get use of a really good computer, and I have an off site server where I can mirror important files.
I have never read an introductory O'Reilly or "...for Dummies" book that was better than the multitude of online tutorials out there. Introductory books are, in my opinion, wastes of money.
I'm inclined to agree on this point. I find I get much more mileage out of online tutorials and references than I do out of a book for beginners.
But I do like "cookbook" style books where they address numerous common problems and present solutions for solving these problems. I find it easy to extrapolate what I may need to do when finding an example that similarly addresses my project goal. When trying to move from one language to another, I find these cookbooks very helpful in showing me the proper setup for the new language. One example would be making a MySQL call from PHP versus doing the same from C. While it is brain-dead simple in PHP, C requires a lot more setup before you can successfully make the call. So look for a book that covers various examples for algorithms in your targeted language that you already know how to do in your familiar programming languages. By comparing the differences in how you would go about addressing a known task in the new language, you should be able to easily pick up on what is needed to write a successful program in that new language.
I truly hate the .99 gimick. I actually wish they'd roll tax into the prices so what you see on the label is what you pay and its a nice round number $X.10 $X.20 $X.50 $X.00. Worse is the stupid gas stations with 9/10's of a cent. Why is it they can charge a fraction of a penny you can't possibly pay, ensuring they skim 10ths of a cent gazillions of times. I think they did that in Superman III or something. How is it after all these years, they're still stealing money?
I hate it too. But the reason retailers do this is because $9.99 still looks cheaper than $10.00.
A lot of retailers use the cents on the price to signal the status of the product sold:
I do wish that someday I could look at the price and see it nicely rounded to the nearest whole number value, rather than some slightly off value. And, yes, the extra nine-tenths of a cent on the gas price is merely to make you think it is actually a cent cheaper than it really is. (See my first paragraph above)