Get to OfficeMax or wherever and sit in the chairs. I know people who have loved those expensive Aeron chairs and people who have hated them and you won't know until you try. Check their website and find a dealer near you.
Also pay attention to posture and computer/monitor/keyboard position, and take regular breaks (with and without stretching) from the chair.
I walked into a Discovery Channel store not too long ago while traveling. They had a removeable lumbar support that you can attach to any chair. Didn't try it and YMMV, but it was about $60.
Oh and you might be able to find a $1000 chair on Ebay or Craig's List, or a local used furniture place for $600 or less. Businesses that go belly-up can have many expensive chairs on the cheap.
Also look at the Zoom PS series (both the discontinued 02 and the newer, smaller 04 model). I tested out the Korg for a few days and really didn't like it. Musician's Friend doesn't carry the Zooms but they're available at most other online music retailers, but I've really liked everything from Zoom that I've used and/or bought. Very easy to use, well-priced, and generally feature-packed. Visit http://www.2090.org/zoom/bbs/index.php for more info from the user community, or go directly to the Zoom.co.jp site for the horse's mouth.
That said, MD, while annoying with its DRM and inability to transfer digitally to the computer, does have a lot of uses. When comparing it to your other options, consider it a kick-ass alternative to a microcassette recorder or other portable cassette recorder. There's only the realtime, analog-out to the computer, but the recording quality is much better than most other options out there.
Maybe it's because they're about the only computer games I still have (or maybe they're the only ones I still have because I enjoy them over and over), but I can keep going back to Starcraft and Warcraft II when I need a gaming fix.
Even the campaign games are fun again after a year or so away from the game.
that the original Mega-Man cover didn't make the list. I remember being at my Dad's house and staring at my step-brother's cartridge, trying to figure out how such a fun game could have such a terrible, graphic art on the outside of the game. Oh wait. There it is. There's a link to the worst game covers top 10 list and it tops it. That's a good call.
On the other hand, I'm happy that Double Dragon graphic was mentioned. I remember seeing both the "second cheek" version and then the "one cheek" version on the back cover of comic books. I probably wouldn't remember that image as well as I do if they hadn't erased half of her butt.
Decide what you want to "Try" not what you want to buy. You'll want to use the thing in action before you commit, especially if you haven't had a lot of experience with filming in general. There's features, there's size, there's shape, there's customizability. A camera can have a great lens that you don't happen to like, and you might not know it until you're sitting down to edit.
With "used in good condition" you can do what a lot of my musician friends do to try out a lot of different equipment. Know thy local pawn shop and always get a good deal, whether you buy or sell. Personally, I stay away from used electronics almost as a rule (you never know if it something was stored in a humid environment or a smoking room), but it works well for a people who are willing to take the chance.
There was a trend a decade or two back in paper-and-dice RPGs when everyone was headed "East." Some of it successful, some boring. I wasn't into Vampire but their Kindred of the East book blew me away.
I figure there's two ways to really screw this up: repackage same old paradigms to look exotic, or bore players with stereotypes from film and TV. Concept art looks good except for the cut and paste "screenshot."
We got our negatives for a few hundred dollars, but the type of negatives that most good photographers used even a few years ago are the type you can't get prints of at the local photo lab. You have to use a pro service. When you _have_ to use a pro service, photographers like it when you go through them, because they have a relationship with the developer, and/or profit from the development of new prints.
Nowadays wedding photographers will use digital or even 35mm film and it's possible to get high quality prints that way. If that's the case, along with the "source" (negatives or digital files) ask for a "copyright release" form, similar to what, as an actor, I ask for when I get a headshot.
Place a big order with the photographer for initial prints and make an offer for the files or negatives and a copyright _release_ of a few hundred dollars and it'll probably be in his or her best financial interest to accept.
Some photographers don't like this idea and won't do it under any circumstances. But I'd sooner find a great photographer who's reluctant and try to convince him or her to release the negatives than a mediocre photographer who's more than happy to hand over his or her work.
Not anymore, of course. It doesn't exist anymore. When onelist merged with egroups or egroups merged with Yahoo, ISML and some celebrity/model fangroup had dibs on the ISML "name" so ISML became "Future Science Mailing List" or FSML. And then it was no more.
If anyone knows of a current group like it or if it morphed into another list of another name, I'd love to know. Last I heard of it was November '02. Great unusual finds from the fringes of tech and science.
Didn't Apple along with a bunch of other software corporations stop putting credits in their software a few years ago, to help prevent large competitors in or around Redmond from paying whatever it took to make ridiculously generous offers for those employees to work for them? Wouldn't it be prudent (if that is their policy) to avoid trumpeting all those people's names as well? What if this person didn't turn in the NDA yet?
Bitpass, which I use for my audiobook project, has a way for customers to appeal for their money back, and, since the ability to download won't expire until a set number of days has passed, a user can contact me with a problem and I'm able to fix it with time to spare.
That Bitpass's payments are anonymous requires an extra step on the spender's part, though. If someone emails me because he or she didn't get the item, I'll just ask him or her to log into Bitpass and get the timestamp for the item, and then do whatever it takes to make sure the customer gets what he or she paid for, by setting up an alternative download if I have to.
I think the best Bitpass "earners" are the ones who decide that, even though an item is 25 cents or so, that's still no reason to treat the customer like crap.
There are at least two key price-drop events. The first is from about the last week in January to the first week in February (25-35 days after the beginning of the year). The second is during the last two weeks of March (75-90 days after the beginning of the year). These are observed across all three platforms: Sony PlayStation 2 (PS2), Microsoft Xbox, and Nintendo GameCube (GC).
The features they end up adding (whether it's to MS Office or Windows or whatever) often seem more closely aligned with what THEY want than what consumers want.
I wonder if they're scared of the original Xbox games being more popular than the new games. They look at the worst case scenario: People will buy an Xbox 2 (and they'll lose money on each sale) and then buy and sell older games used rather than try out the new titles.
Therefore, in this mindset, adding backwards compatibility is a way to enable (what they call) pirates to buy the system and not buy new games, in the same way that they view as pirates those who buy the current system just for emulation or for running Linux.
"No, no. Our customers have been BEGGING for us to try and keep Java, Netscape, Linux, and Apple from succeeding. They call us up and say: 'I'm worried I might accidentally mod my Xbox to emulate NES games and the thought of that sickens us! We have too many choices! Please, do something about this!' So you see, it's a feature."
I agree that Nintendo thinks backwards compatibility is important (and I agree with Nintendo that it should be), but why do you think they haven't pursued it with their consoles, and only with their Gameboy series? I haven't seen anything about Nintendo's next-gen console. Will they be finally offering any backawards compatibility in their next system?
With the GameCube, I can imagine that moving from cartridge to optical disk meant two separate reading mechanisms, which would've made it too expensive. But that doesn't explain why three generations (NES-SuperNES-N64) of cartridge-based systems didn't offer it. On the other hand, until the GameCube, they didn't have the example of the PS-PS2 succcess that showed them how compelling backwards-compatibility could be.
It's also possible that Nintendo wants people to buy the same games in new formats, which could mean the current NES-classic re-releases on the GameBoy were planned well in advance.
Didn't the Tom Cruise character (Vince? Vinnie?) in The Color of Money talk about this as a possible future for his video game prowess? That he'd work for the military as a video game specialist, since all the training and then the action will be done like computer games? Was that before or after "Ender's Game?"
For a while I thought it was called Schwarzeneggerbecause his name was bigger than the title on the cartridge.
It was a sidescroller starring a guy with a machine gun shooting bubbles. Surprisingly fun for a few hours.
Alex.
Didn't know that about Sony. Thanks. Terrible to hear about the laptops. I've heard of that happening with HP (an HP printer being unfixably incompatible with an HP laptop, etc.) But Sony NEVER supported Mac with its CLIE. It was the third party support that didn't offer the conduit to OS X.
And I've been a Mac user only since 2001, so I haven't seen anything I've used become obsolete just yet. But I have heard the cries of protest from those who were in the fold long before I was.
Is this something that only entrenched powerhouses with millions to spend can get their hands on (ie: calling them partners rather than developers) or is an sdk for this or the GBA even possible for an indie developer to access and/or use?
I keep my comics collection in an excel spreadsheet so when I'm going through 25 cent bins I know exactly what my wantlist is and I don't accidentally buy any duplicates.
I read Project Gutenberg texts and books purchased from Peanut Press (or whatever they're called and whoever they're owned by these days) when I'm shopping with my wife.
I listen to lectures and audiobooks in MP3 format.
I do play games, though not very often.
I write memos and story ideas down on the go. There's also a voice memo recorder which I use when driving.
I keep organized with my address book and calendar. I've never been able to be organized in either area until I bought a Palm.
I keep some photographs with me.
I keep a dictionary on my Palm, which is invaluable for when I have time to write.
I'm just as likely to take my Palm with me when I go out as I am my phone. If/when my Palm breaks, I'll replace it.
I think it's less an issue of PDAs not having uses as it is an issue of market saturation. Sony's mistake is that they literally came out with new PDAs almost every month (and if they weren't released in the US, they were released in Japan and never made it to the states). People who use PDAs just don't replace their PDAs often enough to sustain as many handhelds as there are, much less as many as Sony came out with. Sony's other mistake was to revamp its high-end line so often. $700 PDAs are especially not replaced very often. With the speed at which these things were replaced in their lineup, I can't imagine they were able to produce and sell enough to get good margins on those products. It would have been nice for them to have researched how people actually use their PDAs rather than try to cram everything they could into one of them, since a PDA too big to take with you is not one that you'll use, no matter how much "convergence" you've got in one.
I think Sony's other mistake (one that PalmOS might be repeating with its next OS) was to not support the Mac platform out of the box. Many Mac users (and I'm including myself here to some degree) are notorious for wanting the latest and greatest gadgets. My first PDA was an early Sony. When I switched to the Mac platform shortly after that I had to buy a third party conduit, which became outdated when I upgraded shortly after that to Mac OS X--and then there was NO conduit I could use, no matter how much I was willing to pay. So after three yearss my Sony PDA outlived my ability to use it with my current computer. When I was ready to replace my Sony CLIE with a new Palmtop, I didn't feel that I could rely on my Sony to be "supported" by even a third party after three years, so I went with another brand.
Slashdot Mirror
Get to OfficeMax or wherever and sit in the chairs. I know people who have loved those expensive Aeron chairs and people who have hated them and you won't know until you try. Check their website and find a dealer near you.
Also pay attention to posture and computer/monitor/keyboard position, and take regular breaks (with and without stretching) from the chair.
I walked into a Discovery Channel store not too long ago while traveling. They had a removeable lumbar support that you can attach to any chair. Didn't try it and YMMV, but it was about $60.
Oh and you might be able to find a $1000 chair on Ebay or Craig's List, or a local used furniture place for $600 or less. Businesses that go belly-up can have many expensive chairs on the cheap.
Alex.
Also look at the Zoom PS series (both the discontinued 02 and the newer, smaller 04 model). I tested out the Korg for a few days and really didn't like it. Musician's Friend doesn't carry the Zooms but they're available at most other online music retailers, but I've really liked everything from Zoom that I've used and/or bought. Very easy to use, well-priced, and generally feature-packed. Visit http://www.2090.org/zoom/bbs/index.php for more info from the user community, or go directly to the Zoom.co.jp site for the horse's mouth.
That said, MD, while annoying with its DRM and inability to transfer digitally to the computer, does have a lot of uses. When comparing it to your other options, consider it a kick-ass alternative to a microcassette recorder or other portable cassette recorder. There's only the realtime, analog-out to the computer, but the recording quality is much better than most other options out there.
Alex.
Maybe it's because they're about the only computer games I still have (or maybe they're the only ones I still have because I enjoy them over and over), but I can keep going back to Starcraft and Warcraft II when I need a gaming fix.
Even the campaign games are fun again after a year or so away from the game.
Alex.
that the original Mega-Man cover didn't make the list. I remember being at my Dad's house and staring at my step-brother's cartridge, trying to figure out how such a fun game could have such a terrible, graphic art on the outside of the game. Oh wait. There it is. There's a link to the worst game covers top 10 list and it tops it. That's a good call.
On the other hand, I'm happy that Double Dragon graphic was mentioned. I remember seeing both the "second cheek" version and then the "one cheek" version on the back cover of comic books. I probably wouldn't remember that image as well as I do if they hadn't erased half of her butt.
Alex.
Decide what you want to "Try" not what you want to buy. You'll want to use the thing in action before you commit, especially if you haven't had a lot of experience with filming in general. There's features, there's size, there's shape, there's customizability. A camera can have a great lens that you don't happen to like, and you might not know it until you're sitting down to edit.
With "used in good condition" you can do what a lot of my musician friends do to try out a lot of different equipment. Know thy local pawn shop and always get a good deal, whether you buy or sell. Personally, I stay away from used electronics almost as a rule (you never know if it something was stored in a humid environment or a smoking room), but it works well for a people who are willing to take the chance.
There was a trend a decade or two back in paper-and-dice RPGs when everyone was headed "East." Some of it successful, some boring. I wasn't into Vampire but their Kindred of the East book blew me away.
I figure there's two ways to really screw this up: repackage same old paradigms to look exotic, or bore players with stereotypes from film and TV. Concept art looks good except for the cut and paste "screenshot."
Alex.
We got our negatives for a few hundred dollars, but the type of negatives that most good photographers used even a few years ago are the type you can't get prints of at the local photo lab. You have to use a pro service. When you _have_ to use a pro service, photographers like it when you go through them, because they have a relationship with the developer, and/or profit from the development of new prints.
Nowadays wedding photographers will use digital or even 35mm film and it's possible to get high quality prints that way. If that's the case, along with the "source" (negatives or digital files) ask for a "copyright release" form, similar to what, as an actor, I ask for when I get a headshot.
Place a big order with the photographer for initial prints and make an offer for the files or negatives and a copyright _release_ of a few hundred dollars and it'll probably be in his or her best financial interest to accept.
Some photographers don't like this idea and won't do it under any circumstances. But I'd sooner find a great photographer who's reluctant and try to convince him or her to release the negatives than a mediocre photographer who's more than happy to hand over his or her work.
Alex.
Maybe get in touch with Geek Corps. They've got a parallel mission and maybe they've delt with this sort of thing.
Alex.
Not anymore, of course. It doesn't exist anymore. When onelist merged with egroups or egroups merged with Yahoo, ISML and some celebrity/model fangroup had dibs on the ISML "name" so ISML became "Future Science Mailing List" or FSML. And then it was no more.
If anyone knows of a current group like it or if it morphed into another list of another name, I'd love to know. Last I heard of it was November '02. Great unusual finds from the fringes of tech and science.
Alex.
Didn't Apple along with a bunch of other software corporations stop putting credits in their software a few years ago, to help prevent large competitors in or around Redmond from paying whatever it took to make ridiculously generous offers for those employees to work for them? Wouldn't it be prudent (if that is their policy) to avoid trumpeting all those people's names as well? What if this person didn't turn in the NDA yet?
Alex.
Bitpass, which I use for my audiobook project, has a way for customers to appeal for their money back, and, since the ability to download won't expire until a set number of days has passed, a user can contact me with a problem and I'm able to fix it with time to spare.
That Bitpass's payments are anonymous requires an extra step on the spender's part, though. If someone emails me because he or she didn't get the item, I'll just ask him or her to log into Bitpass and get the timestamp for the item, and then do whatever it takes to make sure the customer gets what he or she paid for, by setting up an alternative download if I have to.
I think the best Bitpass "earners" are the ones who decide that, even though an item is 25 cents or so, that's still no reason to treat the customer like crap.
Alex.
From the article:
There are at least two key price-drop events. The first is from about the last week in January to the first week in February (25-35 days after the beginning of the year). The second is during the last two weeks of March (75-90 days after the beginning of the year). These are observed across all three platforms: Sony PlayStation 2 (PS2), Microsoft Xbox, and Nintendo GameCube (GC).
Very helpful indeed.
Alex.
The features they end up adding (whether it's to MS Office or Windows or whatever) often seem more closely aligned with what THEY want than what consumers want.
I wonder if they're scared of the original Xbox games being more popular than the new games. They look at the worst case scenario: People will buy an Xbox 2 (and they'll lose money on each sale) and then buy and sell older games used rather than try out the new titles.
Therefore, in this mindset, adding backwards compatibility is a way to enable (what they call) pirates to buy the system and not buy new games, in the same way that they view as pirates those who buy the current system just for emulation or for running Linux.
"No, no. Our customers have been BEGGING for us to try and keep Java, Netscape, Linux, and Apple from succeeding. They call us up and say: 'I'm worried I might accidentally mod my Xbox to emulate NES games and the thought of that sickens us! We have too many choices! Please, do something about this!' So you see, it's a feature."
Alex.
I agree that Nintendo thinks backwards compatibility is important (and I agree with Nintendo that it should be), but why do you think they haven't pursued it with their consoles, and only with their Gameboy series? I haven't seen anything about Nintendo's next-gen console. Will they be finally offering any backawards compatibility in their next system?
With the GameCube, I can imagine that moving from cartridge to optical disk meant two separate reading mechanisms, which would've made it too expensive. But that doesn't explain why three generations (NES-SuperNES-N64) of cartridge-based systems didn't offer it. On the other hand, until the GameCube, they didn't have the example of the PS-PS2 succcess that showed them how compelling backwards-compatibility could be.
It's also possible that Nintendo wants people to buy the same games in new formats, which could mean the current NES-classic re-releases on the GameBoy were planned well in advance.
Alex.
Didn't the Tom Cruise character (Vince? Vinnie?) in The Color of Money talk about this as a possible future for his video game prowess? That he'd work for the military as a video game specialist, since all the training and then the action will be done like computer games? Was that before or after "Ender's Game?"
And then there was that movie Toys...
Alex.
Alex.
How about (first on a google search for palm address book replacement): Contacts Pro?
Alex.
Or first list on a Google search:
Palm Desktop Replacement Comparison Chart
Alex.
For a while I thought it was called Schwarzeneggerbecause his name was bigger than the title on the cartridge. It was a sidescroller starring a guy with a machine gun shooting bubbles. Surprisingly fun for a few hours. Alex.
And something I found out about thru Bitpass: Fanboy Radio about the comic industry.
And if you've exhausted the NPR database, try checking out the databases of WAMU or Minnesota Public Radio.
And there's always [cough. plug. cough.] cheap-to-free audiobooks from Telltale Weekly.
Alex.
Didn't know that about Sony. Thanks. Terrible to hear about the laptops. I've heard of that happening with HP (an HP printer being unfixably incompatible with an HP laptop, etc.) But Sony NEVER supported Mac with its CLIE. It was the third party support that didn't offer the conduit to OS X.
And I've been a Mac user only since 2001, so I haven't seen anything I've used become obsolete just yet. But I have heard the cries of protest from those who were in the fold long before I was.
Alex.
Is this something that only entrenched powerhouses with millions to spend can get their hands on (ie: calling them partners rather than developers) or is an sdk for this or the GBA even possible for an indie developer to access and/or use?
Alex.
I edit my fiction using DocumentsToGo.
I keep my comics collection in an excel spreadsheet so when I'm going through 25 cent bins I know exactly what my wantlist is and I don't accidentally buy any duplicates.
I read Project Gutenberg texts and books purchased from Peanut Press (or whatever they're called and whoever they're owned by these days) when I'm shopping with my wife.
I listen to lectures and audiobooks in MP3 format.
I do play games, though not very often.
I write memos and story ideas down on the go. There's also a voice memo recorder which I use when driving.
I keep organized with my address book and calendar. I've never been able to be organized in either area until I bought a Palm.
I keep some photographs with me.
I keep a dictionary on my Palm, which is invaluable for when I have time to write.
I'm just as likely to take my Palm with me when I go out as I am my phone. If/when my Palm breaks, I'll replace it.
I think it's less an issue of PDAs not having uses as it is an issue of market saturation. Sony's mistake is that they literally came out with new PDAs almost every month (and if they weren't released in the US, they were released in Japan and never made it to the states). People who use PDAs just don't replace their PDAs often enough to sustain as many handhelds as there are, much less as many as Sony came out with. Sony's other mistake was to revamp its high-end line so often. $700 PDAs are especially not replaced very often. With the speed at which these things were replaced in their lineup, I can't imagine they were able to produce and sell enough to get good margins on those products. It would have been nice for them to have researched how people actually use their PDAs rather than try to cram everything they could into one of them, since a PDA too big to take with you is not one that you'll use, no matter how much "convergence" you've got in one.
I think Sony's other mistake (one that PalmOS might be repeating with its next OS) was to not support the Mac platform out of the box. Many Mac users (and I'm including myself here to some degree) are notorious for wanting the latest and greatest gadgets. My first PDA was an early Sony. When I switched to the Mac platform shortly after that I had to buy a third party conduit, which became outdated when I upgraded shortly after that to Mac OS X--and then there was NO conduit I could use, no matter how much I was willing to pay. So after three yearss my Sony PDA outlived my ability to use it with my current computer. When I was ready to replace my Sony CLIE with a new Palmtop, I didn't feel that I could rely on my Sony to be "supported" by even a third party after three years, so I went with another brand.
Alex.
As a life-long insomiac, I can tell you that I'd pay about whatever I'd have to. That's if it actually worked. Alex.