In the comments section at one of the Nook review sites (Barnes & Noble's reader) there was a complaint that their ebooks cost more than Amazon, in some cases 40-50%. Since B&N has got to meet or exceed Amazon's heft in the book industry, my only guess is that Amazon is was able to swing a deal of iPhone-like proportions with their primary US cell carrier, thus their book prices have to subsidize less of the transmission cost than B&N. Personally, if I could save 50% of the book cost simply by hooking my reader to the usb port on my wifi laptop it'd be worth it. Books for me just aren't an impulse buy (gotta have it NOW!) more of a planned purchase (that's a good book he just mentioned, I'll put it on my list).
And within a generation; intrastellar travel goes from commonplace to non-existant as the system's only "intelligent" species decides to blanket their section of space with a fine, abrasive, high-velocity powder.
Actually the plan is to use a waterpik which has a very high velocity (and won't require any change the the eletronics, just mash in the power button and apply power to the feeds to get it to fire) and short range (not trying to wet people across the room).
Sheesh, I got a '0-off topic' but the replies all got '2 - informative'?
What about water down here? If you can nudge the right rock you could use gravity to land(!) it in the middle of some desert, thus altering the entire climate of the planet, risk changing our rotation, cracking some important tectonic plate...
uhhh, maybe we'll contentrate on "out there". Yeah.
Sometimes the IDE's lag so far behind the language you have to abandon them if you're interested in using something new. Because none of the Big Three ( Eclipse, Netbeans and I-something) support Grails nearly as much they do Java; most of my development is done in jEdit (with some formatting plugins), gEdit, notepad or vi depending on the OS in which I'm using it.
Unfortunately, Grails hasn't caught on in my day job where I use Eclipse daily and weepeth verily.
Was somewhat drawn in by the "change the world" buzz of Ginger; then it came out and I saw the price and said "WTF? For five grand I can get one of these and have a hell of a lot more fun.
True that - always figured it was the name rather than Falwell that turned Americans off to "Tele-*tubbies*" : way too close to home.
Still, tho, I do wonder what we did to force Disney into its current "Black-out". Did we do something wrong? Are we not as entertaining as we were in the late 90's?
(Tho personally I think "Cory In The House" doomed us all)
Indeed, with the increase in quality of life over the planet in the last century (barring occasional genocides/sporadic warfare/intentional starvations that slow this march) we'll probably be in the 1-2 kids/pp range within 100 yrs. If we were at that rate *now*, we'd be back to 1B souls in the year 2200. So, within 2 centuries we'll have plenty of Earth to go around.
For not *much* more that a daily "large double cap light no cream w/ sprinkles" at Starbux, Ann Arbor nomads can find a home away from home at the Workantile Exchange
> (helps to) die and respawn close to where you died (in Indiana Jones)
Doesn't help with "Ghost in the Shell" - I've pissed away too many hours helping Motoko fall to her death off the same damned scaffold and respawn back at the ladder; I'm f-ing sick of it. Learning to dodge snipers, get hand-to-hand right, infiltrate buildings and find keys, not so bad. Trying to land on some damned beam like a joystick gymnast? Like hell, man.
I consider myself the "poster child" for the term "casual gamer". Having enough frustrations in meatspace, I don't want to the attempt to finish a game to be anything like work. I have a handful of Playstation II games and the closest I've got to a finish is "Kim Possible". My kids had to get me past the agility test early in Kingdom Hearts, and a similar test early in "Ghost in the Shell" has ended my progress in that game (my teen girl has no interest in the game and my 7yr old is too young too see such graphic violence).
Really, it's play, I don't wanna work that hard. There are serious sports players and there are "beer-belly" leagues where overweight men hit softballs and sorta jog around the bases - to each his own. If "Ghost" had a demo mode, I might actually know what's in the rest of the damned game nearly two years after I purchased it.
My other console is a Wii, and the types of games I have purchased for it, Wii Play, Playground, Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Wii Music, Cooking Mama, Game Party, Endless Ocean; further demonstrate I purchase games to have fun, not increase my frustrations. Perhaps this is why some of the few meatspace sports I do enjoy are tennis and softball - it seems easier to find casual players for these than say basketball or football which seem to be dominated by guys trying to relive their high school glory days or at least prove they "still got it".
I think the biggest problem that the company had in general is being self-funded. When you're a developer working directly with a publisher and you have milestones to meet it's a whole different ballgame. If you don't meet those milestones, you don't get any money. That right there will keep your project on schedule. If, however, you're funding it yourself, you don't really have anyone to answer to except yourself and you can quickly lose sight of just how much money is going out the door.
Huh. I'm trying to launch an ed/tech magazine next year; I think I'm going to take that piece of advice and nail it to my forehead.
> plugins are often achieved by modifying PHP code.
Yeep. Tell me about it. A sci-fi writer friend of mine asked me to implement paypal on her RUNNING site; I purch'd a $40 Joomla plugin for the purpose, sat down and started to install it, figuring it to be an hour's effort, tops. As soon as I read 'execute this install script to begin patching [multiple] source files' I ran like an 8yr old Galifreyan from a Time Vortex.
I've recently received my own cease and desist from the lizard's lawyers for my very low traffic blog on (codezilla) which used to have as its logo some Godzilla fan art. Not interested in fighting "the Man" (even if he is wearing a rubber monster suit) I replaced it with a Mr-Rogers-as-T-Rex image I got from Creative Commons.
When the community-supplied content overwhelms all the protected stuff I think our current trademark problems will become moot.
while ( spec_creep > 0 ) {
dev: code code code
qa: nag nag nag
dev: code code code
qa: nag nag nag
dev: code code
qa: brilliant! yay! good job! it's, oh, wait...
nag nag nag.
dev: *sigh*. code code code
Actually, according to some casual searches on some of the job sites (and a few phone calls I've been getting of late) there appears to be lots of opportunity in some midwestern states (Ohio, Iowa, Chicago), especially for some of the newer cool stuff like Grails ( unfortunately for me, Michigan appears to be a Grails/Groovy desert within the Great Lakes oasis). Ohio (Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton) has insurance and medical opportunities, the Iowa ones appear to be religious orgs, Chicago is a developer's buffet.
Oh, and Colorado has stuff too. If you're moving from the valley, excluding the weather only Chicago offers anything close to the amenities you have now (plus they have mass transit).
Hell, two years ago my old TV (30in) died and I went to the repair shop and they had a 35in Toshiba tube model for $100. There's enough older TV tech in the 'stream' where I don't see myself needing to pay $800+ for my kids to watch 'Sponge Bob', let alone upgrading the whole video stack to enjoy 'The Sponge Bob Movie' on BR.
> if they wanted vengeance they may have sent him to a maximum security prision
You mean like this guy, who Pennsylvanians gave life w/o possibility of parole for *not* killing a cop (he was unarmed and hiding, his bank-robbing partner had the gun and got the death penalty).
Slashdot Mirror
> 40% premium on books
In the comments section at one of the Nook review sites (Barnes & Noble's reader) there was a complaint that their ebooks cost more than Amazon, in some cases 40-50%. Since B&N has got to meet or exceed Amazon's heft in the book industry, my only guess is that Amazon is was able to swing a deal of iPhone-like proportions with their primary US cell carrier, thus their book prices have to subsidize less of the transmission cost than B&N. Personally, if I could save 50% of the book cost simply by hooking my reader to the usb port on my wifi laptop it'd be worth it. Books for me just aren't an impulse buy (gotta have it NOW!) more of a planned purchase (that's a good book he just mentioned, I'll put it on my list).
And within a generation; intrastellar travel goes from commonplace to non-existant as the system's only "intelligent" species decides to blanket their section of space with a fine, abrasive, high-velocity powder.
Might help as an alien-invasion repellant, tho.
> high muzzle velocity
Actually the plan is to use a waterpik which has a very high velocity (and won't require any change the the eletronics, just mash in the power button and apply power to the feeds to get it to fire) and short range (not trying to wet people across the room).
Sheesh, I got a '0-off topic' but the replies all got '2 - informative'?
She wants to shoot bugs out of the air with a water gun.
> water out there
What about water down here? If you can nudge the right rock you could use gravity to land(!) it in the middle of some desert, thus altering the entire climate of the planet, risk changing our rotation, cracking some important tectonic plate...
uhhh, maybe we'll contentrate on "out there". Yeah.
Sometimes the IDE's lag so far behind the language you have to abandon them if you're interested in using something new. Because none of the Big Three ( Eclipse, Netbeans and I-something) support Grails nearly as much they do Java; most of my development is done in jEdit (with some formatting plugins), gEdit, notepad or vi depending on the OS in which I'm using it.
Unfortunately, Grails hasn't caught on in my day job where I use Eclipse daily and weepeth verily.
If the algae ate the giant pools of pig excrement surrounding most of the industrial feedlots; these guys would be heros.
Was somewhat drawn in by the "change the world" buzz of Ginger; then it came out and I saw the price and said "WTF? For five grand I can get one of these and have a hell of a lot more fun.
True that - always figured it was the name rather than Falwell that turned Americans off to "Tele-*tubbies*" : way too close to home. Still, tho, I do wonder what we did to force Disney into its current "Black-out". Did we do something wrong? Are we not as entertaining as we were in the late 90's? (Tho personally I think "Cory In The House" doomed us all)
Indeed, with the increase in quality of life over the planet in the last century (barring occasional genocides/sporadic warfare/intentional starvations that slow this march) we'll probably be in the 1-2 kids/pp range within 100 yrs. If we were at that rate *now*, we'd be back to 1B souls in the year 2200. So, within 2 centuries we'll have plenty of Earth to go around.
For not *much* more that a daily "large double cap light no cream w/ sprinkles" at Starbux, Ann Arbor nomads can find a home away from home at the Workantile Exchange
providing some insight into the heart of Jupiter
Poetry; pure poetry.
> (helps to) die and respawn close to where you died (in Indiana Jones)
Doesn't help with "Ghost in the Shell" - I've pissed away too many hours helping Motoko fall to her death off the same damned scaffold and respawn back at the ladder; I'm f-ing sick of it. Learning to dodge snipers, get hand-to-hand right, infiltrate buildings and find keys, not so bad. Trying to land on some damned beam like a joystick gymnast? Like hell, man.
I consider myself the "poster child" for the term "casual gamer". Having enough frustrations in meatspace, I don't want to the attempt to finish a game to be anything like work. I have a handful of Playstation II games and the closest I've got to a finish is "Kim Possible". My kids had to get me past the agility test early in Kingdom Hearts, and a similar test early in "Ghost in the Shell" has ended my progress in that game (my teen girl has no interest in the game and my 7yr old is too young too see such graphic violence).
Really, it's play, I don't wanna work that hard. There are serious sports players and there are "beer-belly" leagues where overweight men hit softballs and sorta jog around the bases - to each his own. If "Ghost" had a demo mode, I might actually know what's in the rest of the damned game nearly two years after I purchased it.
My other console is a Wii, and the types of games I have purchased for it, Wii Play, Playground, Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Wii Music, Cooking Mama, Game Party, Endless Ocean; further demonstrate I purchase games to have fun, not increase my frustrations. Perhaps this is why some of the few meatspace sports I do enjoy are tennis and softball - it seems easier to find casual players for these than say basketball or football which seem to be dominated by guys trying to relive their high school glory days or at least prove they "still got it".
> Windows only wifi
Caribou Coffee was like this the last time I took my Linux-laptop in with me. This is why I haven't been in a Caribou for a long time.
I think the biggest problem that the company had in general is being self-funded. When you're a developer working directly with a publisher and you have milestones to meet it's a whole different ballgame. If you don't meet those milestones, you don't get any money. That right there will keep your project on schedule. If, however, you're funding it yourself, you don't really have anyone to answer to except yourself and you can quickly lose sight of just how much money is going out the door.
Huh. I'm trying to launch an ed/tech magazine next year; I think I'm going to take that piece of advice and nail it to my forehead.
Thanks.
Sounds like the first killer app for the javascript-powered Palm Pre.
I'm willing to pay for content OR to have it infested with ads. Not both.
You mean like USA Networks, TBS and all the cable channels that turn 90min movies into mini-series with all the commercials they pack into them?
> plugins are often achieved by modifying PHP code.
Yeep. Tell me about it. A sci-fi writer friend of mine asked me to implement paypal on her RUNNING site; I purch'd a $40 Joomla plugin for the purpose, sat down and started to install it, figuring it to be an hour's effort, tops. As soon as I read 'execute this install script to begin patching [multiple] source files' I ran like an 8yr old Galifreyan from a Time Vortex.
Joomla. Brrrrrrrr. Still gives me the willies.
I've recently received my own cease and desist from the lizard's lawyers for my very low traffic blog on (codezilla) which used to have as its logo some Godzilla fan art. Not interested in fighting "the Man" (even if he is wearing a rubber monster suit) I replaced it with a Mr-Rogers-as-T-Rex image I got from Creative Commons.
When the community-supplied content overwhelms all the protected stuff I think our current trademark problems will become moot.
> wrote my ed thesis on this
And where might a curious fellow find a *copy* of said thesis?
while ( spec_creep > 0 ) {
dev: code code code
qa: nag nag nag
dev: code code code
qa: nag nag nag
dev: code code
qa: brilliant! yay! good job! it's, oh, wait...
nag nag nag.
dev: *sigh*. code code code
}
Actually, according to some casual searches on some of the job sites (and a few phone calls I've been getting of late) there appears to be lots of opportunity in some midwestern states (Ohio, Iowa, Chicago), especially for some of the newer cool stuff like Grails ( unfortunately for me, Michigan appears to be a Grails/Groovy desert within the Great Lakes oasis). Ohio (Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton) has insurance and medical opportunities, the Iowa ones appear to be religious orgs, Chicago is a developer's buffet.
Oh, and Colorado has stuff too. If you're moving from the valley, excluding the weather only Chicago offers anything close to the amenities you have now (plus they have mass transit).
Hell, two years ago my old TV (30in) died and I went to the repair shop and they had a 35in Toshiba tube model for $100. There's enough older TV tech in the 'stream' where I don't see myself needing to pay $800+ for my kids to watch 'Sponge Bob', let alone upgrading the whole video stack to enjoy 'The Sponge Bob Movie' on BR.
> if they wanted vengeance they may have sent him to a maximum security prision
You mean like this guy, who Pennsylvanians gave life w/o possibility of parole for *not* killing a cop (he was unarmed and hiding, his bank-robbing partner had the gun and got the death penalty).