The list of planets will be open and ever extending,
Not likely. Eventually its all found. Like arguing we must redefine australia as an island, or else we'll have trillions of "continents" in the ocean. Eventually you find them all. For example, we are not likely to find any new planets within the orbit of Mars.
and there will be an insoluble argument about where you draw the line between planets and asteroids,
Easy Peasy. Does it crush itself under its own mass to an almost spherical shape? Theoretical compression stress at the core due to gravity exceeds stress limit of the rock? Then its a planet. An asteroid is a smaller lump of rock that isn't heavy enough to "round" itself under its own mass.
In an era where every kid gets a participation trophy I'm mystified at the hate toward Pluto, what does it hurt if it gets socially promoted to planet grade?
We as a country have given up on science, unless it makes immediate profits for megacorporations
I'm not thinking Hubble was manufactured by schoolchildren or launched by a volunteer group.
That's the mystifying part. You'd think there's just as much room for corruption in the aerospace contracting field as the banking field, but apparently fraud is easier in the banking industry. Since they (as in the big bankers) are not going to let us fix the banking system, the solution would seem to be, make the aerospace industry as corrupt, or more corrupt, than the banking industry.
I'm sure we could set up some system of multiple tiers of commissioned sales people, maybe a derivatives market, a couple corrupt safety ratings companies... If it doesn't work, 1) banking system doesn't either and no one cares 2) "space is hard" apologists.
If you move it from your home a couple hundred meters to your car and then a couple hundred meters to your office then it is not very important if it weights 4.5.
If you are a road warrior and drag it with you everywhere then 4.5 kgs can be a lot after a couple of hours.
Speaking of "warriors" that's only a couple grams away from the weight of my M-16 or my gas mask, both of which I hauled everywhere in the field in the 90s (when at base that stuff sat locked up in the armory or NBC cage respectively). In addition to the assorted computer-y thingies which were also very heavy due to TEMPEST shielding, like the 75 pound green 386...
I you wanna talk the talk about "warriors" then you gotta walk the walk, or at least carry the laptop, or something like that.
Another interesting analogy is the "road warriors" may soon require "shield bearers" to help them carry junk. Probably a good job for an intern.
The whole hype that laptops must weigh next to nothing is silly. If the laptop is your mobile office, and if it is important for work, then 4.5 kg is a tiny amount.
You can tell quickly who is ex-military. So, let me get this straight, I've only got to carry 10 pounds, for only a mile or so, in an air conditioned airport? Admittedly this was a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, but back when I was a US Army computer guy, I had one road march well over 15 miles with well over 50 pound backpack on a warm summer day, no exaggeration. And it was up (and down) hills all the way. So carrying a small blade server chassis five miles in normal outside weather on flat ground should not be a big deal for the average civilian?
Yes, it's called a second laptop (oh and a decent OS).
Been there, done that. In networking world, often you need to troubleshoot something on "both sides" of a device. You can F around with multiple USB ethernet dongles and really long cables, but its a heck of a lot cheaper, simpler, faster, more reliable, lighter, and more convenient to just carry two little original eee netbooks running Debian...
Another place I've seen it is client/server development... You're a crossover cable away from a perfect emulation of the end user experience... And a cheap netbook is used to be cheaper than the old cost of a vmware license.
It seems to be a "thousands of dollars" hardware solution to avoid a "hundreds of dollars of proprietary software licensing costs" problem..
I would be happy with gradually paying for a game if i keep enjoying it. In the same way i can buy or rent a single episode of a tv series or buy a whole season set, this option should exist for games.
In other words, the current "Dungeons and Dragons Online" business model. A tolerably fun game where you buy areas. Another way to look at it, is you pay money for areas full of good loot, and the free areas have junk loot. I wish they had a marketplace of 3rd party areas instead of just corporate areas. The junk paid areas have a rep amongst the players and as such are not purchased, so the devs have a bit too much financial incentive to level the playing field and to make the areas too easy, which I don't like.
I'm not entirely sure why they're skewing this around the desires of mobile gamers. Mobile games need to be quick to pick up, quick to put down. Length doesn't really factor into it, as long as...
... its got a decent save system. None of that "you must play until you get to a savepoint or else lose all your work".
The best games I've ever played have been epics (40-120 hours) with strong stories. In the case of Neverwinter Nights or KotOR, I've both bought and played them through multiple times. That, to me, is what those sorts of games should be aiming for.
Based on our similar tastes, I think you'd like "avadon black fortress" on an ipad, not as mobile as an iphone but we're close... Apparently its been quite a success, if I my estimates are correct, Jeff is on his way to a well earned Ferrari... (spiderweb software is a sort of one person shop, much like the x-plane guy Austin)
I think the success of games like Angry Birds are showing developers that they don't need to make an overbudget game that takes 20 hours to complete. Even games that can be played through in an hour or less can have great longevity on multiple playthroughs.
I can't wait until some brilliant genius invents some new game ideas. FPS players like scrolling around with a mouse, and like having a "story arc" (often misspelled on/. as "story arch") so how about essentially writing your own story where you are in charge of a culture, maybe even a... civilization..., and get to make many decisions to manage it's development thru the ages. FPS players like driving vehicles around in between shooting people, so how about a realistic physics simulation of a vehicle in a realistic world simulation, maybe for aeroplanes, I guess you could call it a "flight simulator". FPS players like the military and like varied terrain and varied weapons, how about large scale military engagements involving multiple shooters, just like a multiplayer 1st person shooter but run by one or two guys in 3rd person, maybe on a map of tiled polygons, how about little hex tiles? FPS players like compelling stories and puzzles, what if you made a game completely out of cutscenes and puzzles, and to save money did it all in text, and used an adventure theme... you could call them text adventures? Those games might, just possibly, have some replay value, but I don't know if anyone could "invent" them, they're all pretty far out ideas from a world where videogame = FPS and nothing else.
Naah I'm guessing we'll get multiple playthrus by just another FPS except now you get a fork or two in the road, instead of perfectly linear predictable rails shooter. Oh well.
Videogames are not books or films; they are a different medium altogether.
First of all "videogames" is now a synonym for "FPS". We are not allowed to talk about non-FPS video games, other than to make fun of them and call them casual. How a tactical hex wargame that takes 150 hours to play is "casual" is a mystery we are not allowed to think about. video game = shooting thousands of people and thats all it is allowed to be, and is all we are allowed to think. This is/. and we do not tolerate thoughtcrime here, get your mind closed and think what the PR people told you to think. Other forms of entertainment involving a computer hooked do not exist (other than pr0n, but that's more a lifestyle than an entertainment).
Given that, videogames are mostly vacations. Not stories. Not role playing. Vacations complete with stereotypical "ugly american" behavior, combined with all the heroic levels of ethical and moral behavior you'd expect while anonymously re-enacting the mai lai massacre as per the game designers orders.
Maybe there's a little "historical re-enactor" going on. One zillion SCA guys go in a field and "sword" each other. One zillion "Civil War"/"War of Northern Aggression" reenactors go out in a field and shoot each other. One zillion WWII reenactors hit the FPS video games, maybe its just that simple. Thirty years ago they would have been wearing gray uniforms, hauling cannons thru fields, and talking with fake southern accents as they re-enact the War of Northern Aggression.
Or in summary, video games have to be stereotypical and boring because they have to be FPS and it is not possible inside a FPS to shoot thousands of people in unique ways.
If you carefully and methodically fold yourself into a tiny boring little cardboard box, don't act all insightful at the observation a decade or two later that you're now really bored and surrounded by tasteless cardboard.
Maybe some indie developer can come up with a revolutionary game where you ride around on a Vespa and go to poetry readings at various coffee shops.
They called it "second life". It had that, and gambling until they took the gambling away. And it had sex until they took that away too.
Now I'm not sure it has anything; creepy empty ancient ruins, I suspect? Kind of like Myspace now, or soon to be Facebook once everyone switches to G+.
Used to be a slashvertisement post about second life roughly every other day, perhaps a decade ago up to about five years ago..
I think it's more like a restaurant that makes an excellent steak, vs. more "artistic" restaurants always looking to wow you with something novel. Both have a place; the recipe for steak doesn't need changing.
Its much more like 99% of the restaurants are McDonalds and thru stockholm syndrome, a segment of the population insists that no other restaurant could exist, or should exist. This in a business environment where less than 5% of the population will pay for the product, and the other 95% won't even eat it for free, literally zero dollar value to them. You'd think someone would want a piece of the abandoned 95% of the market, but nooooo...
You see the same thing with formulaic TV and formulaic music. Endless repetitive competition to increase the fraction within the tiny market that purchases, no interest in other markets or increasing market size.
I've got 51% of the horseshoe market, yeah me! Cars? What are those, no one wants them, who cares, now buy my horseshoes instead of my competitors horseshoes!
So, in summary, you were trying to ship an app that replicates the functionality of "add to home screen" in safari, then apple made you remove that too, leaving you with... ? An icon and a name?
We sell 10,000 seat licenses to large banks -- nobody is going to pay for that with a Visa through their iTunes account.
I guess this explains why there's no Treasury Direct app. No one wants to buy multiple $10K federal treasury bonds thru itunes. I haven't bought on treasury direct since rates dropped to about zero (in other words, several years), maybe they do have an app? Do stock trading apps like "td-ameritrade" require you to use itunes for all stock purchases and/or cash deposits? The idea of getting a 5 figure itunes credit card bill is kind of funny.
ok to be fair i am using a gen 2 mc model but i am runing ios 4.2.1 so again I say WTF, I really like google+ but since i mainly use my touch for facebook linkedin twitter and wordpress, i really don't want to have to use the mobile web page all the time. but I guess I am just whining.
No, its not fair at all, since the hardware is identical, minus the telephony peripheral which I'm sure the app doesn't use. Even my brand new ipod touch running the latest ios won't run it. I'm currently researching my jailbreaking options to see if I can fool the app into running, balanced against the fact that the screenshots of the app don't look much different than just using safari...
"Using a highly elliptical orbit of around 340,000 km"
this in no way describes the eccentricity of the orbit. It simply tells us that the apogee is 340,000 km...
Even worse it could be the perigee and then it flings itself out to Mars. That would not be a complete waste of rocket fuel; keep it far away from near earth interference like geosynchronous sats.
Helping rebuild after a natural disaster is one thing, but if after 20+ years a country can't recover, then why should we continue to help?
To build a political powerbase? Given the choice of "vote in my support at the UN about something you don't really care about anyway" vs "no soup for you"...
Works on a smaller scale too, from an engineering standpoint New Orleans should be abandoned, but as long as there's voters there, thats not gonna happen.
In short - where Borders dealt with a changing book market by watering-down its offerings to the point where I had no reason to visit their store
Radio Shack analogy? Went there weekly when I was young and willing to buy 5 resistors for $2, I haven't really been back since the conversion to Cellphone Shack... Now I have weekly deliveries from Mouser, Digikey, Minicircuits, and their competitors...
I'm a teacher who specialises in working with gifted kids
Cool, I enjoyed your type when I was a student, received good advice. Sadly, locally all those positions have been eliminated to save money, hire bilingual teachers, hire guards and truancy officers, etc. So look out for your job..
because they want to talk to someone knowledgeable and well-read about books
Ask yourself honestly, if anyone could afford books if the retailer had to pay your current salary to sales clerks... Also don't take it personally but you missed the biggest problem with your previous management, if I want book buying advice about "motivation and health" I want it from a part time retired psch, or a retired nutritionist, or a retired physical therapist, whos working at the book store to supplement their SS check, not a uni kid who probably doesn't know too much more about the subject than I do... I'd love to sell advice about computer science books in about 20 years, it beats being a walmart people greeter... For example, my local semi-retired coin dealer with well over 40 years of experience in the field recommended a book on roman empire coins to me; it was an excellent book, perfect for my needs, and I was happy to pay a somewhat inflated price to him because his advice about the book was worth it. I don't think the kid at barnes and noble, or borders, would have as much insight on that topic...
the library only carried books on Fortran and Basic and COBOL
These three statements don't seem to go together. I attended a big no-name public uni and transferred to a small no-name college (smaller grad class than my high school...) and their libraries were beyond awesome. Especially the big no-name uni which subscribed to apparently every research journal that exists. Unless the school is located in a slum area, the libraries never check for ID or have any security at all, just show up in the evening when the older folks take night classes, carry a backpack and/or laptop, and its all good as long as you act as a gentleman (no loud ipod music, phone on vibrate, bathe more than once a week, no talking, etc). You don't have to attend classes to visit a university library, merely live nearby and act civilized.
The lesson I take from this is that the local retail is doomed unless we figure out how to address the online tax advantage.
The only direct online tax advantage is sales tax, possibly the most regressive of all taxes, with the possible exception of certain low-income related sin taxes like tobacco taxes. In a race to the bottom, either the sales tax goes bye bye, or the local retail businesses, employees, and customers, go bye bye. Places that desperately want a sales tax can keep it, if they're willing to adsorb the unemployment, and people who are willing to live in an area with retail ghost towns. More power to them, but I don't personally wanna live there. If we had a free market, it would take care of this problem all by itself... Bye bye sales taxes, won't miss you at all...
A very indirect online tax advantage is property tax arbitrage. I can build a warehouse in a low prop tax area, and sell to the suckers in high prop tax areas without having to pay the high prop tax either directly or thru rent that local retailers have to tolerate. Its possible that rural people will have retail bookstores for decades after the last retail bookstore is pushed off Manhattan island.
Also, lets just face it, driving somewhere to buy stuff might be recreational for a tiny fraction of the population, but for most of us, its about as appealing as having to drive to a travel agent office to get airline tickets, or having to wait in line at a bank teller window for 15 minutes to deposit a check. No matter how much you play with taxes, retail might be doomed, because the overall retail experience sucks and conveniently online sucks less.
Lesson among all brick and mortar stores: your selection will always suck compared to online stores. Figure out a niche for yourself such that your selection doesn't suck so much, or have an online presence that's useful. I've given up a long time ago on blindly driving to a freaking store in the hopes they'd have this one thing I need and lo and behold they don't.
Gifts? My wife likes books about subject X, I'll probably find something she will tolerate at B+N. If she wants book number #X of #Y in series of #Z then hellloooo amazon. Admitted we'd all be better off if I gave her an amazon or itunes GC, but that's not socially acceptable in my culture.
So, for birthdays, no problemo, nice distribution across the year. Calendar holidays are a big problem, I have not retail shopped between thanksgiving and christmas in some years, will not tolerate the behavior of other shoppers and do not like waiting in line. Either shop before thanksgiving or order online before 12/10 or so. So they have a huge staffing problem where perhaps 75% of their sales are immediately before xmas and mothers day... Maybe bookstores will have to go the route of the "haloween stores" and "christmas decoration stores" where they pop up on short term month long lease, sell out of the back of a semi trailer for a couple weeks, and move on. Pity books are so dang dense/heavy compared to haloween costumes.
Sunday: Had a problem with a website I like to access that has nothing to do with this hardware, but I felt like blaming it anyway. Kind of like kicking the dog when the local corporate owned sports team loses a game.
Monday: I'm the only person in america who prints stuff at home instead of forwarding it to work and I also pretend I only have access to exactly one computer, this one. (WTF?) And in an industry that only supports printing on winders, and sorta tolerates macs, oddly enough this didn't go too well. Kind of like buying a xbox360 game and whining that it doesn't work so well on my Wii.
Tuesday: I hate all touchpads made in the last decade and this has a touchpad therefore I hate it. Umm, OK. The rest of us don't really care. I hate hitting my thumb with a hammer, and this week I decided to hit my thumb with a hammer, and it did in fact hurt, and I hope you feel educated and informed WRT this point.
Wednesday: To do something complicated, I had to use google to look something up. Un-believable, I'm sure no one has ever done something like that with any other technological artifact, I am The One. Also a minor bug that I didn't report wasn't fixed, furthermore I believe the mind control USB dongle is not working or it would have read my mind. Or perhaps the time travel dongle failed thus it wasn't fixed before I reported it.
Thursday: I found a single missing MIME type. A legit complaint.
Friday: I know this is a netbook for online work, so I'm gonna trash it for not doing local stuff very well. Next up, standard/. car analogy, I'm going to savage my sports car for not having a pickup truck bed and trailer hitch, right after I finish complaining about how poorly the gas engine runs on diesel. Maybe later today I'll flame my diet soda for not tasting like root beer; despite its having a "diet coke" label, all diet sodas are supposed to be diet root beers, right? No average soda drinker could survive the shock, but I'm brave.
Saturday: Kind of like how my wife loves to bring old arguments up over and over when there's nothing new to complain about, and despite apparently being a man based upon my name, I'm gonna do the same thing my wife does. Just re-read Sun-Fr and pretend not to be annoyed at the title "7 days in the cloud" and only getting 6 days. Hope my editor doesn't notice or I am so busted. Well at least I got to play with a new toy for a week.
As a hatchet job, it was fairly well written. As a technical standpoint, its basically a bug report about a single missing MIME-type that somehow dragged on to a 6 screen wall of text. I don't think this is gonna win the pulitzer, nor he gonna get fired, but this is probably in the bottom quartile of his journalistic career.
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The list of planets will be open and ever extending,
Not likely. Eventually its all found. Like arguing we must redefine australia as an island, or else we'll have trillions of "continents" in the ocean. Eventually you find them all. For example, we are not likely to find any new planets within the orbit of Mars.
and there will be an insoluble argument about where you draw the line between planets and asteroids,
Easy Peasy. Does it crush itself under its own mass to an almost spherical shape? Theoretical compression stress at the core due to gravity exceeds stress limit of the rock? Then its a planet. An asteroid is a smaller lump of rock that isn't heavy enough to "round" itself under its own mass.
In an era where every kid gets a participation trophy I'm mystified at the hate toward Pluto, what does it hurt if it gets socially promoted to planet grade?
We as a country have given up on science, unless it makes immediate profits for megacorporations
I'm not thinking Hubble was manufactured by schoolchildren or launched by a volunteer group.
That's the mystifying part. You'd think there's just as much room for corruption in the aerospace contracting field as the banking field, but apparently fraud is easier in the banking industry. Since they (as in the big bankers) are not going to let us fix the banking system, the solution would seem to be, make the aerospace industry as corrupt, or more corrupt, than the banking industry.
I'm sure we could set up some system of multiple tiers of commissioned sales people, maybe a derivatives market, a couple corrupt safety ratings companies... If it doesn't work, 1) banking system doesn't either and no one cares 2) "space is hard" apologists.
If you move it from your home a couple hundred meters to your car and then a couple hundred meters to your office then it is not very important if it weights 4.5.
If you are a road warrior and drag it with you everywhere then 4.5 kgs can be a lot after a couple of hours.
Speaking of "warriors" that's only a couple grams away from the weight of my M-16 or my gas mask, both of which I hauled everywhere in the field in the 90s (when at base that stuff sat locked up in the armory or NBC cage respectively). In addition to the assorted computer-y thingies which were also very heavy due to TEMPEST shielding, like the 75 pound green 386...
I you wanna talk the talk about "warriors" then you gotta walk the walk, or at least carry the laptop, or something like that.
Another interesting analogy is the "road warriors" may soon require "shield bearers" to help them carry junk. Probably a good job for an intern.
The whole hype that laptops must weigh next to nothing is silly. If the laptop is your mobile office, and if it is important for work, then 4.5 kg is a tiny amount.
You can tell quickly who is ex-military. So, let me get this straight, I've only got to carry 10 pounds, for only a mile or so, in an air conditioned airport? Admittedly this was a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, but back when I was a US Army computer guy, I had one road march well over 15 miles with well over 50 pound backpack on a warm summer day, no exaggeration. And it was up (and down) hills all the way. So carrying a small blade server chassis five miles in normal outside weather on flat ground should not be a big deal for the average civilian?
Yes, it's called a second laptop (oh and a decent OS).
Been there, done that. In networking world, often you need to troubleshoot something on "both sides" of a device. You can F around with multiple USB ethernet dongles and really long cables, but its a heck of a lot cheaper, simpler, faster, more reliable, lighter, and more convenient to just carry two little original eee netbooks running Debian...
Another place I've seen it is client/server development... You're a crossover cable away from a perfect emulation of the end user experience... And a cheap netbook is used to be cheaper than the old cost of a vmware license.
It seems to be a "thousands of dollars" hardware solution to avoid a "hundreds of dollars of proprietary software licensing costs" problem..
I would be happy with gradually paying for a game if i keep enjoying it. In the same way i can buy or rent a single episode of a tv series or buy a whole season set, this option should exist for games.
In other words, the current "Dungeons and Dragons Online" business model. A tolerably fun game where you buy areas. Another way to look at it, is you pay money for areas full of good loot, and the free areas have junk loot. I wish they had a marketplace of 3rd party areas instead of just corporate areas. The junk paid areas have a rep amongst the players and as such are not purchased, so the devs have a bit too much financial incentive to level the playing field and to make the areas too easy, which I don't like.
I'm not entirely sure why they're skewing this around the desires of mobile gamers. Mobile games need to be quick to pick up, quick to put down. Length doesn't really factor into it, as long as ...
... its got a decent save system. None of that "you must play until you get to a savepoint or else lose all your work".
The best games I've ever played have been epics (40-120 hours) with strong stories. In the case of Neverwinter Nights or KotOR, I've both bought and played them through multiple times. That, to me, is what those sorts of games should be aiming for.
Based on our similar tastes, I think you'd like "avadon black fortress" on an ipad, not as mobile as an iphone but we're close... Apparently its been quite a success, if I my estimates are correct, Jeff is on his way to a well earned Ferrari... (spiderweb software is a sort of one person shop, much like the x-plane guy Austin)
I think the success of games like Angry Birds are showing developers that they don't need to make an overbudget game that takes 20 hours to complete. Even games that can be played through in an hour or less can have great longevity on multiple playthroughs.
I can't wait until some brilliant genius invents some new game ideas. FPS players like scrolling around with a mouse, and like having a "story arc" (often misspelled on /. as "story arch") so how about essentially writing your own story where you are in charge of a culture, maybe even a ... civilization ..., and get to make many decisions to manage it's development thru the ages. FPS players like driving vehicles around in between shooting people, so how about a realistic physics simulation of a vehicle in a realistic world simulation, maybe for aeroplanes, I guess you could call it a "flight simulator". FPS players like the military and like varied terrain and varied weapons, how about large scale military engagements involving multiple shooters, just like a multiplayer 1st person shooter but run by one or two guys in 3rd person, maybe on a map of tiled polygons, how about little hex tiles? FPS players like compelling stories and puzzles, what if you made a game completely out of cutscenes and puzzles, and to save money did it all in text, and used an adventure theme... you could call them text adventures? Those games might, just possibly, have some replay value, but I don't know if anyone could "invent" them, they're all pretty far out ideas from a world where videogame = FPS and nothing else.
Naah I'm guessing we'll get multiple playthrus by just another FPS except now you get a fork or two in the road, instead of perfectly linear predictable rails shooter. Oh well.
Videogames are not books or films; they are a different medium altogether.
First of all "videogames" is now a synonym for "FPS". We are not allowed to talk about non-FPS video games, other than to make fun of them and call them casual. How a tactical hex wargame that takes 150 hours to play is "casual" is a mystery we are not allowed to think about. video game = shooting thousands of people and thats all it is allowed to be, and is all we are allowed to think. This is /. and we do not tolerate thoughtcrime here, get your mind closed and think what the PR people told you to think. Other forms of entertainment involving a computer hooked do not exist (other than pr0n, but that's more a lifestyle than an entertainment).
Given that, videogames are mostly vacations. Not stories. Not role playing. Vacations complete with stereotypical "ugly american" behavior, combined with all the heroic levels of ethical and moral behavior you'd expect while anonymously re-enacting the mai lai massacre as per the game designers orders.
Maybe there's a little "historical re-enactor" going on. One zillion SCA guys go in a field and "sword" each other. One zillion "Civil War"/"War of Northern Aggression" reenactors go out in a field and shoot each other. One zillion WWII reenactors hit the FPS video games, maybe its just that simple. Thirty years ago they would have been wearing gray uniforms, hauling cannons thru fields, and talking with fake southern accents as they re-enact the War of Northern Aggression.
Or in summary, video games have to be stereotypical and boring because they have to be FPS and it is not possible inside a FPS to shoot thousands of people in unique ways.
If you carefully and methodically fold yourself into a tiny boring little cardboard box, don't act all insightful at the observation a decade or two later that you're now really bored and surrounded by tasteless cardboard.
Maybe some indie developer can come up with a revolutionary game where you ride around on a Vespa and go to poetry readings at various coffee shops.
They called it "second life". It had that, and gambling until they took the gambling away. And it had sex until they took that away too.
Now I'm not sure it has anything; creepy empty ancient ruins, I suspect? Kind of like Myspace now, or soon to be Facebook once everyone switches to G+.
Used to be a slashvertisement post about second life roughly every other day, perhaps a decade ago up to about five years ago..
I think it's more like a restaurant that makes an excellent steak, vs. more "artistic" restaurants always looking to wow you with something novel. Both have a place; the recipe for steak doesn't need changing.
Its much more like 99% of the restaurants are McDonalds and thru stockholm syndrome, a segment of the population insists that no other restaurant could exist, or should exist. This in a business environment where less than 5% of the population will pay for the product, and the other 95% won't even eat it for free, literally zero dollar value to them. You'd think someone would want a piece of the abandoned 95% of the market, but nooooo...
You see the same thing with formulaic TV and formulaic music. Endless repetitive competition to increase the fraction within the tiny market that purchases, no interest in other markets or increasing market size.
I've got 51% of the horseshoe market, yeah me! Cars? What are those, no one wants them, who cares, now buy my horseshoes instead of my competitors horseshoes!
For the last decade, though, it's just been one after another in a long line of goddamned corridor simulators.
First couple times I heard the phrase "rail shooter" I thought that was a clueless attempt to talk about doom's railgun.
So, in summary, you were trying to ship an app that replicates the functionality of "add to home screen" in safari, then apple made you remove that too, leaving you with ... ? An icon and a name?
We sell 10,000 seat licenses to large banks -- nobody is going to pay for that with a Visa through their iTunes account.
I guess this explains why there's no Treasury Direct app. No one wants to buy multiple $10K federal treasury bonds thru itunes. I haven't bought on treasury direct since rates dropped to about zero (in other words, several years), maybe they do have an app? Do stock trading apps like "td-ameritrade" require you to use itunes for all stock purchases and/or cash deposits? The idea of getting a 5 figure itunes credit card bill is kind of funny.
ok to be fair i am using a gen 2 mc model but i am runing ios 4.2.1 so again I say WTF, I really like google+ but since i mainly use my touch for facebook linkedin twitter and wordpress, i really don't want to have to use the mobile web page all the time. but I guess I am just whining.
No, its not fair at all, since the hardware is identical, minus the telephony peripheral which I'm sure the app doesn't use. Even my brand new ipod touch running the latest ios won't run it. I'm currently researching my jailbreaking options to see if I can fool the app into running, balanced against the fact that the screenshots of the app don't look much different than just using safari...
I hear the Kennedy's are good at smuggling. Maybe we can get them to smuggle toilets in from Canada instead of booze?
Then within a generation we'll be stuck with another one as president. Couldn't be much worse than the recent contenders, I suppose.
"Using a highly elliptical orbit of around 340,000 km"
this in no way describes the eccentricity of the orbit. It simply tells us that the apogee is 340,000 km...
Even worse it could be the perigee and then it flings itself out to Mars. That would not be a complete waste of rocket fuel; keep it far away from near earth interference like geosynchronous sats.
Helping rebuild after a natural disaster is one thing, but if after 20+ years a country can't recover, then why should we continue to help?
To build a political powerbase? Given the choice of "vote in my support at the UN about something you don't really care about anyway" vs "no soup for you"...
Works on a smaller scale too, from an engineering standpoint New Orleans should be abandoned, but as long as there's voters there, thats not gonna happen.
.... shop naked while surfing /.
And Mr. Couchslug is why /. does not implement something like google+'s hangout feature...
In short - where Borders dealt with a changing book market by watering-down its offerings to the point where I had no reason to visit their store
Radio Shack analogy? Went there weekly when I was young and willing to buy 5 resistors for $2, I haven't really been back since the conversion to Cellphone Shack... Now I have weekly deliveries from Mouser, Digikey, Minicircuits, and their competitors...
I'm a teacher who specialises in working with gifted kids
Cool, I enjoyed your type when I was a student, received good advice. Sadly, locally all those positions have been eliminated to save money, hire bilingual teachers, hire guards and truancy officers, etc. So look out for your job..
because they want to talk to someone knowledgeable and well-read about books
Ask yourself honestly, if anyone could afford books if the retailer had to pay your current salary to sales clerks... Also don't take it personally but you missed the biggest problem with your previous management, if I want book buying advice about "motivation and health" I want it from a part time retired psch, or a retired nutritionist, or a retired physical therapist, whos working at the book store to supplement their SS check, not a uni kid who probably doesn't know too much more about the subject than I do... I'd love to sell advice about computer science books in about 20 years, it beats being a walmart people greeter... For example, my local semi-retired coin dealer with well over 40 years of experience in the field recommended a book on roman empire coins to me; it was an excellent book, perfect for my needs, and I was happy to pay a somewhat inflated price to him because his advice about the book was worth it. I don't think the kid at barnes and noble, or borders, would have as much insight on that topic...
After I got out of grad school
one of the top 5 universities in the country
the library only carried books on Fortran and Basic and COBOL
These three statements don't seem to go together. I attended a big no-name public uni and transferred to a small no-name college (smaller grad class than my high school...) and their libraries were beyond awesome. Especially the big no-name uni which subscribed to apparently every research journal that exists. Unless the school is located in a slum area, the libraries never check for ID or have any security at all, just show up in the evening when the older folks take night classes, carry a backpack and/or laptop, and its all good as long as you act as a gentleman (no loud ipod music, phone on vibrate, bathe more than once a week, no talking, etc). You don't have to attend classes to visit a university library, merely live nearby and act civilized.
The lesson I take from this is that the local retail is doomed unless we figure out how to address the online tax advantage.
The only direct online tax advantage is sales tax, possibly the most regressive of all taxes, with the possible exception of certain low-income related sin taxes like tobacco taxes. In a race to the bottom, either the sales tax goes bye bye, or the local retail businesses, employees, and customers, go bye bye. Places that desperately want a sales tax can keep it, if they're willing to adsorb the unemployment, and people who are willing to live in an area with retail ghost towns. More power to them, but I don't personally wanna live there. If we had a free market, it would take care of this problem all by itself... Bye bye sales taxes, won't miss you at all...
A very indirect online tax advantage is property tax arbitrage. I can build a warehouse in a low prop tax area, and sell to the suckers in high prop tax areas without having to pay the high prop tax either directly or thru rent that local retailers have to tolerate. Its possible that rural people will have retail bookstores for decades after the last retail bookstore is pushed off Manhattan island.
Also, lets just face it, driving somewhere to buy stuff might be recreational for a tiny fraction of the population, but for most of us, its about as appealing as having to drive to a travel agent office to get airline tickets, or having to wait in line at a bank teller window for 15 minutes to deposit a check. No matter how much you play with taxes, retail might be doomed, because the overall retail experience sucks and conveniently online sucks less.
Lesson among all brick and mortar stores: your selection will always suck compared to online stores. Figure out a niche for yourself such that your selection doesn't suck so much, or have an online presence that's useful. I've given up a long time ago on blindly driving to a freaking store in the hopes they'd have this one thing I need and lo and behold they don't.
Gifts? My wife likes books about subject X, I'll probably find something she will tolerate at B+N. If she wants book number #X of #Y in series of #Z then hellloooo amazon. Admitted we'd all be better off if I gave her an amazon or itunes GC, but that's not socially acceptable in my culture.
So, for birthdays, no problemo, nice distribution across the year. Calendar holidays are a big problem, I have not retail shopped between thanksgiving and christmas in some years, will not tolerate the behavior of other shoppers and do not like waiting in line. Either shop before thanksgiving or order online before 12/10 or so. So they have a huge staffing problem where perhaps 75% of their sales are immediately before xmas and mothers day... Maybe bookstores will have to go the route of the "haloween stores" and "christmas decoration stores" where they pop up on short term month long lease, sell out of the back of a semi trailer for a couple weeks, and move on. Pity books are so dang dense/heavy compared to haloween costumes.
I like documents about those, too.
I'll summarize the article for you to save time:
Sunday: Had a problem with a website I like to access that has nothing to do with this hardware, but I felt like blaming it anyway. Kind of like kicking the dog when the local corporate owned sports team loses a game.
Monday: I'm the only person in america who prints stuff at home instead of forwarding it to work and I also pretend I only have access to exactly one computer, this one. (WTF?) And in an industry that only supports printing on winders, and sorta tolerates macs, oddly enough this didn't go too well. Kind of like buying a xbox360 game and whining that it doesn't work so well on my Wii.
Tuesday: I hate all touchpads made in the last decade and this has a touchpad therefore I hate it. Umm, OK. The rest of us don't really care. I hate hitting my thumb with a hammer, and this week I decided to hit my thumb with a hammer, and it did in fact hurt, and I hope you feel educated and informed WRT this point.
Wednesday: To do something complicated, I had to use google to look something up. Un-believable, I'm sure no one has ever done something like that with any other technological artifact, I am The One. Also a minor bug that I didn't report wasn't fixed, furthermore I believe the mind control USB dongle is not working or it would have read my mind. Or perhaps the time travel dongle failed thus it wasn't fixed before I reported it.
Thursday: I found a single missing MIME type. A legit complaint.
Friday: I know this is a netbook for online work, so I'm gonna trash it for not doing local stuff very well. Next up, standard /. car analogy, I'm going to savage my sports car for not having a pickup truck bed and trailer hitch, right after I finish complaining about how poorly the gas engine runs on diesel. Maybe later today I'll flame my diet soda for not tasting like root beer; despite its having a "diet coke" label, all diet sodas are supposed to be diet root beers, right? No average soda drinker could survive the shock, but I'm brave.
Saturday: Kind of like how my wife loves to bring old arguments up over and over when there's nothing new to complain about, and despite apparently being a man based upon my name, I'm gonna do the same thing my wife does. Just re-read Sun-Fr and pretend not to be annoyed at the title "7 days in the cloud" and only getting 6 days. Hope my editor doesn't notice or I am so busted. Well at least I got to play with a new toy for a week.
As a hatchet job, it was fairly well written. As a technical standpoint, its basically a bug report about a single missing MIME-type that somehow dragged on to a 6 screen wall of text. I don't think this is gonna win the pulitzer, nor he gonna get fired, but this is probably in the bottom quartile of his journalistic career.