Though I can't find the article from work, it interested me last night while I was reading up on Google Editions that one of the articles indicated that there would be the option to convert your book into a paperback at some undetermined price.
Because their marketing department works hard to sell the idea to the people selling games on their platform and for the past year they've been lucky enough to be able to pull in a bunch of 'big name' publishers in a manner spaced widely enough that they can coordinate them.
Plus, it's rarely one. If you have Steam installed and go to the store page, you should see in the mid section of the page a 'list of games' box with four tabs: New Releases, Top Sellers, Coming Soon, and Specials.
I've yet to log into Steam and see that specials tab empty. It's something that hits all the time, they just promote the shit out of the weekend deals, just like any other retailer.
NT 3.1 only had one version. 3.5 had two - Server and Workstation. That was reasonable, and even expected as a product aimed for professional IT groups.
When XP decided to split it down the middle for "Home" and "Professional" that was also reasonable. Perhaps moreso, since it combined the professional and consumer market into one OS instead of two.
What wasn't reasonable was: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate
My primary and lasting complaint vs Vista was the decision (which admittedly was foreshadowed in XP) to create multiple versions of the OS, where the only difference for the price was what features were enabled in the kernel. Especially when the 'top tier' version boiled down to "we might someday decide to give you some free crap, but not really".
Well that and the fact that they played that "Vista Ready" game despite the fact that their own people were complaining that "Vista Ready" computers were barely able to boot, much less do something useful while Vista was installed.
The only AD banner Valve has ever added to a game in Steam are the ADS in Counterstrike (the original) which was released near a decade ago now. I don't see ANYTHING nefarious in that given Valve STILL supports the game and I seriously doubt it's sales numbers in the past five years would have been enough to justify that to anyone in Accounting.
More importantly a metric ton of apps still only boils down to a bushel of 'good' apps. The iPhoine definately suffers from the "Oh Wow! Someone is making money on this, lets release everyhing we can think of for it. Maybe we can too!" syndrome.
I'm not at a computer with a reliable spell checker and using IE6, misspelt words are inevitable.
The point is how many people today go to work and really don't give a shit about what the upper level folk decide to do? I work in a pretty ethical company and still it's not hard to find someone doing the "Shrug, that's what they told me they wanted done, I assume they know what they are doing" dance.
If you knew, right off the bat, that your company getting caught with a smoking gun in it's hands and a dead body in the room, would result in your own job being lost, maybe you wouldn't be that eager to let it go.
Maybe, if you were a bean counter trying to decide if the company should do a recall based on the idea that "well if it happens X times, people will sue and we'll be out Y dollars, but a recall would cost more than that", your answer won't be "let me run the numbers" and instead be "FUCK THAT, do the recall bitch!"
No, I don't expect everyone in the company to suddenly grow angel wings and fly away, but there are a huge number of people in any large company that enable 'bad deeds' simply by not giving enough of a shit to put up a fuss about it. Removing that luxury would quite possibly remove a good deal of the bad behavior companies like the old standby, Enron, used to exhibit.
If a company had done enough 'bad deeds' to warrant 'death', then I wouldn't be particularly sad to see it's employees out of work.
Yes, I'm sure they were tangently innocent, but at the base of it all, when it comes down to it, a company that is full of people who understand their job is on the line when it comes to 'ethical' business decisions is one where fewer unethical decisions can be made.
Dissolution (you no longer exist as a company, your holdings fall to your 'estate', either the stock holders or financers) and removal of freedom (such as blocking the ability to do business) are the first to come to mind. I'm fairly certain that anyone with a wit of imagination could come up with approrpiate translations for other punishments that are applied in criminal cases.
If you are getting torrents that include the par files or ones which are broken up into multiple rar files, it's probably because you are perusing stuff being released via Usenet first and the seeder is attempting to make it easier to seed by setting the torrent up so you can drop what you got from Usenet directly into the folder.
PS. Bittorrent doesn't include erorr correction, it includes error checking. Which, when you are downloading the files, is all that is necessary but is worth crap all if you already have the file and it's corrupted and there are no seeds to redownload from.
With respect, all of those issues are indications that you've done it wrong. ^_^
I admit I did lead you astray a bit by posting the link I did. But if you research a bit from a computer behind a network I'm not on, you should find a 'disk' based client which works off the raw sectors of a disk. I.E. you 'burn' three disks and use a fourth to store parity data.
Or, if you are really hip, you don't pack the disks to the brim and you store that parity data on a separate partition of the disk. Then you make one or five copies.
Honestly if you want to preserve data in the 'digital' world and you aren't making redundant copies as backups, then you are doing it wrong anyway.
You can't go AC! If you left, where would we get our snarky judgemental posts containing nothing but old man flavored bitterness and epenis size comparisions?
One one hand, yes. On the other hand, I've worked with enough overworked 'pigeon holers' in my life to know that once their level of stress gets high enough, they start giving you shit to do just to keep you in a holding pattern while they take care of the rest of their stack. It's quite possible that JWZ just got stuck with someone who is too overwhelmed with what's hitting their desk to give a shit about 'developer experience' and are just finding as many roadblocks to toss out as they can so they can have some breathing room.
This isn't limited to cables, its endemic in brick and mortar stores. Anything other than your baseline items are so heavily marked up that only the uneducated or the desperate would purchase them.
Add on top of this the almost pure profit of their Customer Protection Rackets, and it's not hard to see why they might skimp on the 'pay premium dollar for employees who can provide premium service' plan in favor of 'pay shit for teenaged con-artists who'll scam the rubes for every penny they've got' plan.
I wonder what the implications of this are for polyphasic sleep and it's proponents. I've always thought the Uberman schedule (4 hours blocks of time with 30 minute naps) was an interesting idea, though I've never lived a lifestyle that would make it possible.
Unless your definition of fail is simply 'changed' then nothing you've just said is accurate. If it is, then you need to stop redefining words.
The Romance Languages were not created as a result of a 'failure' of Latin. They were created because the people who spoke Latin around the world no longer intermingled as much as they did during the height of the Roman empire and thus small changes in accent, wording, and etc. eventually becamed enshirined in each locality as 'the language'. This wasn't EVOLUTION, it wasn't the replacement of a weaker system by a better one, which is the typical definition of evolution when used in this sense.
And if you don't know what an asian sinograph is, then perhaps you shouldn't get all snippity when I bring it up.
The number of Chinese characters contained in the Kangxi dictionary is approximately 47,035...
If your arguement was "Hieroglyphics failed because they are inefficent" then what is your explaination for the continued existance and use of the Chinese writting system? It is just as old and 'inefficent' as hieroglyphs, and yet is still used.
agriculture - slash-and-burn - while not faded away, contains the seeds of its own destruction and is not practiced on a large-scale as it has been replaced by other systems
Language - latin - its not called a dead language for nothing. Replaced by another, and more efficient system of language
Writing - Hieroglyphics - Not around anymore either. Also replaced by a more efficient system of writing.
ALL of those things failed, and were replaced by other systems. The structure of the current money supply will also fail, and be replaced by a more efficient system. Im not predicting when that will happen, just that it will happen. Just like it has happened to every system throughout history. Its the basic definition of progress. Sometimes it comes from whats best known as 'creative destruction', sometimes it comes about gradually.
For someone who names themselves PhreakOfTime, you have an... interesting view of it. Latin died because the Roman Empire died. It had nothing to do with inefficiencies, simply a lack of an overarching group to maintain it. You may have heard of this nifty class of languages called the "Romance Languages". Want to guess why they are called that?
Here's a clue (well more of a spoiler): it's because they are based on Latin and were formed after the fall of the Empire allowed regional dialects to be created. Each and every one was formed from Latin, each and everyone diverged, not because it was 'better' but because that's how the people in the area spoke.
Hieroglyphics died because the cultures that used them was no longer in existence. Amusingly, the folk responsible for this were...The ROMANS. The various cultures that used them may not have been wiped from the Earth, but the Romans did a very good job of converting their holdings to their system of doing things.
And you don't even touch on the matter of Asian sinographs.
If your theory actually held water, Latin would have been universally replaced by something more akin to Esperanto not "American" English, which at best is a mis-mash of many influences and other (often seemingly incompatible) language rules.
For the most part, systems are not replaced by 'better systems' they are replaced by 'the winner's systems' which may or may not be better than what they are replacing. But it doesn't matter because the criteria isn't "what's better" it's "how do the rulers do it"
Slashdot Mirror
Why not take a peek and answer your questions directly.
Though I can't find the article from work, it interested me last night while I was reading up on Google Editions that one of the articles indicated that there would be the option to convert your book into a paperback at some undetermined price.
For me, that sounds like the best of both worlds.
Because their marketing department works hard to sell the idea to the people selling games on their platform and for the past year they've been lucky enough to be able to pull in a bunch of 'big name' publishers in a manner spaced widely enough that they can coordinate them.
Plus, it's rarely one. If you have Steam installed and go to the store page, you should see in the mid section of the page a 'list of games' box with four tabs: New Releases, Top Sellers, Coming Soon, and Specials.
I've yet to log into Steam and see that specials tab empty. It's something that hits all the time, they just promote the shit out of the weekend deals, just like any other retailer.
For the most part, deals in Steam are through the publisher, not Valve. So it's likely that THQ is just having a marketing blitz.
NT 3.1 only had one version. 3.5 had two - Server and Workstation. That was reasonable, and even expected as a product aimed for professional IT groups.
When XP decided to split it down the middle for "Home" and "Professional" that was also reasonable. Perhaps moreso, since it combined the professional and consumer market into one OS instead of two.
What wasn't reasonable was: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate
A bridge too far, at least for me.
My primary and lasting complaint vs Vista was the decision (which admittedly was foreshadowed in XP) to create multiple versions of the OS, where the only difference for the price was what features were enabled in the kernel. Especially when the 'top tier' version boiled down to "we might someday decide to give you some free crap, but not really".
Well that and the fact that they played that "Vista Ready" game despite the fact that their own people were complaining that "Vista Ready" computers were barely able to boot, much less do something useful while Vista was installed.
I think you can see some pics of what he's describing in this video.
The only AD banner Valve has ever added to a game in Steam are the ADS in Counterstrike (the original) which was released near a decade ago now. I don't see ANYTHING nefarious in that given Valve STILL supports the game and I seriously doubt it's sales numbers in the past five years would have been enough to justify that to anyone in Accounting.
More importantly a metric ton of apps still only boils down to a bushel of 'good' apps. The iPhoine definately suffers from the "Oh Wow! Someone is making money on this, lets release everyhing we can think of for it. Maybe we can too!" syndrome.
Netgear and D-Link have been on my verboten list since I can remember having one. Neither have ever been reliable other than being reliably broken.
+1 for appropriate use of Alice's Restaurant.
Although it looks cool, I have to point out that one is mainly just an over engineered pedometer and doesn't really have open access to the data.
I'm not at a computer with a reliable spell checker and using IE6, misspelt words are inevitable.
The point is how many people today go to work and really don't give a shit about what the upper level folk decide to do? I work in a pretty ethical company and still it's not hard to find someone doing the "Shrug, that's what they told me they wanted done, I assume they know what they are doing" dance.
If you knew, right off the bat, that your company getting caught with a smoking gun in it's hands and a dead body in the room, would result in your own job being lost, maybe you wouldn't be that eager to let it go.
Maybe, if you were a bean counter trying to decide if the company should do a recall based on the idea that "well if it happens X times, people will sue and we'll be out Y dollars, but a recall would cost more than that", your answer won't be "let me run the numbers" and instead be "FUCK THAT, do the recall bitch!"
No, I don't expect everyone in the company to suddenly grow angel wings and fly away, but there are a huge number of people in any large company that enable 'bad deeds' simply by not giving enough of a shit to put up a fuss about it. Removing that luxury would quite possibly remove a good deal of the bad behavior companies like the old standby, Enron, used to exhibit.
If a company had done enough 'bad deeds' to warrant 'death', then I wouldn't be particularly sad to see it's employees out of work.
Yes, I'm sure they were tangently innocent, but at the base of it all, when it comes down to it, a company that is full of people who understand their job is on the line when it comes to 'ethical' business decisions is one where fewer unethical decisions can be made.
Dissolution (you no longer exist as a company, your holdings fall to your 'estate', either the stock holders or financers) and removal of freedom (such as blocking the ability to do business) are the first to come to mind. I'm fairly certain that anyone with a wit of imagination could come up with approrpiate translations for other punishments that are applied in criminal cases.
If you are getting torrents that include the par files or ones which are broken up into multiple rar files, it's probably because you are perusing stuff being released via Usenet first and the seeder is attempting to make it easier to seed by setting the torrent up so you can drop what you got from Usenet directly into the folder.
PS. Bittorrent doesn't include erorr correction, it includes error checking. Which, when you are downloading the files, is all that is necessary but is worth crap all if you already have the file and it's corrupted and there are no seeds to redownload from.
With respect, all of those issues are indications that you've done it wrong. ^_^
I admit I did lead you astray a bit by posting the link I did. But if you research a bit from a computer behind a network I'm not on, you should find a 'disk' based client which works off the raw sectors of a disk. I.E. you 'burn' three disks and use a fourth to store parity data.
Or, if you are really hip, you don't pack the disks to the brim and you store that parity data on a separate partition of the disk. Then you make one or five copies.
Honestly if you want to preserve data in the 'digital' world and you aren't making redundant copies as backups, then you are doing it wrong anyway.
You can't go AC! If you left, where would we get our snarky judgemental posts containing nothing but old man flavored bitterness and epenis size comparisions?
So do what most people do and dedicate a portion of the disk(s) to some form of error correction data.
One one hand, yes. On the other hand, I've worked with enough overworked 'pigeon holers' in my life to know that once their level of stress gets high enough, they start giving you shit to do just to keep you in a holding pattern while they take care of the rest of their stack. It's quite possible that JWZ just got stuck with someone who is too overwhelmed with what's hitting their desk to give a shit about 'developer experience' and are just finding as many roadblocks to toss out as they can so they can have some breathing room.
Sadly, the reverse is just as true.
You've obviously never attempted to buy an accessory at any of these stores. Compare online prices to your typical 'store brand' prices.
This isn't limited to cables, its endemic in brick and mortar stores. Anything other than your baseline items are so heavily marked up that only the uneducated or the desperate would purchase them.
Add on top of this the almost pure profit of their Customer Protection Rackets, and it's not hard to see why they might skimp on the 'pay premium dollar for employees who can provide premium service' plan in favor of 'pay shit for teenaged con-artists who'll scam the rubes for every penny they've got' plan.
I wonder what the implications of this are for polyphasic sleep and it's proponents. I've always thought the Uberman schedule (4 hours blocks of time with 30 minute naps) was an interesting idea, though I've never lived a lifestyle that would make it possible.
Unless your definition of fail is simply 'changed' then nothing you've just said is accurate. If it is, then you need to stop redefining words.
The Romance Languages were not created as a result of a 'failure' of Latin. They were created because the people who spoke Latin around the world no longer intermingled as much as they did during the height of the Roman empire and thus small changes in accent, wording, and etc. eventually becamed enshirined in each locality as 'the language'. This wasn't EVOLUTION, it wasn't the replacement of a weaker system by a better one, which is the typical definition of evolution when used in this sense.
And if you don't know what an asian sinograph is, then perhaps you shouldn't get all snippity when I bring it up.
If your arguement was "Hieroglyphics failed because they are inefficent" then what is your explaination for the continued existance and use of the Chinese writting system? It is just as old and 'inefficent' as hieroglyphs, and yet is still used.
For someone who names themselves PhreakOfTime, you have an... interesting view of it. Latin died because the Roman Empire died. It had nothing to do with inefficiencies, simply a lack of an overarching group to maintain it. You may have heard of this nifty class of languages called the "Romance Languages". Want to guess why they are called that?
Here's a clue (well more of a spoiler): it's because they are based on Latin and were formed after the fall of the Empire allowed regional dialects to be created. Each and every one was formed from Latin, each and everyone diverged, not because it was 'better' but because that's how the people in the area spoke.
Hieroglyphics died because the cultures that used them was no longer in existence. Amusingly, the folk responsible for this were...The ROMANS. The various cultures that used them may not have been wiped from the Earth, but the Romans did a very good job of converting their holdings to their system of doing things.
And you don't even touch on the matter of Asian sinographs.
If your theory actually held water, Latin would have been universally replaced by something more akin to Esperanto not "American" English, which at best is a mis-mash of many influences and other (often seemingly incompatible) language rules.
For the most part, systems are not replaced by 'better systems' they are replaced by 'the winner's systems' which may or may not be better than what they are replacing. But it doesn't matter because the criteria isn't "what's better" it's "how do the rulers do it"