Maybe The Greatest American Hero made me a sucker for Robert Culp, but I was also fond of Voyeur on the CD-i. But both of the titles (as well as a so-so Chaos Control) were eventually released on the PC.
Well that's shy I shoved in the word "indefinitely." "save, don't save, cancel" dialogs are fine. What's not fine is an app, especially a piece of malware (and yeah this does happen), aborting the shutdown procedure entirely.
"More likely the application accpets the shutdown, but returns the wrong value to the OS. The app shuts itself down but says 'abort'. Try again and the app is already gone, and shutdown proceeds normally. This is an application bug."
Sorry, but if the user tells the OS to shut down and an app has the power to override that indefinitely, that's an OS bug, not an application bug. An application shouldn't have that power.
You drop a pathogen into a solution that's 2%-8% alcohol with a PH around 4-5 that's had most of its sugars and oxygen consumed and tell me how it does. Alcohol isn't the whole story but it's a big part of it. The yeast more or less have a scorched earth policy towards the unfermented beer. They use aerobic respiration as long as there is oxygen available so they can multiply. When there is no more oxygen, they'll resort to anaerobic respiration and eat up all of the sugars and leave behind alcohol and CO2. When that is done, they'll go dormant for a while but if left in the brew too long will even resort to autolysis and start eating each other. They consume almost anything and everything that can be consumed and leave their environment quite inhospitable afterwards to anything but bacteria like lactobacillus or less picky yeast strains like brettanomyces. Even infected beer is generally safe to drink because of the type of infection that would have to be present to survive the harsh post-fermentation environment.
No, it's the alcohol content and relatively low PH (usually in the 4-5 range) that makes beer so unfriendly for pathogens. There are even styles of beer like Berliner Weisse that are not traditionally boiled but are still far safer to drink than water of unknown quality.
The virgin angle was a little irritating but other than that I didn't feel the morality shoved down my throat. The rest of it played out like a typical kidnapping film. There are some better films in the genre (Frantic) and some worse (Breakdown) but I still thought Taken qualifies as good.
I thought Avatar was crap and there were quite a few films I liked in 2009. Up, Watchmen, Moon, Taken, Zombieland, and Sherlock Holmes were all movies I thought were at least good. Moon is the only one in that list I wouldn't categorize as popular. Most of those films are rehashes of old plots, but none of them are white messiah films. And none of them bludgeon me over the head with their moral message because I REALLY hate that sort of thing. So as far as I'm concerned, Avatar sucks. And it's not because the movie is popular. It's primarily because they took a plot that I already don't like and cranked it up to 11.
"Apple and Andorid are reinventing the way we look at software"
Bullshit. They're just adapting the video game console software model (which has existed for DECADES) to more general purpose software. If you want to see where this will take us, look at the PS3/Wii/360. I'm not saying I like it, but stop pretending this is something new, because it's very much not.
What's really sad is that Choose Your Own Adventure books have been available ever since the iPhone got the Kindle app. So this isn't even something new to the iPhone.
There are a ton of Kindle competitors. I just waded through 5 or 6 of them before deciding on the Kindle. If what you really want is a general purpose computing device with a small form factor and eink display, I have to warn you that the technology is just not there yet. I have the newer model Kindle with the now painfully slow refresh instead of the old woefully slow refresh or the even older Biblically-woefully slow refresh. The best eink display I ran across was the Sony with it's only-somewhat-less-painfully slow refresh. That's fine if you want to read static text, but for anything else it sort of sucks. That's ok that it sort of sucks for other things because it's amazing at what it does and in the Kindle's case, Amazon just throws in a rudimentary browser with free 3G access. Given how much faster the Sony and Kindle 3 refresh compared to the Kindle 1, I am optimistic that we'll have a viable eink general purpose display in the near future, but not right now.
"I've been to D&B a number of times and they only seem loosely qualified as "arcades". They seem more like the fairway at a carnival."
When I was a kid, that's what arcades were: carnivals without the big rides. In the arcades I remember when I was really young, there was a wide assortment of Skee Ball, candy cranes, shooting galleries, bumper cars, pinball, and there might be a small collection of arcade cabinets in a corner somewhere. Then Pacman happened. After that, the arcades were flooded with upright and cocktail machines. The carnival games (except for Skee Ball) were slowly replaced. The bumper cars were taken out and made into a backroom full of older machines now that Ms Pacman, Tron and Cloak and Dagger were up front.
It made them more money in the short term, but they lost a lot of their diversity both in product lineup and in clientele. Girls would no longer set foot in the them. Adults also lost interest. When arcade machines lost popularity, arcades no longer had anything else to prop up their business model. They got rid of that other stuff years ago.
The establishments like Dave and Busters that we have today are almost a "What might've been?" for arcades. What if arcades became more diverse instead of less? What if they gave up some short term profit for long term viability? What if they didn't worship at the altar of the teenage boy and his money?
As a general rule, I don't let Nora Ephron dictate my likes and dislikes. I like Barnes and Noble. It's a good store. It offers a good selection. And for new books, they have decent prices. I've never seen them pull any shenanigans like Wal-Mart does where they'll lower prices until they drive folks out of town and then raise prices once the other guys are gone. B&N sticks to MSRP plus set discount rates based on clear metrics. The only real differentiation I see from that pricing model is the clearance section which is not enough by itself to put any competition under. Barnes and Noble has thrived thus far by offering a solid shopping experience to its customers. In places where they have driven out competition, they have maintained that good shopping experience. In my book, that's a "big guy" I have no qualms with.
Definition of a classic: "something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." --Professor Winchester (via Mark Twain)
I agree wholeheartedly about the "great" books we read in school. A lot of them were garbage. To take a slightly different angle though, what's really frustrating to me is that they often took garbage from otherwise great authors. I despised The Old Man and the Sea so much that I wouldn't read a Hemmingway novel for years afterwards. I picked up For Whom the Bell Tolls one day and loved it. I have read several of his works since and loved them, too. And I know Romeo and Juliet makes for great movie adaptations but it's one of Shakespeare's weaker plays. It wasn't until we read King Lear in college that I grew an appreciation for his work. I wonder how many other authors I do not like because the school system rammed their crap down my throat.
About 12 years ago Napster made downloading music easy. We had easy ways to take that downloaded music and integrate it with our existing habits via CD burners. Legal alternatives soon followed. Eventually record shops closed their doors. Not due to piracy but to due to uselessness. Now we have devices like MP3 players and iPods that let us enjoy our downloaded music in a more efficient manner than the old burn-to-CD method.
Thanks to codecs like Divx, movies became downloadable in a semi-reasonable amount of time. Later technologies like Hulu made streaming possible. Rentals stores are taking a beating and stores specializing in selling movies and TV shows have all but disappeared. Originally like CDs, you had to burn your movies to DVDs to watch them on a TV but thanks to HDTV and to set-top boxes, there are more efficient ways to enjoy downloaded TV and movies.
With books there was always a rub: There was no simple way to integrate them with out existing habits. You could print something but it would likely be on single-sided 8.5"x11" paper. You could read it off the screen but that's a lot less comfortable and convenient. With books, we had to wait for the more efficient device in order for electronic distribution to become feasible. I imagine we'll see a very rapid shift now that such devices exist and are becoming affordable. It'll be like the near-overnight industrialization that happens in nations these days compared to the slow, drawn-out process it was when Britain industrialized.
Barnes and Noble is in trouble and they know it. It's a good time to sell.
"Why doesn't anyone speak about the need for cheaper ebooks?"
The same reason people don't talk about the need for cheaper MP3's. In time, we'll get the Kindle version of the "You wouldn't steal a car!" commercials. eBooks are really really small and easy find and download from legally ambiguous sources.
Personally, I think legally-acquired eBooks will have to cost no more than a secondhand copy to be a real success. Look at something like the Discworld book range. Your options are to buy the Kindle version or new physical paperback copies at $7-$10 per book, buy used copies at $1-$2 plus shipping, or download a 30MB rar file and dink around with formatting them right using a program like Calibre. Legal copies should be available for all but the newest books in the series at that $1-$2 price point.
The 3G connectivity is what got me to buy the Kindle instead of the Sony ereader. Sites that are already set up for mobile use are great on the Kindle. Anything else is a pain, but for no monthly charge I'll take it. I even have a mobile version of Google Voice running through my Kindle so I can send and receive texts there. I don't have data or text plans on my cell phone so those features are a game changer for me. It goes with me whenever it is practical to carry it around, and I don't think that would be the case if it didn't have the 3G connectivity.
Wi-Fi instead of 3G would save money. I'm not so sure you'd be saving a lot of bandwidth given the Kindle's web-browsing limitations. As far as saving power, I regularly go 5-6 days between charges and I use my Kindle all the time both as a reader and web browser. When I'm careful about turning wireless off when I'm not using it, I can stretch that to 8 days. I think it's saving plenty of power.
There's not always a sticky note on the monitor. Some people are security conscious. They hide the sticky under their mouse pad. Because really... who would ever think to look there?
Parents? PARENTS? Let your parents land the helicopter and start taking care of your own problems. There are grievance channels at just about any institution. Use them. You'll often find some pretty reasonable people running them. Besides, with student loans being as cheap and plentiful as they are, you should be your own "paying customer." It's your life. Take the wheel.
Subsidization may bring free back...
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I just recently paid $140 for a refurbished Kindle that has unlimited wireless Internet access on it. Yeah, the interface on the "Experimental" web browser is a bit kludgy but I can check my email, sports scores, and basic stuff like that for free. Amazon is betting that enough people use Kindle's purchasing system that it pays for the limited web usage they offer. If they are right and the web browser remains free, other services may adopt similar strategies of giving away basic Internet access in exchange for locking you in as a potential customer.
Slashdot Mirror
The Sega Saturn had some of the best games no one will ever, ever play. Off the top of my head, some of the elite games were:
Radiant Silvergun
Saturn Bomberman
Legend of Oasis
Nights into Dreams
Panzer Dragoon Saga
Maybe The Greatest American Hero made me a sucker for Robert Culp, but I was also fond of Voyeur on the CD-i. But both of the titles (as well as a so-so Chaos Control) were eventually released on the PC.
Well that's shy I shoved in the word "indefinitely." "save, don't save, cancel" dialogs are fine. What's not fine is an app, especially a piece of malware (and yeah this does happen), aborting the shutdown procedure entirely.
"More likely the application accpets the shutdown, but returns the wrong value to the OS. The app shuts itself down but says 'abort'. Try again and the app is already gone, and shutdown proceeds normally. This is an application bug."
Sorry, but if the user tells the OS to shut down and an app has the power to override that indefinitely, that's an OS bug, not an application bug. An application shouldn't have that power.
Acetobacter isn't a pathogen. I specifically used the word pathogen for a reason.
You drop a pathogen into a solution that's 2%-8% alcohol with a PH around 4-5 that's had most of its sugars and oxygen consumed and tell me how it does. Alcohol isn't the whole story but it's a big part of it. The yeast more or less have a scorched earth policy towards the unfermented beer. They use aerobic respiration as long as there is oxygen available so they can multiply. When there is no more oxygen, they'll resort to anaerobic respiration and eat up all of the sugars and leave behind alcohol and CO2. When that is done, they'll go dormant for a while but if left in the brew too long will even resort to autolysis and start eating each other. They consume almost anything and everything that can be consumed and leave their environment quite inhospitable afterwards to anything but bacteria like lactobacillus or less picky yeast strains like brettanomyces. Even infected beer is generally safe to drink because of the type of infection that would have to be present to survive the harsh post-fermentation environment.
No, it's the alcohol content and relatively low PH (usually in the 4-5 range) that makes beer so unfriendly for pathogens. There are even styles of beer like Berliner Weisse that are not traditionally boiled but are still far safer to drink than water of unknown quality.
What about you? You didn't tell me you were gonna scream "Black Rage!" I nearly pissed myself!
"Guess you don't watch msnbc, abc, cbs or npr."
Given those networks' viewing and listening figures these days, that's a safe assumption.
Mister Potato Head! Mister Potato Head! Back doors are not secrets!
The virgin angle was a little irritating but other than that I didn't feel the morality shoved down my throat. The rest of it played out like a typical kidnapping film. There are some better films in the genre (Frantic) and some worse (Breakdown) but I still thought Taken qualifies as good.
I thought Avatar was crap and there were quite a few films I liked in 2009. Up, Watchmen, Moon, Taken, Zombieland, and Sherlock Holmes were all movies I thought were at least good. Moon is the only one in that list I wouldn't categorize as popular. Most of those films are rehashes of old plots, but none of them are white messiah films. And none of them bludgeon me over the head with their moral message because I REALLY hate that sort of thing. So as far as I'm concerned, Avatar sucks. And it's not because the movie is popular. It's primarily because they took a plot that I already don't like and cranked it up to 11.
"Apple and Andorid are reinventing the way we look at software"
Bullshit. They're just adapting the video game console software model (which has existed for DECADES) to more general purpose software. If you want to see where this will take us, look at the PS3/Wii/360. I'm not saying I like it, but stop pretending this is something new, because it's very much not.
There is no clear canon for Doctor Who.
What's really sad is that Choose Your Own Adventure books have been available ever since the iPhone got the Kindle app. So this isn't even something new to the iPhone.
There are a ton of Kindle competitors. I just waded through 5 or 6 of them before deciding on the Kindle. If what you really want is a general purpose computing device with a small form factor and eink display, I have to warn you that the technology is just not there yet. I have the newer model Kindle with the now painfully slow refresh instead of the old woefully slow refresh or the even older Biblically-woefully slow refresh. The best eink display I ran across was the Sony with it's only-somewhat-less-painfully slow refresh. That's fine if you want to read static text, but for anything else it sort of sucks. That's ok that it sort of sucks for other things because it's amazing at what it does and in the Kindle's case, Amazon just throws in a rudimentary browser with free 3G access. Given how much faster the Sony and Kindle 3 refresh compared to the Kindle 1, I am optimistic that we'll have a viable eink general purpose display in the near future, but not right now.
"I've been to D&B a number of times and they only seem loosely qualified as "arcades". They seem more like the fairway at a carnival."
When I was a kid, that's what arcades were: carnivals without the big rides. In the arcades I remember when I was really young, there was a wide assortment of Skee Ball, candy cranes, shooting galleries, bumper cars, pinball, and there might be a small collection of arcade cabinets in a corner somewhere. Then Pacman happened. After that, the arcades were flooded with upright and cocktail machines. The carnival games (except for Skee Ball) were slowly replaced. The bumper cars were taken out and made into a backroom full of older machines now that Ms Pacman, Tron and Cloak and Dagger were up front.
It made them more money in the short term, but they lost a lot of their diversity both in product lineup and in clientele. Girls would no longer set foot in the them. Adults also lost interest. When arcade machines lost popularity, arcades no longer had anything else to prop up their business model. They got rid of that other stuff years ago.
The establishments like Dave and Busters that we have today are almost a "What might've been?" for arcades. What if arcades became more diverse instead of less? What if they gave up some short term profit for long term viability? What if they didn't worship at the altar of the teenage boy and his money?
As a general rule, I don't let Nora Ephron dictate my likes and dislikes. I like Barnes and Noble. It's a good store. It offers a good selection. And for new books, they have decent prices. I've never seen them pull any shenanigans like Wal-Mart does where they'll lower prices until they drive folks out of town and then raise prices once the other guys are gone. B&N sticks to MSRP plus set discount rates based on clear metrics. The only real differentiation I see from that pricing model is the clearance section which is not enough by itself to put any competition under. Barnes and Noble has thrived thus far by offering a solid shopping experience to its customers. In places where they have driven out competition, they have maintained that good shopping experience. In my book, that's a "big guy" I have no qualms with.
Definition of a classic: "something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."
--Professor Winchester (via Mark Twain)
I agree wholeheartedly about the "great" books we read in school. A lot of them were garbage. To take a slightly different angle though, what's really frustrating to me is that they often took garbage from otherwise great authors. I despised The Old Man and the Sea so much that I wouldn't read a Hemmingway novel for years afterwards. I picked up For Whom the Bell Tolls one day and loved it. I have read several of his works since and loved them, too. And I know Romeo and Juliet makes for great movie adaptations but it's one of Shakespeare's weaker plays. It wasn't until we read King Lear in college that I grew an appreciation for his work. I wonder how many other authors I do not like because the school system rammed their crap down my throat.
About 12 years ago Napster made downloading music easy. We had easy ways to take that downloaded music and integrate it with our existing habits via CD burners. Legal alternatives soon followed. Eventually record shops closed their doors. Not due to piracy but to due to uselessness. Now we have devices like MP3 players and iPods that let us enjoy our downloaded music in a more efficient manner than the old burn-to-CD method.
Thanks to codecs like Divx, movies became downloadable in a semi-reasonable amount of time. Later technologies like Hulu made streaming possible. Rentals stores are taking a beating and stores specializing in selling movies and TV shows have all but disappeared. Originally like CDs, you had to burn your movies to DVDs to watch them on a TV but thanks to HDTV and to set-top boxes, there are more efficient ways to enjoy downloaded TV and movies.
With books there was always a rub: There was no simple way to integrate them with out existing habits. You could print something but it would likely be on single-sided 8.5"x11" paper. You could read it off the screen but that's a lot less comfortable and convenient. With books, we had to wait for the more efficient device in order for electronic distribution to become feasible. I imagine we'll see a very rapid shift now that such devices exist and are becoming affordable. It'll be like the near-overnight industrialization that happens in nations these days compared to the slow, drawn-out process it was when Britain industrialized.
Barnes and Noble is in trouble and they know it. It's a good time to sell.
"Why doesn't anyone speak about the need for cheaper ebooks?"
The same reason people don't talk about the need for cheaper MP3's. In time, we'll get the Kindle version of the "You wouldn't steal a car!" commercials. eBooks are really really small and easy find and download from legally ambiguous sources.
Personally, I think legally-acquired eBooks will have to cost no more than a secondhand copy to be a real success. Look at something like the Discworld book range. Your options are to buy the Kindle version or new physical paperback copies at $7-$10 per book, buy used copies at $1-$2 plus shipping, or download a 30MB rar file and dink around with formatting them right using a program like Calibre. Legal copies should be available for all but the newest books in the series at that $1-$2 price point.
The 3G connectivity is what got me to buy the Kindle instead of the Sony ereader. Sites that are already set up for mobile use are great on the Kindle. Anything else is a pain, but for no monthly charge I'll take it. I even have a mobile version of Google Voice running through my Kindle so I can send and receive texts there. I don't have data or text plans on my cell phone so those features are a game changer for me. It goes with me whenever it is practical to carry it around, and I don't think that would be the case if it didn't have the 3G connectivity.
Wi-Fi instead of 3G would save money. I'm not so sure you'd be saving a lot of bandwidth given the Kindle's web-browsing limitations. As far as saving power, I regularly go 5-6 days between charges and I use my Kindle all the time both as a reader and web browser. When I'm careful about turning wireless off when I'm not using it, I can stretch that to 8 days. I think it's saving plenty of power.
There's not always a sticky note on the monitor. Some people are security conscious. They hide the sticky under their mouse pad. Because really... who would ever think to look there?
Parents? PARENTS? Let your parents land the helicopter and start taking care of your own problems. There are grievance channels at just about any institution. Use them. You'll often find some pretty reasonable people running them. Besides, with student loans being as cheap and plentiful as they are, you should be your own "paying customer." It's your life. Take the wheel.
I just recently paid $140 for a refurbished Kindle that has unlimited wireless Internet access on it. Yeah, the interface on the "Experimental" web browser is a bit kludgy but I can check my email, sports scores, and basic stuff like that for free. Amazon is betting that enough people use Kindle's purchasing system that it pays for the limited web usage they offer. If they are right and the web browser remains free, other services may adopt similar strategies of giving away basic Internet access in exchange for locking you in as a potential customer.