For the past 7 or 8 years we've used pet guinea pigs to keep our lawns trimmed. All you need is a secure hutch to keep them in at night, and a 15-25' roll of strong 4' high mesh to temporarily fence off a section of lawn. Use a couple of clips to hold the ends together, and peg it down well if there are dogs around. We put shadecloth over the top to deter cats, and use a couple of big plastic garden pots for shelter. (Cut down the middle and placed with the cut side down.) They need water, too.
If you use thick straw for their bedding and feed them veggie scraps from the kitchen you'll also end up with lots and lots of natural fertiliser and mulch.
And the big bonus is that you never have to mow the lawn again. Plus you can get the kids to move the guinea pigs to a new patch.
Just one tip: make sure all the guinea pigs are female. They seem to get along better than all males, and if you mix them you'll be renting the offspring out to the entire neigbourhood.
90kb loaded in about 4 seconds, versus 45kb loaded in 3-5mins from cassette. And random access storage.
They were about 1/5th the cost of a floppy disk drive (and about 1/10th as reliable)
I still have a couple of working microdrives and a bunch of the little carts in my Speccy collection. Fun to get them out every now and then to remind myself what I used to consider state of the art. (That, and the silver toilet roll ZX printer.)
The question boils down to this: Would I rather sell 100 ebooks heavily protected with DRM, and sleep sound knowing those 100 people are the only ones who can read my book.
OR would I rather 150,000 people pirated and read my novel, and 200 people paid for a copy out of honesty, guilt, or because they were too inept to seek out a stolen copy?
The second way I many twice as much money, even though it still wouldn't buy a meal for 4. I also reach more readers, some of whom might spring for a paperback.
By the way, anyone who thinks that putting DRM on the ebook in the second example would lead to 150,000 sales is deluded, and clearly employed by those stats companies who report on how many $billions piracy is costing industry 'X'
My article on self-publishing is here, and you'll also find articles on POD, finding a publisher, seeking an agent, etc.
(I self-published back in 2001, and after putting out three titles in the same series I was picked up by a traditional publisher. Therefore my articles cover both sides of the coin.)
If you buy the ebook direct from the publisher you know you're getting a proofed, complete copy of the original title. Download a rar file with a thousand ebooks from some torrent and you could end up with anything - rough OCR jobs, chapter headings and page numbers every 20 lines or so, missing pages, wrong authors, wrong titles, someone's homage to Asimov meets JK Rowling...
If ebooks were a reasonable price people would buy them in bigger quantities. The problem at the moment is that $10-$15 is vastly overpriced for a digital file.
There will always be piracy. The question is whether 3000-4000 new ebook sales would generate enough royalties for an author to write full time, not whether another 30,000 people stole their copy.
Finally, people are loyal to their favourite authors. If they come across half a dozen pirated ebooks and start enjoying them, who knows... maybe they'll buy one or two of them just to say thanks, or maybe they'll be first in line when the author's next title hits the shops.
I talked my publisher into releasing my first novel as a freebie download (see sig), and over the past couple of months I've worked on them to the point that they're about to announce DRM-free ebook releases of all my novels. (The first is free, the rest about US$3.50 each.)
Trust me, it was hard work convincing them this was the way to go, but I don't believe people want $10-$15 encrypyted ebooks they could lose access to at any moment.
The most common complaints with ebooks are... too expensive when they're priced at a similar amount to a hard copy, and too much trouble when they're DRM-locked. My publisher is addressing both with this release, and we're hoping it'll catch on.
Do my eyes deceive me or did they even miss the original Atari ST version of Dungeon Master? I knew a computer shop owner who used to have people queuing up to buy an ST so they could get DM with it.
I have a copy of the PC port but I tend to play the originals in an emulator. My old favourite emu was ZX32 but just like Gerton Lunter's (sp?) Z80 emulator before it, modern CPUs just got too damn fast in the end.
I can still use ZX32 on my notebook, and that's good enough for now. (Come to think of it, a little netbook with a ZX emu and a copy of every speccy game ever written would make a nice travelling companion.)
What is this list, world history excluding everything the innovate programmers from the UK came up with in the early to mid 1980's? Ever heard of Rare, formerly Ultimate Play the Game, who dropped a little title called Knight Lore on the world and changed the industry overnight? Okay, so it led to a load of derivative rubbish, but I'd rather vote for a technically groundbreaking game packed into 48kb than a three-CD monster with pretty cutscenes.
And where is Lords of Midnight? And leaving Elite out of that list is like leaving Ms Hilton off a paparazzi's to-do list.
The early Speccy games were 4.99 and 5.99. I remember Crash (or was it Sinclair User?) making a big thing out of the first game costing a whopping ten quid. I think it may have been one of the Ultimate titles.. Sabre Wulf? I do remember it being big news at the time.
Same here, although in the past 3-4 years I've not had much time for gaming so I've just picked up one blockbuster title per year. E.g. GTA Vice City, GTA SA, Oblivion, Flight Sim X, GTAIV probably covers all my purchases for the last 5 years or more.
I've already turned away in disgust. For many years I would happily buy one or more games a month, transferring the disk images to my PC with Virtual CD so I didn't have to hunt for one particular game disk amongst hundreds. (Same reason I won't buy a console.)
Then I ran across the first Starforce game, in the form of some crap called Trackmania. I uninstalled it about ten minutes later and haven't seen the disk since. Then I bought GT Legends, because I'm a big fan of classic racers, and that came with Starforce too. I put up with it for a week, then bailed.
After the tenth time manually uninstalling and reinstalling my CDRom from the hardware control panel due to it suddenly insisting on running in PIO mode, it was adios to Starforce and no more games buying.
I've only bought two games in the past few years: Oblivion (plus the addons, which happily run in Virtual CD), and GTA IV. I knew GTA IV was DRM'd up the wazoo, but it was a must-have game for me.
And that's what my games-buying has been reduced to... one blockbuster title every couple of years. I don't download any, I just don't bother any more. Instead of playing games I now spend a lot more time watching DVDs (which I believe can be) ripped and transcoded onto my file server.
Entire seasons of Doctor Who used to (and still do) rely on all the alien terrors heading for the nearest Welsh quarry as soon as they arrive on planet Earth.
I used to think that and then age caught up with me. Now I can happily re-read books I enjoyed 20 years ago without remembering the plot or the ending. Soon I won't even remember whether I've read a book before or not. After that's it's 'what's a book?' and then it's game over.
I hope you didn't watch Blackadder series I. That pile of crap should be expunged from the record and never seen again. Start with BlackAdder the Second. Trust me.
As for The Office - hate it. I'm all for British comedy but I didn't get a single chuckle out of this one.
For some reason, FF 3.0 freezes for about eight-ten seconds after I start it up, every single time. It's very, very irritating, and the behaviour encourages me to leave it open as much as possible. (This never happened with FF 1 or 2)
I have a dual core cpu with gigs of ram, so it's not a hardware issue. Running another profile (with few bookmarks) on the same PC doesn't exhibit the same problem, and I can only assume it's the browser rechecking links, favicons or something else every time I start it up. (places.sqlite is 31mb)
I disabled the url security thingo which reads/writes the 10mb urlclassifier2.sqlite file, but that made little difference. I guess I could delete 90% of my bookmarks, but I really don't want to do that.
I still have a BP6 with dual Celeron 433s, specifically purchased as a Linux File/Web server. I remember the BH6 fondly too, especially teamed with a Celeron 300A CPUs.
I've been playing GTA4 PC for the past 3-4 days, and it's been rock solid on my machine. I did have to upgrade my Nvidia drivers but the experience has been fine.
Admittedly I have a high-powered PC, but I'm used to Microsoft's Flight Sim games which have a bunch of higher-end options that will only run smoothly on PCs 2-3 years in the future. The GTA IV manual says as much about the higher detail levels & graphics options available.
Did anyone read the article all the way through, and specifically this bit? Emphasis mine.
GTA IV PC uses SecuROM for protecting our EXE until street date has passed, to ensure the retail disk is in the computer drive, and is used for Product Activation of the title. Product Activation is a one time only online authentication when installing the game. GTA IV has no install limits for the retail disc version of the game, and that version can be installed on an unlimited number of PCs by the retail disk owner.
I just searched through the comments here on/. and didn't see it mentioned.
I've already ordered GTAIV and am looking forward to it. I assumed it would have all kinds of DRM crap, but that's why I now buy only one PC game a year (and I don't own a console.) I used to buy two or three per month, but I don't like digging around for the CD/DVD and I don't like having crap running in the background on my PC.
This was 24 years ago, around the time D&D was equated with witchcraft. Nowadays it's Harry Potter novels, which tells me modern PTAs are staffed with complete wusses. My money's on the gelatinous cube.
Slashdot Mirror
For the past 7 or 8 years we've used pet guinea pigs to keep our lawns trimmed. All you need is a secure hutch to keep them in at night, and a 15-25' roll of strong 4' high mesh to temporarily fence off a section of lawn. Use a couple of clips to hold the ends together, and peg it down well if there are dogs around. We put shadecloth over the top to deter cats, and use a couple of big plastic garden pots for shelter. (Cut down the middle and placed with the cut side down.) They need water, too.
If you use thick straw for their bedding and feed them veggie scraps from the kitchen you'll also end up with lots and lots of natural fertiliser and mulch.
And the big bonus is that you never have to mow the lawn again. Plus you can get the kids to move the guinea pigs to a new patch.
Just one tip: make sure all the guinea pigs are female. They seem to get along better than all males, and if you mix them you'll be renting the offspring out to the entire neigbourhood.
Or she has very itchy nostrils ...
90kb loaded in about 4 seconds, versus 45kb loaded in 3-5mins from cassette. And random access storage.
They were about 1/5th the cost of a floppy disk drive (and about 1/10th as reliable)
I still have a couple of working microdrives and a bunch of the little carts in my Speccy collection. Fun to get them out every now and then to remind myself what I used to consider state of the art. (That, and the silver toilet roll ZX printer.)
Look around for yPlay. You can set numerous bookmarks and pick whichever one you want to continue from.
The question boils down to this: Would I rather sell 100 ebooks heavily protected with DRM, and sleep sound knowing those 100 people are the only ones who can read my book.
OR would I rather 150,000 people pirated and read my novel, and 200 people paid for a copy out of honesty, guilt, or because they were too inept to seek out a stolen copy?
The second way I many twice as much money, even though it still wouldn't buy a meal for 4. I also reach more readers, some of whom might spring for a paperback.
By the way, anyone who thinks that putting DRM on the ebook in the second example would lead to 150,000 sales is deluded, and clearly employed by those stats companies who report on how many $billions piracy is costing industry 'X'
My article on self-publishing is here, and you'll also find articles on POD, finding a publisher, seeking an agent, etc.
(I self-published back in 2001, and after putting out three titles in the same series I was picked up by a traditional publisher. Therefore my articles cover both sides of the coin.)
If you buy the ebook direct from the publisher you know you're getting a proofed, complete copy of the original title. Download a rar file with a thousand ebooks from some torrent and you could end up with anything - rough OCR jobs, chapter headings and page numbers every 20 lines or so, missing pages, wrong authors, wrong titles, someone's homage to Asimov meets JK Rowling ...
... maybe they'll buy one or two of them just to say thanks, or maybe they'll be first in line when the author's next title hits the shops.
If ebooks were a reasonable price people would buy them in bigger quantities. The problem at the moment is that $10-$15 is vastly overpriced for a digital file.
There will always be piracy. The question is whether 3000-4000 new ebook sales would generate enough royalties for an author to write full time, not whether another 30,000 people stole their copy.
Finally, people are loyal to their favourite authors. If they come across half a dozen pirated ebooks and start enjoying them, who knows
I talked my publisher into releasing my first novel as a freebie download (see sig), and over the past couple of months I've worked on them to the point that they're about to announce DRM-free ebook releases of all my novels. (The first is free, the rest about US$3.50 each.)
... too expensive when they're priced at a similar amount to a hard copy, and too much trouble when they're DRM-locked. My publisher is addressing both with this release, and we're hoping it'll catch on.
Trust me, it was hard work convincing them this was the way to go, but I don't believe people want $10-$15 encrypyted ebooks they could lose access to at any moment.
The most common complaints with ebooks are
Do my eyes deceive me or did they even miss the original Atari ST version of Dungeon Master? I knew a computer shop owner who used to have people queuing up to buy an ST so they could get DM with it.
I have a copy of the PC port but I tend to play the originals in an emulator. My old favourite emu was ZX32 but just like Gerton Lunter's (sp?) Z80 emulator before it, modern CPUs just got too damn fast in the end.
I can still use ZX32 on my notebook, and that's good enough for now. (Come to think of it, a little netbook with a ZX emu and a copy of every speccy game ever written would make a nice travelling companion.)
What is this list, world history excluding everything the innovate programmers from the UK came up with in the early to mid 1980's? Ever heard of Rare, formerly Ultimate Play the Game, who dropped a little title called Knight Lore on the world and changed the industry overnight? Okay, so it led to a load of derivative rubbish, but I'd rather vote for a technically groundbreaking game packed into 48kb than a three-CD monster with pretty cutscenes.
And where is Lords of Midnight? And leaving Elite out of that list is like leaving Ms Hilton off a paparazzi's to-do list.
I was thinking awfully alliterative, but yes - definitely an opportunity missed.
The early Speccy games were 4.99 and 5.99. I remember Crash (or was it Sinclair User?) making a big thing out of the first game costing a whopping ten quid. I think it may have been one of the Ultimate titles .. Sabre Wulf? I do remember it being big news at the time.
Same here, although in the past 3-4 years I've not had much time for gaming so I've just picked up one blockbuster title per year. E.g. GTA Vice City, GTA SA, Oblivion, Flight Sim X, GTAIV probably covers all my purchases for the last 5 years or more.
I've already turned away in disgust. For many years I would happily buy one or more games a month, transferring the disk images to my PC with Virtual CD so I didn't have to hunt for one particular game disk amongst hundreds. (Same reason I won't buy a console.)
... one blockbuster title every couple of years. I don't download any, I just don't bother any more. Instead of playing games I now spend a lot more time watching DVDs (which I believe can be) ripped and transcoded onto my file server.
Then I ran across the first Starforce game, in the form of some crap called Trackmania. I uninstalled it about ten minutes later and haven't seen the disk since. Then I bought GT Legends, because I'm a big fan of classic racers, and that came with Starforce too. I put up with it for a week, then bailed.
After the tenth time manually uninstalling and reinstalling my CDRom from the hardware control panel due to it suddenly insisting on running in PIO mode, it was adios to Starforce and no more games buying.
I've only bought two games in the past few years: Oblivion (plus the addons, which happily run in Virtual CD), and GTA IV. I knew GTA IV was DRM'd up the wazoo, but it was a must-have game for me.
And that's what my games-buying has been reduced to
Entire seasons of Doctor Who used to (and still do) rely on all the alien terrors heading for the nearest Welsh quarry as soon as they arrive on planet Earth.
I used to think that and then age caught up with me. Now I can happily re-read books I enjoyed 20 years ago without remembering the plot or the ending. Soon I won't even remember whether I've read a book before or not. After that's it's 'what's a book?' and then it's game over.
I hope you didn't watch Blackadder series I. That pile of crap should be expunged from the record and never seen again. Start with BlackAdder the Second. Trust me.
As for The Office - hate it. I'm all for British comedy but I didn't get a single chuckle out of this one.
For some reason, FF 3.0 freezes for about eight-ten seconds after I start it up, every single time. It's very, very irritating, and the behaviour encourages me to leave it open as much as possible. (This never happened with FF 1 or 2)
I have a dual core cpu with gigs of ram, so it's not a hardware issue. Running another profile (with few bookmarks) on the same PC doesn't exhibit the same problem, and I can only assume it's the browser rechecking links, favicons or something else every time I start it up. (places.sqlite is 31mb)
I disabled the url security thingo which reads/writes the 10mb urlclassifier2.sqlite file, but that made little difference. I guess I could delete 90% of my bookmarks, but I really don't want to do that.
I second that. I've been using noscript for years, and wouldn't browse the net without it.
I still have a BP6 with dual Celeron 433s, specifically purchased as a Linux File/Web server. I remember the BH6 fondly too, especially teamed with a Celeron 300A CPUs.
I've been playing GTA4 PC for the past 3-4 days, and it's been rock solid on my machine. I did have to upgrade my Nvidia drivers but the experience has been fine.
Admittedly I have a high-powered PC, but I'm used to Microsoft's Flight Sim games which have a bunch of higher-end options that will only run smoothly on PCs 2-3 years in the future. The GTA IV manual says as much about the higher detail levels & graphics options available.
Did anyone read the article all the way through, and specifically this bit? Emphasis mine.
/. and didn't see it mentioned.
GTA IV PC uses SecuROM for protecting our EXE until street date has passed, to ensure the retail disk is in the computer drive, and is used for Product Activation of the title. Product Activation is a one time only online authentication when installing the game. GTA IV has no install limits for the retail disc version of the game, and that version can be installed on an unlimited number of PCs by the retail disk owner.
I just searched through the comments here on
I've already ordered GTAIV and am looking forward to it. I assumed it would have all kinds of DRM crap, but that's why I now buy only one PC game a year (and I don't own a console.) I used to buy two or three per month, but I don't like digging around for the CD/DVD and I don't like having crap running in the background on my PC.
No, no - it spontenously combusted, burning the devil's number into your locker door.
This was 24 years ago, around the time D&D was equated with witchcraft. Nowadays it's Harry Potter novels, which tells me modern PTAs are staffed with complete wusses. My money's on the gelatinous cube.