That is the best investment I could have made. Buying a business class notebook through work's discount program got me a much better product than the consumer one. The warranty uplift cost $79 for three year, next business day, onsite warranty service. I've had to use it three times. The last time was 2 years 10 months after I bought the notebook and they sent a new one rather than fix the old one.
Best of all they hosed the warranty transfer so I could buy a new warranty uplift (buying one off the 'old' warranty was much more expensive) so I've got a new notebook and 3 years of great warranty service. I see a non-fixable hardware failure happening 2 years and 10 months from the replacement date.
Extended warranties can be worth it if the warranty actually improves the service you receive. Spending a little money to go from taking/sending the product to a service center to having in home service is great for things like large appliances and other items where it's just a headache to try and get the thing anywhere or when you don't want to or can't be without whatever it is.
Then there's the warranties for stupid products that will cost less to replace when they do break than to deal with trying to get it fixed. Microwaves, keyboards, stuff like that. Sometimes the price of the warranty is the same as the item. I despair for humanity when I see people buying them.
This is just another reason why I use temporary credit card numbers for online purchases. They're only good for a set period of time and you set the maximum chargeable amount.
The end result is that they never actually have your credit card number.
Of course a better solution is to read the fine print, both online and on your packing slip, so you know the deal. I too had one of those 'free offers' that was really a 'free trial'. Luckily I read my packing slip which had all the details on how to cancel it. Followed the instructions, no problem. But they were also pretty up-front about it.
Any company that buries a subscription or a situation where you have to pay for things you never thought you ordered is a scam. Period. End of story. They're counting on the fact that most people won't understand or read the agreement. Trying to squash negative commentary is just more proof that they know what they're doing is wrong.
I think that's what the case was about. Mr. Beck and his attorneys thought the site was libelous, the creator thought it was parody/satire. The judge sided with the creator. I don't see where it was incorrect to bring about a suit and from all reports it was handled correctly and professionally.
The only 'big thing' is that it was a site about Glenn Beck. Had it been someone less.. contentious.. then it probably wouldn't have been created/covered/known in the first place.
That's the price of being a public figure. The bar for libel is higher.
As much as I hate linking to blogs SecurityFocus seems to have the most detailed story on the DirecTV lawsuits against anyone and everyone who ever bought a smart card writer. Their reasoning seems to be "People use smart card writers to pirate our service therefore everyone who purchases a smart card writer is doing so to pirate our services."
Careful, make sure you read the law in detail. In Kansas it is also legal to open-carry, however the state law permits cities to pass municipal ordinances restricting open-carry.
We have a preemption law in Wisconsin. For those not in the know it means no municipality/county/etc. can make a law that's more restrictive than the state law. So the open carry is legal everywhere.
That being said there's places all over the state trying to pass laws/ordinances with heinous penalties for open carry in a 'no gun' area. As in $10,000 fine for first offense. I think they've backed down on those but haven't really followed them.
Here's the lovely irony. The preemption law was passed while the current governor was attorney general. Now he's upset that it is getting in the way of his agenda. He's also trying to do away with open carry. But he's also been vetoing conceal carry because we have open carry. So the logical thing is - if he's against open carry we should have conceal carry. It's quite confusing. Funny, but confusing.
Big whoop. Strippers and lap dances in a venue expected to be attended by males in a location where it's the norm to have such entertainment.
Had I been there I would have either found something else to do or be highly entertained by the idjits stuffing money into g-strings. Silly waste of money (imo) but if they can spare it and are enjoying the show then more power to them.
As I see it the "true feminist" is a person who believes that a woman has the right to choose how to live their lives. Some choose to enter the workforce, some choose to stay home and raise their families. But the important thing is that they have the choice. Incidentally those women who do enter the workforce should be paid the same as their male counterparts but honestly should that even need to be said any more? Either of the above listed choices should be highly endorsed by true feminists because the choice is available.
Did Yahoo do anything wrong? Nope. Not a thing. I haven't really searched but I'm not seeing a lot of negative comments from the attendees or the hired help. If they're not complaining why should anyone else?
AMEN! There is a reason the 20 something whiz kid shows up the IT personnel, they think about the problem, not memorize the solution.
I want to see that in practice. What I typically find is that the '20 something whiz kid' has absolutely no idea how to solve a problem when they're not presented with a list of possible solutions.
Between menu-driven games and standardized testing all these kids are turned loose in the world without any skills to take on a problem and FIND a solution. Heck, I spent far too many hours teaching the interns and new hires basic troubleshooting so they had some idea where to start looking for the problem. Finding the solution was an entirely different thing.
In context of being able to navigate a menu more quickly I'll grant you the edge. For everything else I just don't see it.
A few things I've found by having several news sites in my rotation.
The same story will appear in exactly the same format on multiple sites.
The same story will appear multiple times on the same site (I'm lookin' at you Yahoo News).
A headline and summary will suffice for 98% of the news I read since I don't care about the nitty gritty.
With that in mind I would possibly pay for a handful of 'full stories' every week but for the bulk of them they're just not that interesting. I like knowing Event A happened but I don't need the in-depth analysis. But I wouldn't sign up on multiple sites and hand over payment information willy-nilly nor would I want to have to jump through multiple hoops to get access to the story. By the time that happens I will have already lost interest. Don't even start with putting down a balance on each site to have access to their content.
Re:Women's issues in computing workplace
on
Coders At Work
·
· Score: 1
And who's fault is that? If you didn't set the damn air conditioning at 'sub zero' then maybe we would stop poking the menu options on the monitor, making us less efficient.
Quite frankly, the temperature thing doesn't help you either. Think about it.
I too rely on the little red line under a word that may be misspelled. I try to find and correct my own mistakes as I type since I can 'feel' them as I go. But I've gotten to rely on the built in spell checker to make sure.
Has using electronic communication affected my handwriting? Not really. I tend to write out notes to myself all the time when I'm working and I will occasionally sit down and write letters. I agree with some of the posters above that having to hand write something makes me sit and think things out to their logical conclusion since I can't easily delete and rewrite.
I've also found a reverse effect. People aren't used to reading cursive any more. Printing is just fine but when I write a letter in cursive I get comments that they have trouble reading it. I've checked my handwriting and it really isn't bad enough to put the blame completely on me.
One other thing I've found is that writing a letter isn't as easy as it used to be since anything I write will be 'stale' once it is received. Electronic communication is immediate and fresh. So my letters have to deal with subject matter that generally isn't addressed in e-mails or I know that it will be a repeat of something at some point.
Letters are a dying art. Getting a real letter (not just a greeting card with a sentence or two) happens so rarely these days that it is treated as an oddity.
Every member company of BSA has been found to have 'unauthorized software' [citation needed] but of course those aren't reported to the media like the rest.
I did asset and software management for 15 years before finally being able to dump the whole mess on someone else. Every license was tied to a purchase order and every purchase order was tied to a machine. Whenever we got a new Microsoft rep (since they were the majority of our products) I would show them the huge lateral filing cabinets with every license in order. Yeah, they're going to try to pull an audit on us.
I did get a call from the Microsoft 'legal' department once trying to tell us that we didn't have enough Exchange licenses for a company our size. When I asked which company, since we had 15 affiliates, they couldn't tell me. And when I told them that only 2 affiliates used Exchange and the rest were Lotus Notes they got truly confused. At which point I essentially told them to fuck off until they could get their facts straight. Surprisingly I never heard back.
Yes, the BSA uses disgruntled employees as their main source of information and they pay for it. They're evil and while I have no pity for companies that buy one license and install on fifty machines the BSA tactics and fine structure completely suck.
We put an asset tag on every machine. Then we use the asset tag as the machine ID/computer name. Unique, simple and right in front of the user when they call in.
There's nothing to change if the machine moves around. That's all handled through the automated inventory tools. Need to know the OS? Look it up by asset tag.
We would have used the accounting fixed asset numbers but those aren't assigned until well after the machine is deployed.
Serial numbers are an idea but they're not exactly easy to get from the end user when you're asking questions for troubleshooting.
Our asset tag format is X000000 with X being alpha. This gives us plenty of tags and they're all bar coded for that eventuality of needing to do a physical inventory.
Nothing silly, nothing hard to understand. Nothing that needs to be changed as the machines move around. Which they do.
Slightly off topic are the server names. Prefix for prod/test, hyphen, region, hyphen, identifier. As in TS-XYZ-APP01 for a test machine housed in the XYZ region for Application. Simple, easy, etc.
Once you start dealing with thousands of PCs and hundreds of servers you stop trying to be cute and make things as easy as possible.
Moreover, he said that it won't be only the newspaper sites that adopt this change; foxnews.com, he said, will also start charging for content. "It had a huge and loyal and profitable [web] audience already," he said.
Mind you, I heard the story from the person who had the domain name stolen and then returned. The story may have been embellished for effect. But it's still darn good.
Someone I know owns a highly profitable and highly desirable domain name for shall we say, marital aids. He got smart and registered it in the early days and it's very much a thriving site. One day, someone stole it along with about a dozen other highly profitable domains.
This gentleman contacted some of the other victims and they were willing to help out with catching who did this and with getting their domains back.
The thieves were employees of Network Solutions and had planned on skipping the country very soon after the incidents. However, the victims pooled their money and hired a 'bounty hunter' to track down and find the thieves. He did, and for a little extra money the domains were returned without question.
The person who told me the story has been silent on what happened to the thieves. He's leaving that to the imagination but I have a feeling they're at least quite sorry that they tried this stunt.
I think that was much more satisfying than going through the court systems, etc. Not that I endorse taking the law into your own hands but when the courts aren't set up to deal with this type of crime sometimes you have to deal with it through side channels.
Nope. You're not alone. Management here thinks that if you're not in a location where a supervisor (not your supervisor, just a random supervisor) can check in on you then you're not going to work.
Telecommuting is technically allowed in company policies but that only seems to apply to a very small remote sales force in practice.
Considering the plethora of inherited medical issues in my DNA I accept your thanks, along with the countless future generations who won't have to deal with them.
But just because they have to happen doesn't mean that I can't generally schedule them to my advantage.
I tend to group my meetings so that they're in a single block when I can. That way they don't run long ("Sorry. Have a 10:30. Gotta go.") and I can then keep the rest of the day free for actual work.
For those days when it isn't possible that's when I do my documentation since there's no way I can get back into a project and do anything useful with an hour.
Back in the days our calendar system would auto-accept any meeting invites. It was a while ago. But that meant you got put into all kinds of meetings without actually being able to request a different time up front. My boss had the best solution, which we all try to do now based on other responses. He blocked out 80% of his day into two events: "HFMTDW". If you needed to get into the blocks you asked and he would free up the time for you.
"HFMTDW" = "Hiding From Meetings to do Work"
I loved that boss. Too bad being the manager of our division drove him into a nervous breakdown after 18 months.
As a father, I can say this doesn't happen only to women. Having a child actually completes me and makes me happy
FTFY
Please don't include me in your sweeping generalizations. I've never wanted children, knowing that I would not make a good or happy parent. As such, I feel my life is complete without them.
Thank you for your contribution in the continuation of the species.
Re:Software Projects vs. Traditional Projects
on
Why New Systems Fail
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
People are taken out of the equation when it comes to bridges. You don't have to teach people how to use *your* bridge since the use of a bridge is the same regardless of which bridge they use.
People are the main reason why I see projects fail. Incomplete/incorrect requirements, artificial deadlines, glory seekers, scope creep, poor training, process change, resistance to process change, etc. These are all variables that don't have to be considered when building a physical structure.
And unfortunately they're also variables that aren't given enough consideration in the project from start to finish.
I'm currently waiting for my company to replace the system at the heart of our IT support functions. The one we've built around our business processes for the last 9 years. The one they honestly believe can be replaced by a Big System in about 2 months. And they wonder why I drink.
The really sad thing is that the system they're dead set on replacing isn't broken, is still in active use out in the wild, is off the books, and has no real reason for being replaced except for a manager who wants to put his name on the replacement project and his manager who is convinced that since the system isn't one of The Big Three we shouldn't be using it any more.
Personally I like to play games where I create things so this kind of environment would be perfect. I would get the enjoyment of creating and running my little part of the larger world and the players who prefer other aspects would have a place to re-equip, etc. Not everyone likes to go out and kill things.
That being said, if I had to spend massive amounts of time there to make it work then I wouldn't do it. That's one of many reasons I don't play online games. I don't have the time or inclination to sit at the computer for hours on end playing a game and paying for the privilege.
I realize this is US-centric but I take full advantage of the first sale doctrine by purchasing used books. I know the author doesn't see a dime of those sales but if I have the choice between paying $15 for a book or paying $5 I'm going to wait a bit and buy the less expensive one. I'll probably check the book out of the library first to make sure I want to own it.
Until I can get used copies of books on the Kindle for under $5 then there's no way in heck I'm buying one. And at this point in time there's no financial benefit to me for buying a Kindle and then buying the books since the price is almost the same as buying a paper copy.
So no matter what format the files are in they're useless to me. I'd prefer an open standard/no DRM but that's not going to happen for a while. With a paper copy you completely transfer ownership when you sell it but there's nothing to make you delete and electronic copy if you sell it to someone else. So an open format book is going to hit the torrents within hours of release if it's a popular book/series/author. I'm not sure how many books are on those sites since I don't torrent so someone else with more experience will have to report on that one.
Slashdot Mirror
That is the best investment I could have made. Buying a business class notebook through work's discount program got me a much better product than the consumer one. The warranty uplift cost $79 for three year, next business day, onsite warranty service. I've had to use it three times. The last time was 2 years 10 months after I bought the notebook and they sent a new one rather than fix the old one.
Best of all they hosed the warranty transfer so I could buy a new warranty uplift (buying one off the 'old' warranty was much more expensive) so I've got a new notebook and 3 years of great warranty service. I see a non-fixable hardware failure happening 2 years and 10 months from the replacement date.
Extended warranties can be worth it if the warranty actually improves the service you receive. Spending a little money to go from taking/sending the product to a service center to having in home service is great for things like large appliances and other items where it's just a headache to try and get the thing anywhere or when you don't want to or can't be without whatever it is.
Then there's the warranties for stupid products that will cost less to replace when they do break than to deal with trying to get it fixed. Microwaves, keyboards, stuff like that. Sometimes the price of the warranty is the same as the item. I despair for humanity when I see people buying them.
This is just another reason why I use temporary credit card numbers for online purchases. They're only good for a set period of time and you set the maximum chargeable amount.
The end result is that they never actually have your credit card number.
Of course a better solution is to read the fine print, both online and on your packing slip, so you know the deal. I too had one of those 'free offers' that was really a 'free trial'. Luckily I read my packing slip which had all the details on how to cancel it. Followed the instructions, no problem. But they were also pretty up-front about it.
Any company that buries a subscription or a situation where you have to pay for things you never thought you ordered is a scam. Period. End of story. They're counting on the fact that most people won't understand or read the agreement. Trying to squash negative commentary is just more proof that they know what they're doing is wrong.
you better make sure you have that million safely in your offshore corporate shell account before your company goes belly up.
FTFY
I think that's what the case was about. Mr. Beck and his attorneys thought the site was libelous, the creator thought it was parody/satire. The judge sided with the creator. I don't see where it was incorrect to bring about a suit and from all reports it was handled correctly and professionally.
The only 'big thing' is that it was a site about Glenn Beck. Had it been someone less .. contentious .. then it probably wouldn't have been created/covered/known in the first place.
That's the price of being a public figure. The bar for libel is higher.
As much as I hate linking to blogs SecurityFocus seems to have the most detailed story on the DirecTV lawsuits against anyone and everyone who ever bought a smart card writer. Their reasoning seems to be "People use smart card writers to pirate our service therefore everyone who purchases a smart card writer is doing so to pirate our services."
Good luck with that.
Careful, make sure you read the law in detail. In Kansas it is also legal to open-carry, however the state law permits cities to pass municipal ordinances restricting open-carry.
We have a preemption law in Wisconsin. For those not in the know it means no municipality/county/etc. can make a law that's more restrictive than the state law. So the open carry is legal everywhere.
That being said there's places all over the state trying to pass laws/ordinances with heinous penalties for open carry in a 'no gun' area. As in $10,000 fine for first offense. I think they've backed down on those but haven't really followed them.
Here's the lovely irony. The preemption law was passed while the current governor was attorney general. Now he's upset that it is getting in the way of his agenda. He's also trying to do away with open carry. But he's also been vetoing conceal carry because we have open carry. So the logical thing is - if he's against open carry we should have conceal carry. It's quite confusing. Funny, but confusing.
Big whoop. Strippers and lap dances in a venue expected to be attended by males in a location where it's the norm to have such entertainment.
Had I been there I would have either found something else to do or be highly entertained by the idjits stuffing money into g-strings. Silly waste of money (imo) but if they can spare it and are enjoying the show then more power to them.
As I see it the "true feminist" is a person who believes that a woman has the right to choose how to live their lives. Some choose to enter the workforce, some choose to stay home and raise their families. But the important thing is that they have the choice. Incidentally those women who do enter the workforce should be paid the same as their male counterparts but honestly should that even need to be said any more? Either of the above listed choices should be highly endorsed by true feminists because the choice is available.
Did Yahoo do anything wrong? Nope. Not a thing. I haven't really searched but I'm not seeing a lot of negative comments from the attendees or the hired help. If they're not complaining why should anyone else?
AMEN! There is a reason the 20 something whiz kid shows up the IT personnel, they think about the problem, not memorize the solution.
I want to see that in practice. What I typically find is that the '20 something whiz kid' has absolutely no idea how to solve a problem when they're not presented with a list of possible solutions.
Between menu-driven games and standardized testing all these kids are turned loose in the world without any skills to take on a problem and FIND a solution. Heck, I spent far too many hours teaching the interns and new hires basic troubleshooting so they had some idea where to start looking for the problem. Finding the solution was an entirely different thing.
In context of being able to navigate a menu more quickly I'll grant you the edge. For everything else I just don't see it.
A few things I've found by having several news sites in my rotation.
With that in mind I would possibly pay for a handful of 'full stories' every week but for the bulk of them they're just not that interesting. I like knowing Event A happened but I don't need the in-depth analysis. But I wouldn't sign up on multiple sites and hand over payment information willy-nilly nor would I want to have to jump through multiple hoops to get access to the story. By the time that happens I will have already lost interest. Don't even start with putting down a balance on each site to have access to their content.
And who's fault is that? If you didn't set the damn air conditioning at 'sub zero' then maybe we would stop poking the menu options on the monitor, making us less efficient.
Quite frankly, the temperature thing doesn't help you either. Think about it.
Bzzt. Cultural reference fail.
Neal Stephenson got there before Harry Potter with The Diamond Age and e-paper.
I'm sure others will be along later with prior art. FYI - The Diamond Age was published in 1995 so go from there.
I too rely on the little red line under a word that may be misspelled. I try to find and correct my own mistakes as I type since I can 'feel' them as I go. But I've gotten to rely on the built in spell checker to make sure.
Has using electronic communication affected my handwriting? Not really. I tend to write out notes to myself all the time when I'm working and I will occasionally sit down and write letters. I agree with some of the posters above that having to hand write something makes me sit and think things out to their logical conclusion since I can't easily delete and rewrite.
I've also found a reverse effect. People aren't used to reading cursive any more. Printing is just fine but when I write a letter in cursive I get comments that they have trouble reading it. I've checked my handwriting and it really isn't bad enough to put the blame completely on me.
One other thing I've found is that writing a letter isn't as easy as it used to be since anything I write will be 'stale' once it is received. Electronic communication is immediate and fresh. So my letters have to deal with subject matter that generally isn't addressed in e-mails or I know that it will be a repeat of something at some point.
Letters are a dying art. Getting a real letter (not just a greeting card with a sentence or two) happens so rarely these days that it is treated as an oddity.
Every member company of BSA has been found to have 'unauthorized software' [citation needed] but of course those aren't reported to the media like the rest.
I did asset and software management for 15 years before finally being able to dump the whole mess on someone else. Every license was tied to a purchase order and every purchase order was tied to a machine. Whenever we got a new Microsoft rep (since they were the majority of our products) I would show them the huge lateral filing cabinets with every license in order. Yeah, they're going to try to pull an audit on us.
I did get a call from the Microsoft 'legal' department once trying to tell us that we didn't have enough Exchange licenses for a company our size. When I asked which company, since we had 15 affiliates, they couldn't tell me. And when I told them that only 2 affiliates used Exchange and the rest were Lotus Notes they got truly confused. At which point I essentially told them to fuck off until they could get their facts straight. Surprisingly I never heard back.
Yes, the BSA uses disgruntled employees as their main source of information and they pay for it. They're evil and while I have no pity for companies that buy one license and install on fifty machines the BSA tactics and fine structure completely suck.
We put an asset tag on every machine. Then we use the asset tag as the machine ID/computer name. Unique, simple and right in front of the user when they call in.
There's nothing to change if the machine moves around. That's all handled through the automated inventory tools. Need to know the OS? Look it up by asset tag.
We would have used the accounting fixed asset numbers but those aren't assigned until well after the machine is deployed.
Serial numbers are an idea but they're not exactly easy to get from the end user when you're asking questions for troubleshooting.
Our asset tag format is X000000 with X being alpha. This gives us plenty of tags and they're all bar coded for that eventuality of needing to do a physical inventory.
Nothing silly, nothing hard to understand. Nothing that needs to be changed as the machines move around. Which they do.
Slightly off topic are the server names. Prefix for prod/test, hyphen, region, hyphen, identifier. As in TS-XYZ-APP01 for a test machine housed in the XYZ region for Application. Simple, easy, etc.
Once you start dealing with thousands of PCs and hundreds of servers you stop trying to be cute and make things as easy as possible.
Moreover, he said that it won't be only the newspaper sites that adopt this change; foxnews.com, he said, will also start charging for content. "It had a huge and loyal and profitable [web] audience already," he said.
FTFY
I knew this all sounded familiar. Make it pretty and easy to do things but only the AOL^H^H^HApple way and everyone will be happy.
We all remember how well that worked out for AOL, don't we?
Mind you, I heard the story from the person who had the domain name stolen and then returned. The story may have been embellished for effect. But it's still darn good.
Someone I know owns a highly profitable and highly desirable domain name for shall we say, marital aids. He got smart and registered it in the early days and it's very much a thriving site. One day, someone stole it along with about a dozen other highly profitable domains.
This gentleman contacted some of the other victims and they were willing to help out with catching who did this and with getting their domains back.
The thieves were employees of Network Solutions and had planned on skipping the country very soon after the incidents. However, the victims pooled their money and hired a 'bounty hunter' to track down and find the thieves. He did, and for a little extra money the domains were returned without question.
The person who told me the story has been silent on what happened to the thieves. He's leaving that to the imagination but I have a feeling they're at least quite sorry that they tried this stunt.
I think that was much more satisfying than going through the court systems, etc. Not that I endorse taking the law into your own hands but when the courts aren't set up to deal with this type of crime sometimes you have to deal with it through side channels.
My answer to the 'paperless office' has been the same one for over a decade now.
Nope. You're not alone. Management here thinks that if you're not in a location where a supervisor (not your supervisor, just a random supervisor) can check in on you then you're not going to work.
Telecommuting is technically allowed in company policies but that only seems to apply to a very small remote sales force in practice.
Considering the plethora of inherited medical issues in my DNA I accept your thanks, along with the countless future generations who won't have to deal with them.
But just because they have to happen doesn't mean that I can't generally schedule them to my advantage.
I tend to group my meetings so that they're in a single block when I can. That way they don't run long ("Sorry. Have a 10:30. Gotta go.") and I can then keep the rest of the day free for actual work.
For those days when it isn't possible that's when I do my documentation since there's no way I can get back into a project and do anything useful with an hour.
Back in the days our calendar system would auto-accept any meeting invites. It was a while ago. But that meant you got put into all kinds of meetings without actually being able to request a different time up front. My boss had the best solution, which we all try to do now based on other responses. He blocked out 80% of his day into two events: "HFMTDW". If you needed to get into the blocks you asked and he would free up the time for you.
"HFMTDW" = "Hiding From Meetings to do Work"
I loved that boss. Too bad being the manager of our division drove him into a nervous breakdown after 18 months.
FTFY
Please don't include me in your sweeping generalizations. I've never wanted children, knowing that I would not make a good or happy parent. As such, I feel my life is complete without them.
Thank you for your contribution in the continuation of the species.
People are taken out of the equation when it comes to bridges. You don't have to teach people how to use *your* bridge since the use of a bridge is the same regardless of which bridge they use.
People are the main reason why I see projects fail. Incomplete/incorrect requirements, artificial deadlines, glory seekers, scope creep, poor training, process change, resistance to process change, etc. These are all variables that don't have to be considered when building a physical structure.
And unfortunately they're also variables that aren't given enough consideration in the project from start to finish.
I'm currently waiting for my company to replace the system at the heart of our IT support functions. The one we've built around our business processes for the last 9 years. The one they honestly believe can be replaced by a Big System in about 2 months. And they wonder why I drink.
The really sad thing is that the system they're dead set on replacing isn't broken, is still in active use out in the wild, is off the books, and has no real reason for being replaced except for a manager who wants to put his name on the replacement project and his manager who is convinced that since the system isn't one of The Big Three we shouldn't be using it any more.
Personally I like to play games where I create things so this kind of environment would be perfect. I would get the enjoyment of creating and running my little part of the larger world and the players who prefer other aspects would have a place to re-equip, etc. Not everyone likes to go out and kill things.
That being said, if I had to spend massive amounts of time there to make it work then I wouldn't do it. That's one of many reasons I don't play online games. I don't have the time or inclination to sit at the computer for hours on end playing a game and paying for the privilege.
I realize this is US-centric but I take full advantage of the first sale doctrine by purchasing used books. I know the author doesn't see a dime of those sales but if I have the choice between paying $15 for a book or paying $5 I'm going to wait a bit and buy the less expensive one. I'll probably check the book out of the library first to make sure I want to own it.
Until I can get used copies of books on the Kindle for under $5 then there's no way in heck I'm buying one. And at this point in time there's no financial benefit to me for buying a Kindle and then buying the books since the price is almost the same as buying a paper copy.
So no matter what format the files are in they're useless to me. I'd prefer an open standard/no DRM but that's not going to happen for a while. With a paper copy you completely transfer ownership when you sell it but there's nothing to make you delete and electronic copy if you sell it to someone else. So an open format book is going to hit the torrents within hours of release if it's a popular book/series/author. I'm not sure how many books are on those sites since I don't torrent so someone else with more experience will have to report on that one.