Timewaster's Guide Archive

The ugliest noise I've ever heard that has nothing to do with technology came out of a pig's mouth. Agitated pigs make a lot of noise, and it's horrifying. It sounds stupid to say it's horrifying to hear a pig squeal, but wait 'till you hear it. It's so loud, and visceral, and just ugly. It sounds like something is getting tortured.

In Nicaragua (where I served an LDS mission), people just randomly keep pigs. Oftentimes they butcher their own pigs. When those pigs know the knife is coming…when the squeal crescendos, then sharply cuts off…sheesh, I'm creeping myself out. It's almost worse to write about it than it was to be there.

Or, how about a man's angry scream, followed by running footsteps and the sound of something repeatedly striking flesh? Heard that in Nicaragua too, sitting in someone's (fenced-in) yard. By the time we got to the gate, there was a crowd in the street but we didn't see anyone hurt. I still don't know what happened. Not a happy moment, that.

if McMillian wants to charge more for the digital copy of new books and less for the old books it would still even out to the same amount as if they sold all their books for the same price.

That would only be true if they sold the same number of copies at every price, but that's not the way it works.

The point of varying the price of a good over time is price discrimination. Some people are willing to pay more for books than others, and the publishers want to take advantage of that. Conveniently, the people willing to pay more are also those more likely to buy a book immediately after its release. By charging more money at first and less over time, you maximize your revenue.

Amazon doesn't care about McMillan's revenue. They want to shape the market for eBooks, making less (or no) money in the short term so that they're in a better position to make money in the long term. This helps only Amazon, so I can understand why people would get upset at them for acting like a bully.

I was a little confused at first why Pranger turned Petey down so adamantly for the "rescue Kevyn's timeclone" job.

Well, I'm rereading the archives. Could it have something to do with the fact that, last time he worked with Kevyn, he set off an antimatter bomb and took out his capital ship (to say nothing of his desire never to share the same planet as Kevyn again). Adurr...yeah. I'm a little slow...

Cynic - in other words, the plot is not predictable. That's good, right?

So, Erik. I like what you've done with Morrigan in this chapter. I know she's still wicked, and probably doesn't have Ellie's best interests in mind, but you've made me feel for her. You've made me wonder if Ellie really can trust her, at least insofar as she won't kill her. I'm not sure how truthful she is, and her motives are not transparent. These are all good things.

There's not a lot that I could complain about in this chapter. The biggest thing is that it still feels like the plot is taking baby steps. It feels like a status update on Ellie instead of a chapter where anything really happens. Yes, we get some more information on sigil knights and some nice character development for Morrigan, and we get to point and laugh at poor bumbling Mordred, but that's about it.

So, hmm. I guess that "stuff happens", but it doesn't feel like the plot is moving. Perhaps this stems from the fact that Ellie's character isn't really evolving anymore. Actually, she's been fairly static throughout the entire book. Contrast that with Kail and all that he's changed and grown.

BTW, what happened with Ellie asking Morrigan about Bloodbath? The chapter is short enough that you could have slipped that in.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Is it me, or is Tagon channeling Bond? The formalwear, the consorting with married women, the jumping off balconies...

Kudos to Howard for using the lack of magic carbonan to ramp up the tension on something not involving bullets. Tagon jumping around the inside of a rotating space station—the dude's nuts. Remember how Schlock got smeared upon landing in Credomar?

If I were a betting man, I'd bet that the perp he's chasing isn't a thief or anything sinister. Betcha he's just a punk kid running some crazy centrifugal zero-gee parkour.

Mac Mini doesnt count, no. Can you network it? not really. Same with an iMac, not easily networked. Just ask my 100 pissed off videographers when some genius thought they should all get brand new iMacs. And they call me at least once a week because it dropped the network again and i have to reinstall Tiger. And they cant run Leopard, or SnowLeopard. We tried, and failed. so they lobbied for PCs when their upgrade time comes around, and they are going to be getting Lenovo ThinkPads, possibly, Dell Latitude E6400s. With docking stations of course.

 

Every Mac Apple ships is equally networkable. Right now I'm sitting at work in a lab full of 86 happily-netowrked iMacs. With Apple Remote Desktop, I can do anything to any Mac on the entire campus-wide network to which I've been given rights. With my MacBook Pro, I can VPN in to the network and do the same from over the Internet. We can remote-boot those machines with an image stored on any Mac on the network. We can hook in to the university's LDAP service to provide logins to our students, with no additional software beyond the base OS.

I can state with 100% confidence that there is nothing network-related that Macs can't do. Your claim is ridiculous.

Why, why why would you pay $1000 because "good enough" isnt "good enough" when in fact "good enough" is BETTER than your $1500 computer?

http://www.apple.com/macmini/specs.html

Look at teh Specs! My Gateway NETBOOK has better ram, processor and memory than that!

If hardware specs are all you care about, then I agree with you: why WOULDN'T you buy the cheapest PC you could find? But, honestly, I just really don't care that much about hardware specs anymore. Far more important to me is that my software work elegantly. I'd also like my laptops to last me 4 years, which is something PCs seem to have a hard time doing; what I've seen from PC laptops owned by family members, roommates, and friends is that they start to fall apart after 2.5-3 years.

The hardware is fast enough. My 2-year-old Macbook Pro is still plenty fast for everything I do with it. I've upped the RAM to 4GB and the HDD to 500, but that's a typical mid-life upgrade. I develop software and websites, often at the same time. I run multiple virtual machines simultaneously. I run office programs, email, RSS, web browsers, Adobe Creative Suite apps. I can even boot into Windows and play games. My machine never feels slow and never bogs down. Why should I care if PC hardware is higher-specced and costs less, when I'm far happier with my Mac than I ever would be using Windows?

ryos: I have about 10 different MP3 players, including an ipod classic and a touch, how much music do you have that 8GB isnt not enough? Much less the 32 for the highest end model? I can fit nearly every song I own on an 8GB memory stick or SD card (iPods do not support SD cards, a very very big negative on them, and neither does the iPad, even the Nintendo DS supports microSD and the Wii has an SD slot!)

8737 songs, 3023 photos, 138 videos, 158 podcasts and 4 games. That all occupies 63 GB of space. When I run out space on my 80 GB iPod (11 GB to go), I'll delete the photos, since I don't really use them anyway.

My anecdotal experience is exactly opposite yours. In cases like that, we can agree to disagree.

Also, snooty? For that to be true, I'd have to look down on PC buyers, but I don't. Sometimes, I envy you. I once tried to join you, because cheap hardware is tempting, but I couldn't do it. Oh, to honestly believe that any $20 music player is the equal of any iPod! But no, I was cursed to care about details. "Good enough" isn't good enough for me. Like I said before, there's nothing in that statement that suggests that this makes me better than other people. You may as well say "he has blue eyes, he's a snob," when in reality it's just an ordinary part of who I am.

(Your figure for the "cheapest Mac" is $900 high, by the way. And, I'm still waiting for a link to that $50 iPod Touch knockoff.)