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Comment Re:What's this? (Score 1) 8

Amazon was an experiment. I read the library's copy of Andy Wier's The Martian, really liked it, and googled to see if he had any more titles. Wikipedia said that he couldn't get a publisher so he introduced it as an Amazon ebook, it went to their best seller list, and a publisher bought the hardcover rights for a six figure sum.

So I thought, what the hell, why not give it a try? I thought it might give me extra exposure, but I was wrong.

Comment Re:Open Auto (Score 1) 128

Consider that Local Motors most likely found and are exploiting loopholes (e.g. hobbyist car-building from scratch, which is still quite active.) Consider further that they wouldn't have attracted a dime of venture funding without at least some plan to exploit existing legal loopholes.

So - you made the assertion, you get to prove it by naming at least one existing rule or law that could be used to slap them down.

Comment Re:Why would you want this? (Score 1) 178

Dude - this is nicotine, not heroin or meth.

Going cold-turkey on cigarettes is nothing more than an annoyance for most folks who do so. This vaccine only means that once your body is rid of the cravings (anywhere from 3 days to a month), you won't want to return to it, since doing so wouldn't give you what you were seeking when you did fall off the wagon, so to speak. After a year, you don't want to bother anyway - at worst you'll occasionally dream of lighting one up, but then feel perhaps a little guilty about the dream in the morning.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Well, crap... 8

Patty emailed me and solved the "why isn't anybody buying the Amazon ebook" question -- according to her, it's nearly impossible. She says they won't take a credit or debit card, you have to either have an Amazon gift card or that Amazon Prime crap.

So I don't know what to do. I'd just pull it and put it on the site for free like the other two books, but that would hardly be fair to the two people who jumped through Amazon's hoops.

Suggestions are very welcome.

Comment Re: No! (Score 2) 148

Not to drift too off-topic, but I noticed something WRT Sharepoint...

In most companies that I've seen, Sharepoint runs the company site that has all the HR and official corporate stuff (schedules, forms, etc), but that's it. Usually only one or two departments take their chunk of it even halfway seriously, while the rest put up some perfunctory content (if they even bother) and ignore it. Individual user content? Unless it's a multinational corp, you won't really see any of that, if at all.

Meanwhile, in the departments where the developers/sysadmins/engineers live, Confluence and JIRA dominate for content and ticketing, respectively (and before that, basic Wiki pages like TWiki held all the tribal knowledge). Sales departments usually turn to Salesforce, SAP, or similar.

I'm really not sure if any company uses it any differently outside of Microsoft itself. I think the only reason any organization bothered with Sharepoint in the first place is because the beancounters think it's "free" (nevermind the OS licensing and infrastructure requirements).

That said, Sharepoint has document versioning, sure... but that's about where the similarities to Git or Subversion end (CVS? Okay maybe, but only because CVS is outdated simplistic crap compared to SVN or Git.)

Comment Re:Science by democracy doesn't work? (Score 2, Insightful) 497

if the same data has been used to claim a warming trend and the same data is used to say otherwise I'd call that invalid data.

The same data has been used to claim men landed on the moon, and that the moon landing was a hoax. Therefore all data related to the moon landing should then be ignored. As it's proven flawed on both counts.

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Comment Re:Crusty Hardware (Score 5, Insightful) 189

So basically you want Apple and Microsoft to keep supporting your crusty old hardware with new features that it doesn't support anyway?

You're approaching it from the hobbyist/end-user viewpoint - turn in your geek card, please. The corporate/enterprise side of things will actually keep hardware around a whole hell of a lot longer, and industrial use cases keep old crap around the longest of all.

Example? No problem, I got a ton of those, including this little gem I dealt with a couple of years ago: Company spent millions on a certain specialized (solar cell) wafering machine whose computer still uses a parallel port (remember those?)/ It's a year or two out from ROI when it breaks down, but the manufacturer won't update or repair anything w/o the company spending millions on a new machine. Why? Because they stopped issuing patches/drivers for the machine long ago when Microsoft decided to drop their OS support, and the old stuff won't support USB enough to allow for a USB/Parport adapter.

This has fuck-all to do with fanboy ideology, and everything with having to keep systems up in situations where they need to.

Comment Re:A question for all the"deniers". (Score 1) 497

earth is primarily a self regulating eco-system leading to stability

Gaia is living, breathing, self stabilizing organism. Gaia actively maintains optimum conditions for live to thrive. If the sun fluctuates hotter, Gaia will keep us cool. If the sun fluctuates cooler, Gaia will keep us warm. We have released two quadrillion pounds (2,000,000,000,000,000) of CO2 into the atmosphere and the laws of physics say that will trap heat.... and Gaia will.... umm I dunno... but Gaia will do it's super-smart-Gaia-thing to to actively counter it and keep us in a loving protective embrace of shielded stability. If we have a nuclear war, Gaia will cleanse the environment and protect us from that nasty radiation-stuff. Gaia loves all life, gaia loves us and protects us. Gaia loves broadway shows and long walks on the beach. Gaia has profiles on eHarmony.com and JDate.com.

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