thesuperbigfrog - Slashdot User

Comment Re:!sales (Score 1) 111

by thesuperbigfrog on Sunday December 27, 2009 @12:06PM (#30563516) Attached to: Amazon Sells More Ebooks On Christmas Than Real Books

Kindle books are almost always cheaper than the new print equivalent (used print books are cheaper).

There are many good books available on Kindle offered for free on a promotional basis. Usually these books are the first in a series. I grabbed a copy of Manifold: Time for free during a promotion and ended up buying the other two books in the series, Manifold: Space and Manifold: Origin for $6.99 each.

There are also sample chapters available for most books so you can read the book before deciding to purchase or not.

Comment Re:Greedy publishers (Score 1) 111

by thesuperbigfrog on Sunday December 27, 2009 @11:55AM (#30563448) Attached to: Amazon Sells More Ebooks On Christmas Than Real Books

s/Test/Text/

Comment Re:Greedy publishers (Score 3, Informative) 111

by thesuperbigfrog on Sunday December 27, 2009 @11:51AM (#30563428) Attached to: Amazon Sells More Ebooks On Christmas Than Real Books

They are in the ebook publishing business with the Amazon Digital Test Platform: https://dtp.amazon.com/mn/signin

You can have your book published directly to Kindle and get better royalties than many other publishers would give you.

Submission + - Flight Of The Navigator: When CGI was HARD! (denofgeek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16, 2009 @03:03PM

An anonymous reader writes: Jeff Kleiser brought cinema its first photo-real, reflection-mapped CGI in 1986. A full five years before James Cameron's apparently ground-breaking 'metallic' visual effects in Terminator 2, Kleiser was trying to make a silver spaceship out of pixels for Walt Disney's Flight Of The Navigator.

Kleiser tells Den Of Geek just how hard it was to render CGI back when the 'jumping lamp' seemed like a landmark:

"To render the spaceship and get it onto film (along with a matte for the optical printing department), they had their own rendering software running on a prototype supercomputer called the Foonly F-1, which had formerly been used by Information International, Inc to drive their film recorders. The Foonly had very little disk space, so we had to render on the fly and send the data directly to the film recorder as it was being computed. That meant we had no way of reshooting a scene other than re-rendering it from scratch each time..."

Submission + - Linux Vendor Pays Off Microsoft

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16, 2009 @01:15PM

An anonymous reader writes: A vendor of Linux-based networking products has "settled" patent claims by Microsoft, Infoweek reports. Melco Group, which markets the Buffalo brand NAS devices and routers, will pay an undisclosed fee to Redmond. In return (reading between the lines), Microsoft won't sue Melco or its customers for using Linux code that supposedly contains Microsft IP. The problem, of course, is that Microsoft won't publicly state which parts of Linux allegedly infringe its patents. With vendors like Melco apparently willing to settle, Microsoft is undoubtedly motivated to chase down other so-called "offenders." A while back, Steve Ballmer said the company was even ready to go after Red Hat users.

Submission + - Apple Asks Microsoft to Stop New Ad Campaign (informationweek.com)

Submitted by Hyppy on Thursday July 16, 2009 @11:33AM

Hyppy writes: Microsoft COO Kevin Turner has received multiple correspondences from Apple requesting that Microsoft cease their new ad campaign. From the article: "Turner said Apple's legal eagles tried to depict the ads as inaccurate. 'Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices,' Turner quoted Apple's attorneys as saying. 'They took like $100 off or something,' said Turner. 'It was the single greatest phone call in history that I've ever taken in business.'"

Comment Paranoid Linux is your friend (Score 5, Interesting) 479

by thesuperbigfrog on Tuesday August 05, 2008 @07:35PM (#24488875) Attached to: Lessig Predicts Cyber 9/11 Event, Restrictive Laws

Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" describes a Linux distro called "Paranoid Linux" which has nice features for this kind of thing. Such as distro is already in the works: http://paranoidlinux.org/

Submission + - 32 Reasons Why Geeks are Severly Underpaid

Submitted by

GeekinOz

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @08:55PM

GeekinOz writes: "IT vs. Sales in the salary earning stakes.
Why are geeks losing out? Here's our in-depth answer:
32 Reasons Nearly All Geeks are Severely Underpaid
"Why are sales professionals still rewarded with the biggest pay packets? Are sales professionals better qualified or smarter than IT professionals? No, there's no such thing as a sales degree. Do they work longer or harder? Of course not. So why then is IT not the best paid profession?""

Submission + - Is swap a file system?

Submitted by

FS_Lover

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @07:51PM

FS_Lover writes: "Is swap itself a file system at all?"

Submission + - Patenting Life

Submitted by Archangel_Azazel on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @07:33PM

Archangel_Azazel writes: The New York Times is running a story here : http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/opinion/13cricht on.html?_r=1&oref=slogin about an opinion that Michael Crichton wrote about patenting genes and the harm to innovation and lives that gene patents cause.

There's also information about a bill being sponsered that may offer a solution, from TFA:

"Fortunately, two congressmen want to make the full benefit of the decoded genome available to us all. Last Friday, Xavier Becerra, a Democrat of California, and Dave Weldon, a Republican of Florida, sponsored the Genomic Research and Accessibility Act, to ban the practice of patenting genes found in nature."

Feed Beware the Daylight Saving Bug (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @07:12PM

As you spring forward this year, brace yourself for a software glitch that could affect computers, digital watches and clocks. By the Associated Press.

Submission + - GPLv3 license delayed by Novell/Microsoft review

Submitted by

PetManimal

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @06:31PM

PetManimal writes: "Reuters is reporting that the General Public License Version 3 is being held up by concerns about the Microsoft/Novell partnership. GPLv3 will govern the licensing of numerous open-source software licenses, but the article notes widespread community disdain for Novell, which recently got into bed with Microsoft and uses GPLv2 for SUSE Linux. Free Software Foundation general counsel Eben Moglen had originally expressed hope that the GPLv3 document would be completed this week, but says that's no longer realistic. From the Reuters article:

Some supporters of open-source software have called on the foundation to use the new agreement to address the Microsoft/Novell deal, such as by restricting Novell's ability to distribute upgrades of key parts of open-source Linux that are covered by GPLv3.
"

Submission + - How To Record On An iPod For Free Using iPod Linux

Submitted by

blue234

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @05:59PM

blue234 writes: "Have you ever wanted to record audio with your iPod? If you have got a third generation iPod, just following simple eight step guide to accomplish just that! How To Record On An iPod For Free Using iPod Linux"

Submission + - Secure a PC For Your Mom?

Submitted by

BoneThugND

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @05:33PM

BoneThugND writes: "ITSecurity.com has published a 20 minute guide to securing a PC. While many of the tips are solid, I am thinking I should go a bit further to protect my mom's new Windows machine. Assuming she is not a very savvy user, what should I be doing to make sure her box isn't slowed down by dozens of malware programs after three weeks of surfing?"

Submission + - Mythical Man-Month formula?

Submitted by frodpittle on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @05:20PM

frodpittle writes: We all know that doubling the number of developers doesn't halve the development time.

What rule-of-thumb formula do you use to adjust your development-time estimate based on the number of developers? For example, if a project will take 1 year with 2 developers, how long will it take with 5 developers? How dependent is the answer on the specifics of a particular project?

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