There are a lot of culture changes "no one wants." Among these are racially integrated societies. I'm not comparing the two, but I am saying that "unpopular ideas" should not be restricted based on their lack of popularity.
Wait
Don't forget Google and Apple, both of which operate online bookstores, too. If we're going to talk about "the ebook market," I don't think tracking sales of ereaders is the way to do it.
The problem is that they don't sell washing machines.
Amazon make enough profit in other areas of their business (eg: advertising) that they don't need to make a profit selling eBooks.
This is actually the case with Kobo, too. As others have pointed out, Kobo is owned by Japanese internet giant Rakuten, which makes a lotta money. In their earnings statements, they don't even break out the Kobo division's revenue as a separate line item. So they said Kobo revenues were "up 143%" last year, but they didn't say how much they actually were. Thus I take their claim that they're #2 in the ebook biz with a grain of salt.
He disrespected me and my craft
What
If you're claiming that Roger Ebert disrespected the craft of movie-making, on the other hand, you're a fool.
Yeah, maybe I just don't understand gamers, but I don't get all the fuss either. This is a collection of fun/weird things that you can plant in your city, like a big garden gnome or the "world's biggest ball of twine." They're free; all you gotta do is buy a tube of toothpaste or some floss, which I hope you're doing anyway. This just seems like harmless fun stuff for people who like to put their own stamp on their game worlds. And if it wasn't Crest sponsoring them, it would have been someone else.
He was big enough to get his own TV show, and it was very popular! This is astounding when you consider other types of art criticism.
He was also the first writer to win a Pulitzer Prize
“Given how complicated things in nature are, you might think the programs running them would be very complicated,” he began.
This one quote points to the main problem I had with A New Kind of Science, which was that Wolfram seemed to start with a plausible, interesting premise -- "patterns we see in nature can be modeled using very simple cellular automata" -- but then he seemed to repeatedly conclude that "these cellular automata are therefore what are running the processes of nature," which seems absurd.
It's like he has this bizarre short circuit in his brain where he thinks a successful model is necessarily identical to the real process, so that if you stare deeper and deeper into the model -- which you yourself created -- then you will be able to understand more about the real-world process without ever doing so much as a real-world experiment. What do you call that, if not a god complex?
Otherwise, I found Wolfram's text to be more or less indistinguishable from any other long-winded crank science manifesto that purports to refute all of known science and usher in a new age of progress if only the bastards weren't trying to keep me quiet, god damn them! It seems a shame that he's dedicated so much of his life to such pursuits when he seems to be an otherwise competent mathematician and programmer. Kind of a wasted life, if you ask me.
Eh? Netflix seems to work just fine on my Android tablets, and I'm pretty sure it's not using Silverlight there. Probably doesn't use it on the various Smart TVs and Blu-Ray players that support it, either. Is this just a case of Google deciding to enable something that other people were using already? Or do these other platforms use Moonlight or something?
Wow, where can you do that? What distribution channels does that give you access to?
For a lot of types of music, there is no mass market. The "distribution channels" are MySpace, Facebook, and Amazon. The role of the record label is minimal.
I had one friend who managed to score a distribution deal with a pretty big indy distributor. It meant you could walk into any Virgin Megastore on Earth and buy his CD. But did you? No
That said, realize that all a record label really is is a bank with a lot of connections. Everything a major record label "spends" on you
$125 for one ISBN is only "very expensive" when you consider that ten ISBNs is $250. There are plenty of people who are willing to sell you an extra ISBN for cheap.
That said, $125 for an ISBN is only "very expensive" in a country where the average person spends less than $125 for a bag of groceries. Which ain't this one.
On a broader level, one of most baffling things to me has been how little people are willing to invest in their own futures. They'll spend $1,500 on an HDTV, but spend $125 for an ISBN -- when publishing their novel is presumably one of their lifelong dreams -- hell no! I can't afford it! It's so much money! I've listened to long harangues from musicians about how unjust the music industry is, and it turns out all they need is $2,500 to put out an album that's already been written AND recorded. I just can't understand it -- if it's that important to you, if this is what you really want to do with your life, why wouldn't you just put $2,500 on your credit card and damn the consequences? Honestly, I've made my living as a writer for well over a decade now, so I know what it's like to make no money at all
Instead of training your staff not to open phishy emails, just ban any email client that allows execute-on-open.
I'm not sure that's the main problem, actually. Where spear phishing is concerned, I mostly hear about emails that are crafted to look like legitimate messages from companies like banks, FedEx, etc. If you can convince someone to click through to a website, it's not hard to ship them malware -- particularly if they have the Java plugin enabled.
One of the most annoying things about the MS API documentation is all the unexplained dependencies.
I've noticed this even when trying to do simple things -- such as whipping up a quick VBA macro for use in Word.
My question, though, is how do you think Microsoft should do it? Those structs exist, they need to be documented
Speak for yourself. I routinely carry a Nook Simple Touch in my back pocket, which is about the size of a 7" tablet. It's a lot more convenient than carrying a trade paperback book. With a book, I'll probably need to leave the house with a shoulder bag. With the Nook, I just put it in my pocket, irrespective of how long the book I'm reading is. When I want to sit down, I just take it out of my pocket and put it on the table. It works pretty well -- provided, of course, that you live in a city where you don't spend the majority of your time driving.
It's true, though. The Nexus 7 fits into the back pocket of a pair of Levi's 501s, though it's a little too long to be comfortable. It will also fit into the inside pocket of a lot of jackets, but it's a bit heavy to carry there.
BLISS is ignorance.
