Harry Potter Mania...

The wife, daughter, a friend of hers and their two kids all went into town last night and bought the new Harry Potter book, LOL. They didn't get back until 2:30 AM. What a gold-mine for J.K. Rowling...

Can you think of a similar item when (you were growing up) which captured the imagination of young America like Harry Potter? Tinker-Toys, a .22 Rifle, and the Zebco 202 come to my mind, LOL...

Happy Reading
Ben

 

Well for one year in 1983 people did this with cabbage patch dolls, and beat the crap out of each other trying to get them.

 

The Mrs has just finished her copy LOL

 

^^^ Well, I'll be the last here to get ahold of our copy so don't spill any secrets. PLEASE...

 

Well it goes like this LOL Once upon a time :goofer:

 

My oldest has a copy already. He is reading it now. I haven't read any of them but have seen a few of the movies.

 

Excuse me, but who is Harry Potter?

 

Those seem like boy stuff. Whereas the Harry Potter books tend to excite both genders and all ages. I dont see the big deal. But it gets kids to read

 

Teach a man to fish...


From Wikipedia...

Google is a search engine owned by Google, Inc. whose mission statement is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". The largest search engine on the web, Google receives several hundred million queries each day through its various services. The last reported figures were 2.5 billion queries each day as of February 2004, up from 3 million queries per day in September 1999 and 10,000 queries per day in November 1998.

Google not only indexes and caches HTML files but also 13 other file types, which include PDF, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Flash SWF, plain text files, among others. Except in the case of text and SWF files, the cached version is a conversion to HTML, allowing those without the corresponding viewer application to read the file.

Users can customize the search engine somewhat. They can set a default language, use "SafeSearch" filtering technology (which is on 'moderate' setting by default), and set the number of results shown on each page. Google has been criticized for placing long-term cookies on users' machines to store these preferences, a tactic which also enables them to track a user's search terms over time. For any query (of which only the 32 first keywords are taken into account), up to the first 1000 results can be shown with a maximum of 100 displayed per page.

Around 2001, the Google search engine rose to prominence. Its success was based in part on the concept of link popularity and PageRank. The number of other websites and webpages that link to a given page is taken into consideration with PageRank, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. The PageRank of linking pages and the number of links on these pages contribute to the PageRank of the linked page. This makes it possible for Google to order its results by how many websites link to each found page. Google's minimalist user interface is very popular with users, and has since spawned a number of imitators.

Google and most other web engines utilize not only PageRank but more than 150 criteria to determine relevancy.Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Stanford University. 1998. The algorithm "remembers" where it has been and indexes the number of cross-links and relates these into groupings. PageRank is based on citation analysis that was developed in the 1950s by Eugene Garfield at the University of Pennsylvania. Google's founders cite Garfield's work in their original paper. In this way virtual communities of webpages are found. Teoma's search technology uses a communities approach in its ranking algorithm. Nippon Electric Corporation|NEC Research Institute has worked on similar technology. Web link analysis was first developed by Jon Kleinberg and his team while working on the CLEVER project at IBM's Almaden Research Center. Google is currently the most popular search engine.

In addition to its tool for searching webpages, Google also provides services for searching images, Usenet newsgroups, news websites, videos, searching by locality, maps, and items for sale online. In 2006, Google has indexed over 25 billion web pages, 1.3 billion images, and over one billion Usenet messages.[citation needed] It also caches much of the content that it indexes. Google operates other tools and services including Google News, Google Suggest, Froogle, Google Maps, Google Co-op and Google Desktop Search.

http://www.google.com

I bet out the 25 billion web pages web pages google has indexed, at least one will be about Harry Potter.

 

DE ORC!!! DUDE!!!!!! Im on like page 24, but just got mine like a half hour ago. but stil! A 760 page book in 11 hours!?!

 

The name of my best friend for the next twelve or so hours.

 

Lol, nice frank. I just saw the new movie on wednsday, and i have to say that it was dissapointing. It was good, but not great. Im on chapter 7 right now of the book.

 

My oldest daughter and I went around to a few of the big chain bookstores and we were amazed at the number of people sitting all over the place on the floor. We had to step over people just to walk through. They had little activities and such. We ended up waiting in a much shorter line at Walmart (it was $5 less there also). She had hers by about 12:30.

I kept yelling "I got an advanced copy and Valdamoor is Harry's father", it was a hoot.

 

lol, nice joke.

 

Hate to say this Cody but I finished it in 7 hours! My wife was disgusted, all that anticipation and excitement and I didn't even have the decency to savor the book! lol

 

I just waited for the Mrs to finish it then she gave me edited highlights of the good bits LOL I have her 2 box's of the latest release trading cards for Xmas as well

 

Regarding the original question, I can't recall anything comparable when I was a kid. Toy advertising hadn't really taken off yet and basically we played baseball every day fro morning until dark.

 

Thanks Stu, I'll bet you'r right on this one.

Doesn't that quote you gave go something like this:
"Give a man a fish and he eats for one day, teach him how to fish and he sits in a boat and drinks beer all day."

 

I just finished books 6 and 7 last week. Book 7 was the probably the best of the series but only because I always like the book that wraps up many of the details. It didn't wrap them all up but you'll figure that out for yourself.

I took the kids to Borders the night book seven came out and waited until midnight for a copy. Some over weight nerdish 20-something got his copy and walked to the exit and took out a hidden microphone of some kind and announced a crucial detail as he exited the store and then ran for it. Kids all over the store gowned.

My kids were probably closest to the exit at the time. I heard it too but I am not bothered by knowing the details or the ending of a book like many people tell me they are. I mean I know the ending to the Iliad and the Odyssey but they are still good reading. Unfortunately, some people are just so pathetic that they get excited by ruining little kids days.

If you haven't read the series, you are missing out on something that is bound to be part of our culture for quite some time.

 

The wife already finished her copy. She's really into the series, but I don't understand the hype. I guess a degree in English puts you in the frame of mind that if it was written after 1950, it's not worth reading, ha...

I've been dragged along to all the movies so far, though. They're OK, I guess.