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Fuck "TiB". It should just be "TB" and base-10 whiners can STFU.

Fuck TiB, fuck TB, Fuck the base-10 whiners, and fuck base-2.

Units should be in laraBytes (la-B, which is 60^7 in metric-60), using base-60. We could use modern glyphs, but I'd go for cuniform just to really fuck with people's heads.

Read Diaspora by Greg Egan. http://www.amazon.com/Diaspora...

Or Smith's Autonomy http://autonomyseries.com/
Or Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur series. http://www.goodreads.com/serie...

All excellent novels.

So it sits there. Unpublished by anyone. I'll never know if nobody likes it until I hit the go button. But I'm also scared to learn that I suck at something I enjoy doing.

I went through a similar process to yours, with agents liking (but not taking) my novel. My wife has won literary awards for works agents wouldn't take because they couldn't see her stories becoming best sellers. Not just doing well (which they admitted they would do), but becoming best sellers! The entire publisher/agent thing is a bad joke on creative talent. These self appointed gatekeepers of our culture often miss the next big thing and are rarely looking for a new, different voice despite what they claim, but rather the next celebrity ghostwritten tripe where they can make a quick buck.

I can relate to your fear of rejection...I share it...but I'd encourage you to go for it. Make sure your book is professionally edited and proofread (this is absolutely critical, and far too many self-published authors don't do this). While you're doing that, figure out a promotional strategy. For example, line up bookstores in your area for signings, create a presence on goodreads, participate in book fairs, lit fests, and conventions applicable to your genre, etc.

Don't be too disappointed if you don't sell a ton of copies (it is very hard to get noticed), and don't measure yourself on that...measure yourself on how well people enjoy your work. That is the real metric on how well you write, and how good your work is. My novel Autonomy received all kinds of good reviews (from people I've never met!), but it's still not a "best seller." Just put your edited, polished work out there and if those who read it love it, then you don't "suck at something" you enjoy. Quite the opposite.

*50 Shades fans excluded, because they are a brain damaged lot.

Absolutely true! Not just the 50 shades reference, which is spot on, but the overall sentiment. The best reviews are done by the average public, though I would argue that said public should include authors of the Genre (perhaps marked with an icon as such). SciFi authors tend to be SciFi fans--I certainly am, and once my book comes out (shameless plug: Autonomy) next month, I won't be able to rate any of the hundreds of books I've read and enjoyed, which is a pity, because a fan of the genre, whether or not they write themself, is better suited to critiquing or reviewing a book in the genre than some random sampling of the broader populace.

I for one would find it very useful, for embedding things like sexagesimal numerals, e.g http://autonomyseries.com/autonomy-canon/community-standard-sexagesimal/ right now uses an aging wordpress plugin to display sexagesimal.ttf glyphs. Being able to embed "@font=sexagesimal.ttf" (or whatever the syntax is) would be very handy, but not if we're forced to convert our ttfs to Microsoft's worthless alternative format.

As for Microsoft's pathetic excuse that someone, somewhere might violate a copyright at some point in time my response is: so what? Just because someone, somewhere might violate someone's asinine copyright on a particular implementation of the alphabet's 26 letters, doesn't mean monopolists like Microsoft have any business throwing roadblocks in the way of the rest of us, who design our own fonts and want to be able to display and distribute them simply, seamlessly, and painlessly in standard, open formats. This isn't about protecting copyrights on fonts, its about Microsoft making sure IE isn't quite compatible with every other browser, and making sure we have to use their tools if we want anything to work on their dominant platform (and, if history is anything to judge by, eventually buy a license to do so). It's about muscling in on web standards to the detriment of everyone else, and I for one am fed up with it. I'm delighted Firefox, Opera, and Apple are embracing this. Hopefully they'll do the same with ogg-vorbis and other open standards, so we can have a complete web stack (including fonts and multimedia) that is unencumbered by American software patents, Microsoft (or anyone else's) proprietaryisms, sometimes-expensive licensing of third party products, and proprietary formats that only run on one or two widespread platforms.

Feh. Metric, shmetric, miles, shmiles. Nothing beats metric-60.

From a 15th century monk's perspective, today's curve is vertical. Of course to us it's clearly not. Thus the flaw of the hand-wringing over "the singularity" is illustrated--it suffers from the classic error of attempting to evaluate the future in the context of today. Of course when we get to the future, we'll be in the future too--so it doesn't matter what we think now.

That is exactly right. In my book Autonomy I take issue with the term singularity, and in fact describe the unpredicatability and unknowability of the future as a horizon instead. Not an "event horizon", which implies discontinuous change (a "singularity"), but a simple, everyday horizon, like the one each of us sees every day due to the curvature of our planet. Just as we cannot see California from New York, or Paris from London, so to we cannot see the post-human daily grind (or understand it) from the early twenty-first century. My argument is very similar to yours: from the point of view of the caveman, the invention of archery is a singularity granting their descendents godlike powers to kill at a distance. From the point of view of Native Americans the invention of ships was a singularity, granting godlike powers to Europeans to emerge from the water and conquer their empires. Likewise for the invention of steam power, electricity, and hundreds of other world-changing technologies I've not mentioned.

Each change, whether revolutionary or evolutionary, whether explosive or gradual, has been contiguious. There has not been a "discontinuity", nor will there be one. Indeed, the closer we get to Vinge's "Singuarity" the better we grasp what form it might take. By the time we reach that point in the exponential curve, we will likely see it as just another step in the gradual, contiguous progression of life and technology. We may do so with what to us today are godlike powers of reason and intelligence, but to us (or our descendents then), it will just be another day at the office, using our common sense and everyday tools that augment our abilities, just as the first sharp rock augmented our ancestors' ability to dress the meat of the animal they killed for dinner.

I remember the famous quip:-

"FreeBSD is what you get when a group of UNIX hackers sit down to write a port of UNIX for the PC. Linux is what happens when a group of PC hackers sit down and write a UNIX clone for the PC."

For starters, read this. Linux isn't simply decentralised; it's unplanned. There's a very large difference. (Debian users/developers, I acknowledge you as an exception, here)

Secondly, go and get a copy of bsd.port.mk, read it and some sample makefiles. Compare this with rpm, and some of the spec file examples you can find from Mandrake and a few of the other distributions that use it. Note your conclusions.

It also needs to be pointed out that lack of comparitive lack of hardware support should not be considered an indictment of an operating system, in itself. Unfortunately, hardware support exists as part of a vicious cycle; if more people use the system, more hardware will become supported because of the increased demand. Linux has experienced its' own problems in this regard.

Linux is more popular because:-
a) If anything, FreeBSD's developers are actually *more* strongly technically oriented, and hence more obscure. I've repeatedly read the claims about Theo de Raadt being difficult to work with, but my own theory on that is simply that Theo is possibly someone who genuinely is unusually intellectually gifted, and hence finds himself becoming deeply frustrated at times when he is unable to communicate his ideas to others in a manner that they can understand. I've considered it as tragic as anyone else when UNIX users in general behave in a manner which suggests that they feel superior to their fellow man; however, the reality is that this superiority complex is genuinely justified in most cases.

b) Richard Stallman has, I believe, expended a large amount of effort to discredit the BSD license and discourage its' use as thoroughly as possible.

c) Yes, the BSD license *is* incompatible with corporate greed. Might we be honest here however and admit that that is more an indictment of corporate moral degeneracy than it is the BSD license? The other thing is...I suspect that the only reason why the BSD license even exists as such at all is actually because other licenses do. In other words, originally there existed a scenario where in software authors' minds, software being devoid of ownership was something known/thought of at an instinctive or barely conscious level. If you look at bsd.port.mk, Jordan Hubbard's statement there is that the file is in the public domain. Not "free as in freedom." Just plain free, in every possible sense of the word, all at once. In Richard Stallman's case, the definition of freedom has become perverted and distorted, and looking at the BSD and some of the Creative Commons license can show us why that is so.

I remember reading another quote:-
"Freedom is the only law that genius knows."

It's also the only law that true genius needs. What we now call FOSS originally came from a place where some abnormally intelligent, deeply spiritual people wrote and saw software as simply one part of an entire world that they wanted to live in; a world where it is understood instinctively that humanity is an intimately connected, genetically related group, and that each additional human being who exists has priceless value as a means of that group being able to express itself in a unique and previously entirely undiscovered way.

Contrast that to the type of vision that groups like Microsoft, WIPO and the RIAA have, and you might begin to understand why the BSD license hasn't become as popular. It is surprising that they tolerate even the GPL, watered down though it is.