Slashdot Mirror

You can go to http://greatfirewallofchina.org/test and test if a specific URL is censored by China (they use a remote server and have it try to make an outbound connection). The site is up and down at the moment due to a mention on Fark.com, but I was able test a few URLs:

• http://slashdot.org/ - not blocked when I tested, but periodically blocked
• http://cnn.com/ - not blocked at the moment, but periodically blocked
• http://ralan.com/ & http://locusmag.com/ (Sci Fi market info) - blocked.
• http://thehaws.org/ (my site) - not blocked... which is kind of disappointing

Apologies in advance for being long winded...

If you only count the official "submission to pro fiction magazines", I've been uncannily lucky. Not being too prolific, I've only sent out a half dozen formal submissions over the years and got this one sale last year.

For several years, though, I submitted three or more times a year to an amateur short-short contest in the Orange County Register and placed in the top ten half the time (meriting being put on their website) and scored first twice (to wind up in their newspaper). One of those grew into the Black Gate piece.

On the (nominally) nonfiction front, I wrote several articles for Dragon. In would pitch, say, twenty different articles at a sentence a piece before the editor would tell me he liked one and asked me to write the article. Perhaps one in five of those I liked enough to actually carry out and complete a full article. Of those articles that were "preapproved" that were submitted, he only turned down two - one of which was by an assistant editor in a very unprofessional manner that convinced me to end my relationship with Dragon.

So, my ratio is either very high (about 80% for "preapproved" Dragon articles), good (16% for "submission to pro fiction magazines"), or rather low (about 1% for total Dragon pitches).

If you're not bored yet with my ramblings and want to see the total tally of pieces that saw print, check out my site.

the market share for winCE is, in fact, dropping like a stone

I've got Windows CE on my resume and I'm getting 3-5 unsolicited calls/EMAILs weekly for headhunters looking for CE guys. We work with a CE house that is buried. I won't say CE's market share will overcome VxWorks anytime soon, but for anything with a GUI display or that's web enabled, it's a very valid choice.

WinCE was 50 bucks, which is a lot of money in an embedded product.

First, I'd need to verify with our contract guys to be sure, but I believe we're paying more on the order of $10/licence. $50 sounds a lot more like embedded XP to me (which we're using in other products). Also, we're running an x86 with no BIOS, so BIOS royalties go away. In anycase, while recurring cost is a big issue, for lower volume products (say under 100K) the savings in initial software development costs (our biggest item here) recoups.

Now, before you say "Low volume, what a cop out!" I need to point out that there's an enormous amount of embedded development out there that meet this critera. Go to a trade show and you'll find at least half of the atendees are not building VCRs or PDAs but niche products - medication inventory trackers embedded within pharmacy carts, portable diagnostic equipment for high voltage power lines, or (in my case) in flight entertainment systems. You won't find any of these things at your local Best Buy, but there's more than enough demand for them to support these lower volumes. I agree that this was not MS'es initial goal, and it makes me wonder if they'll ever turn their back on CE because of that, but for the moment CE looks quite healthy to me.

I've written a couple of things for Dragon in the past. While developing a gaming product is quite different, I like that the staff was very professional (with the exception of a single member of the editorial staff who shall remain nameless), they paid on acceptance, and the checks never bounced -- all of which are questionable when dealing with other F/SF magazines. They paid out about $400 for a 8K word article (which took about 40K of rewrites to do - about $1/hour). I also like that Dave Gross is very quick turning around EMAILed article queries - perhaps a week or two is the longest I ever waited. That's greased lighting in the publishing biz, my friends.

One thing to remember, though, is that unlike conventional publishers, game houses like WoTC buy all rights forever. That means you loose all control. It's not that big a deal (heck, you're being paid) but it sometimes irks me that I can't post my stuff at my site.

If you're interested it pitching something to Dragon, read the submission guidelines and come up with a half dozen ideas. Then EMAIL Dave with the ideas. You might go through twenty or thirty ideas before coming up with a winner, but once he sees something he likes you can get down to scribbling.

Good luck!