They can only get away with the high price if they are comfortable selling to a small market of early adopters. If publishers want ebooks to go mainstream, they will have to lower the price to something quite a bit lower then the price of the dead-tree edition. Maybe like a third of the price or something.
When I looked into buying ebooks, I was floored they cost so much. Why bother when they dead-tree versions do more and cost less?
I'm sorry, but I don't see the problem with this. What are pirates taking by copying data? How are they harming others?
Out of curiosity, what do you do for a living. And if you don't do anything yet, what is your plans for the future. Because if it is anything involving technology, the bread on your table and the roof over your head is the result of selling what is inside your head. Undermine the legals system in a way that devalues your gray matter, and you will be out on the street.
It is prone to jitter. Plus only an analog connection can accurately reproduce the full color gamut that today's high end systems can generate. The same way audiophiles can hear the jaggyness of digital audio, many skilled developers can see the ones and zeros of such a digital link. With analog monster brand DVI cables, it is a pure waveform.
Your suggestion to use DSL is silly. DSL is prohibitively expensive. So expensive that only two kings in Prussia have such technology. Besides--what use is connecting two computers with a high speed link?
If you are running a massive data center that hosts a webfarm, cloud cluster, or some other large horizontally scaled computing project and require highly technical staff troubleshooting individual machines onsite, your process and application is completely screwed up. A well designed, horizontally scaled app should not fail if multiple machines go down.
At the scale of Yahoo, Google or facebook, they probably dont even bother to troubleshoot a machine that is even hinting at questionable behavior. They just yank it off the load balancer and have some unskilled dude take the machine, dump it, and put in a new one.
If you have a massive failure of your system, short of a natural disaster it ain't a hardware issue or a server issue. It is an application bug that require software engineers to fix. They don't have to be at the datacenter, they just create a patch from the comfort of their normal office (or home) and push it out to production.
I agree with your concerns. Many Silicon Valley startups have taken to using expensive Monster Brand DVI cables to link the computers in Buffalo with the monitors in the Valley.
That said, many techies claim you can just use ordinary lamp cord for the DVI signal, true techies know that Monster Cable uses sophisticated techniques to cut out jitter and chromatic abnormalities often introduced in transit over the Sierra Nevada mountain range. I personally would not hire an admin who did not use monster cabling.
Some have taken to frame-grabbing. They capture the screen in Buffalo several times second, compress the image using sophisticated algorithms such as GIF89 or TIFF, and the send them using ordinary phone lines as pulses of one or zero. It is very expensive, and only the most well funded start-ups use this technique.
Ditto. Tried to find it on YouTube... No dice. The least they could do is upload it to YouTube (or the much better vimeo). On YouTube it would play everywhere, including through the media player hooked up to the tv.
Which sucks because I wanted to watch it. I certainly ain't gonna go use my "real" computer.
Stupid FOSS politics. Gets in the way of actually doing useful things.
Twitter is hardly mainstream. Out of a huge assortment of people I know, almost all of them, nerds or technophobes have a facebook account. I have only met one person who claims to use Twitter.
Twitter is pure, 100% hype. It is the most hyped ".com" I've seen since, well, the dot.com days. Seriously. Twitter is not mainstream in the least.
Those "normal" people will not care if their phone is hobbled by the carrier.
I don't know if that is true anymore. The market for mobile apps might have shifted just enough that people will want "killer apps" on their phone. If the cell companies start locking stuff so that you can only buy through their app store, people won't buy the phone.
Now, all the crapplets and custom branding? Just look at how much of that shit is on the average laptop. The average buyer either doesn't care, or does care but thinks it is too much of a hassle to remove.
Even if the way americans buy cell phones changes, and we start buying unlocked phones, the crapplets will remain—they will just be from the vendor that sold the phone.
But locked down app stores (in the "must be signed by and bought in the AT&T / Verison mega-mall to run on this phone sense, not the apple app store sense") days are numbered.
Those jailbreaks are only possible through exploits in the operating system. "jailbreak" is really an emphusium for "local root exploit" (or in some cases, "remote root exploit"). Would you rather they leave the local root exploit in the code?
Here is why jailbreaks are bad: do you really trust the code you just ran to do the right thing? It is like running a keygen as root as admin on XP (ie the default for win XP). Sure it might crack the program, but lots of those "harmless" keygen programs jnstallled other, not so harmless things like spyware and botnet clients.
The people who make these jailbreak apps do share a somewhat common lineage with the keygen scene. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those things are installing other, more "exciting" things as part if their payload. And if they aren't now, it is 100% likely somebody will. It may not be on the mainstream jailbreak download, but people are idiots and run things they download from anywhere. Download the wrong jailbreak and your iPad/iPhone will get hosed.
I too use tech Luddites. And it is very apt in this site. I partially blame the "hacker culture" spun up by people like RMS. To them, if it is easy to use, it is sinful and you should feel guilty using it.
It is basically geek religion—seriously! Easy to use, or proprietary both evoke guilty pleasure. Pleasure is shameful and sinful. Forgiveness comes in busting your ass off using Pure Free Software like GNUsense.
I'd elaborate more, but I am delay serious when I say that kind of techludditism stems from a modern day form of religion that targets the same types of guilty/sin triggers that something like, say, catholisism does. Religion for nerds.
Your post makes little sense. Short of increasing the speed of light, how to you propose a designer can decease latency on a network where they do not have control over the hops between the two endpoints.
The only reason landlines have less latency is because the telco owns the entire route between point A and point B (or at least to where it gets handed off to Skype or your cell provider)
Because that would cost a hell of a lot more money to build, develop and maintain.
What open book format? How will the school convince publishers to use that format? Who will ensure the system in the Childs hand remains secure? If you propose a heterogeneous environment where this whole thing runs of varied platforms, who will test it? If you propose the kids use their own setup, what if that setup is not supported?
Or you can just buy a crate of ipads, shove a bunch of ebooks on there and call it a day.
Yup. When I did a daily car commute, the right lane was always the fastest. I mean, think about it, who would be caught dead in the "slow lane"? It would be just so unfashionable! Thus, all the inattentive soccer moms would pile up in the trendy left lane and camp there their whole trip. Even in dense traffic, the right lane would be the fastest.
It is so nice to drive on roads where everybody sticks to the right. Makes it easy to use cruise control and makes determining the relative speeds of fellow drivers easier too.
The budget part is relevant, but only to the extent that every human being ought to know how to manage their resources. The rest is suited for an assistant trained in accounting.
Isn't that the exact same complaint developers and IT folk have about management? That the senior execs don't know C# the language from C# the note?
What you are saying is that management doesn't need to worry about those scum in accounting—they can treat accounting like a black box were magic goes in and magically record growth numbers come out. Kind of like how programmers take in cheap pizza and "make it work" as a spec and by magic crank out a working product in a single weekend.
You better be caraful with statements like that because if you subscribe to the idea that the management ought to know what devs do, you also have to subscribe to the idea that they need to know what accounting does too.
There is a reason the higher the level in the company you go, the broader your knowledge must be. You need to know how all the pieces fit—how accounting can help development, how the IT staff can improve the workplace, how marketing can sell the damn thing, and how the lawyers can keep everybody out of jail.
MBA is a masters degree yo. It is something you get after you get your bachelors. If you flunked out of a bunch of stuff during your undergrad, odds are good you wouldn't get admitted in a high-ranking MBA program, nor would you have the desire.
You don't get an MBA because you are a "jock" or are some kind of party person. What is this, high school?
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is full of old fogies like that. A tech site full of tech Luddites.
Your sig. Sneakers. Nice. :-)
They can only get away with the high price if they are comfortable selling to a small market of early adopters. If publishers want ebooks to go mainstream, they will have to lower the price to something quite a bit lower then the price of the dead-tree edition. Maybe like a third of the price or something.
When I looked into buying ebooks, I was floored they cost so much. Why bother when they dead-tree versions do more and cost less?
I'm sorry, but I don't see the problem with this. What are pirates taking by copying data? How are they harming others?
Out of curiosity, what do you do for a living. And if you don't do anything yet, what is your plans for the future. Because if it is anything involving technology, the bread on your table and the roof over your head is the result of selling what is inside your head. Undermine the legals system in a way that devalues your gray matter, and you will be out on the street.
I'm really starting to believe that we could completely do away with copyrights and things would change very little.
Well, for starters the GPL would not work. It would be closer to public domain, where anything goes.
I love how this got modded up. Paranoid much?
Branding. Gotta be his signature font. Probably nobody else gets to use times new roman.
Or an artifact of translation? Who knows!
Not even close to being as good. Google was down to earth. Bing was extra verbose
It is prone to jitter. Plus only an analog connection can accurately reproduce the full color gamut that today's high end systems can generate. The same way audiophiles can hear the jaggyness of digital audio, many skilled developers can see the ones and zeros of such a digital link. With analog monster brand DVI cables, it is a pure waveform.
Your suggestion to use DSL is silly. DSL is prohibitively expensive. So expensive that only two kings in Prussia have such technology. Besides--what use is connecting two computers with a high speed link?
If you are running a massive data center that hosts a webfarm, cloud cluster, or some other large horizontally scaled computing project and require highly technical staff troubleshooting individual machines onsite, your process and application is completely screwed up. A well designed, horizontally scaled app should not fail if multiple machines go down.
At the scale of Yahoo, Google or facebook, they probably dont even bother to troubleshoot a machine that is even hinting at questionable behavior. They just yank it off the load balancer and have some unskilled dude take the machine, dump it, and put in a new one.
If you have a massive failure of your system, short of a natural disaster it ain't a hardware issue or a server issue. It is an application bug that require software engineers to fix. They don't have to be at the datacenter, they just create a patch from the comfort of their normal office (or home) and push it out to production.
I agree with your concerns. Many Silicon Valley startups have taken to using expensive Monster Brand DVI cables to link the computers in Buffalo with the monitors in the Valley.
That said, many techies claim you can just use ordinary lamp cord for the DVI signal, true techies know that Monster Cable uses sophisticated techniques to cut out jitter and chromatic abnormalities often introduced in transit over the Sierra Nevada mountain range. I personally would not hire an admin who did not use monster cabling.
Some have taken to frame-grabbing. They capture the screen in Buffalo several times second, compress the image using sophisticated algorithms such as GIF89 or TIFF, and the send them using ordinary phone lines as pulses of one or zero. It is very expensive, and only the most well funded start-ups use this technique.
Ditto. Tried to find it on YouTube... No dice. The least they could do is upload it to YouTube (or the much better vimeo). On YouTube it would play everywhere, including through the media player hooked up to the tv.
Which sucks because I wanted to watch it. I certainly ain't gonna go use my "real" computer.
Stupid FOSS politics. Gets in the way of actually doing useful things.
Twitter is hardly mainstream. Out of a huge assortment of people I know, almost all of them, nerds or technophobes have a facebook account. I have only met one person who claims to use Twitter.
Twitter is pure, 100% hype. It is the most hyped ".com" I've seen since, well, the dot.com days. Seriously. Twitter is not mainstream in the least.
Damn Luddite. Why are you on a tech site bitching about tech? Upgrade your damn 486.
Seroously. What is with the Luddites on this site?
I don't know if that is true anymore. The market for mobile apps might have shifted just enough that people will want "killer apps" on their phone. If the cell companies start locking stuff so that you can only buy through their app store, people won't buy the phone.
Now, all the crapplets and custom branding? Just look at how much of that shit is on the average laptop. The average buyer either doesn't care, or does care but thinks it is too much of a hassle to remove.
Even if the way americans buy cell phones changes, and we start buying unlocked phones, the crapplets will remain—they will just be from the vendor that sold the phone.
But locked down app stores (in the "must be signed by and bought in the AT&T / Verison mega-mall to run on this phone sense, not the apple app store sense") days are numbered.
Those jailbreaks are only possible through exploits in the operating system. "jailbreak" is really an emphusium for "local root exploit" (or in some cases, "remote root exploit"). Would you rather they leave the local root exploit in the code?
Here is why jailbreaks are bad: do you really trust the code you just ran to do the right thing? It is like running a keygen as root as admin on XP (ie the default for win XP). Sure it might crack the program, but lots of those "harmless" keygen programs jnstallled other, not so harmless things like spyware and botnet clients.
The people who make these jailbreak apps do share a somewhat common lineage with the keygen scene. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those things are installing other, more "exciting" things as part if their payload. And if they aren't now, it is 100% likely somebody will. It may not be on the mainstream jailbreak download, but people are idiots and run things they download from anywhere. Download the wrong jailbreak and your iPad/iPhone will get hosed.
I too use tech Luddites. And it is very apt in this site. I partially blame the "hacker culture" spun up by people like RMS. To them, if it is easy to use, it is sinful and you should feel guilty using it.
It is basically geek religion—seriously! Easy to use, or proprietary both evoke guilty pleasure. Pleasure is shameful and sinful. Forgiveness comes in busting your ass off using Pure Free Software like GNUsense.
I'd elaborate more, but I am delay serious when I say that kind of techludditism stems from a modern day form of religion that targets the same types of guilty/sin triggers that something like, say, catholisism does. Religion for nerds.
Your post makes little sense. Short of increasing the speed of light, how to you propose a designer can decease latency on a network where they do not have control over the hops between the two endpoints.
The only reason landlines have less latency is because the telco owns the entire route between point A and point B (or at least to where it gets handed off to Skype or your cell provider)
Because that would cost a hell of a lot more money to build, develop and maintain.
What open book format?
How will the school convince publishers to use that format?
Who will ensure the system in the Childs hand remains secure?
If you propose a heterogeneous environment where this whole thing runs of varied platforms, who will test it?
If you propose the kids use their own setup, what if that setup is not supported?
Or you can just buy a crate of ipads, shove a bunch of ebooks on there and call it a day.
Yeah, and even ones a few decades old have elementary school kids adding the number of cigarretes in a carton.
Basic math may not have changed, but they way we teach it has.
Yup. When I did a daily car commute, the right lane was always the fastest. I mean, think about it, who would be caught dead in the "slow lane"? It would be just so unfashionable! Thus, all the inattentive soccer moms would pile up in the trendy left lane and camp there their whole trip. Even in dense traffic, the right lane would be the fastest.
It is so nice to drive on roads where everybody sticks to the right. Makes it easy to use cruise control and makes determining the relative speeds of fellow drivers easier too.
Moral? Stick to the right, jackass.
Why would you want to work for somebody Ike that anyway? It would be clear from the start the two of you wouldn't be a good fit.
Isn't that the exact same complaint developers and IT folk have about management? That the senior execs don't know C# the language from C# the note?
What you are saying is that management doesn't need to worry about those scum in accounting—they can treat accounting like a black box were magic goes in and magically record growth numbers come out. Kind of like how programmers take in cheap pizza and "make it work" as a spec and by magic crank out a working product in a single weekend.
You better be caraful with statements like that because if you subscribe to the idea that the management ought to know what devs do, you also have to subscribe to the idea that they need to know what accounting does too.
There is a reason the higher the level in the company you go, the broader your knowledge must be. You need to know how all the pieces fit—how accounting can help development, how the IT staff can improve the workplace, how marketing can sell the damn thing, and how the lawyers can keep everybody out of jail.
MBA is a masters degree yo. It is something you get after you get your bachelors. If you flunked out of a bunch of stuff during your undergrad, odds are good you wouldn't get admitted in a high-ranking MBA program, nor would you have the desire.
You don't get an MBA because you are a "jock" or are some kind of party person. What is this, high school?
Judging by the number of MBAs hired by apple, I would say MBA's are pretty darn prevalent.