"On the other, I can't help but think that the time spent creating such works is finite, and once complete no further time or resources are spent"
Speaking as a published author from a family of published authors, not only is this not true, but it completely misses the point.
Why would anyone write the books if they didn't receive a benefit? It takes *years*.
If you steal, you reduce the impetus for people to create. Simple as pie.
Helps you understand why indie game studios die, doesn't it? (Also speaking as the owner of an indie studio whose contract was pulled because of changing piracy rates during development.)
Maybe just stop trying to come up with excuses that it's okay for you to take things without paying for them. It isn't.
One, Kindle reads ePub just fine. Amazon used MobiPocket for their own content because it's a better standard. It's still an open standard. You might as well be suggesting they should use HTML2; it's also way more prevalent. It's also a very bad idea.
Two, Amazon books have *no* DRM.
Three, book pricing for eBooks is cheaper than any book system ever has been. Amazon heavily incentivizes authors to offer their books at the two dollar price point. They can't force the author to choose price 1 or price 2 because of archaic author defense laws (yes, I know Steam can do it; books have different rules from the founders' era.) They also *shouldn't* force prices: it's really up to the author.
Four, Amazon knows eBooks should be cheaper. That's why if the author chooses that price structure within a specific window, Amazon doubles the percentage that the author keeps.
Five, Kindle also supports PDF, which is way more standard than ePub or MobiPocket will ever be.
Six, Amazon isn't responsible for the quality of the books. Be serious. If you are unhappy with Glue, return it, and explain that the reason is because it's a garbage scan. Amazon will stop selling it (they've done that with major books before) until the publisher fixes it.
Seven: are you really complaining about Amazon in a post where your signature is an Amazon affiliate link?
RMS is just being a clueless idiot again. Amazon doesn't force anything. Hook the kindle to a USB port and drag a PDF onto it. Not deletable, not identified, not tracked.
You can do that on a Kindle without ever giving it a user account.
As usual, RMS has no idea what he's talking about, and just wants attention for somehow being an advocate for the people, even though nobody can ever explain how this actually benefits the people in a way that holds up to even minor scrutiny.
Cue the fanboy downvotes and the recitations of standard text which don't actually address what's been said.
Fantastically expensive? I get 25/25 for $43 after taxes and fees.
And customers of Serbian Broadband get 100/100 for less than half that price. And customers of LithuaniaCOM get 300 megabit for a little over half that price. And people in Hong Kong get gigabit symmetric for about that price. Et cetera.
Yes, the price you're used to is fantastically expensive.
> Unless they've edited that page since you commented that's bullshit.
Maybe you shouldn't criticize from anonymous coward attacks in the singular. I'm not sure which "that page" you're talking about - I didn't cite a specific page, so you have no idea which page I'm coming from.
Astroturf much?
> The job posting explicitly says they want native English speakers.
Which one? There are literally hundreds using that exact text, cut and pasted.
It is interesting that you refer to "on their various job postings" in the singular, like it hadn't even dawned on you that your very first hit might not be the one I meant. (Ostensibly this is because you went straight to the page at your employer's website, rather than to look for it, because if you actually Google that text, you get results across dozens of sites.)
Go criticize your own lack of googling skills under someone else's name, sir. I have no interest being attacked by a Packt staffmember from incorrect "facts" so painfully obviously structured from falsehoods.
Anonymous cowards are called cowards for a reason.
They acquired that "office" once I started telling people where they were. It's what an American would think of as a tax drop-box (some people might call it a safety deposit address).
Their real address is
Sagbag Lane, Off.Andheri Kurla Road, Saki Naka, Andheri East MUMBAI, Maharashtra, India 400001
Their phone number is
9769235506
On their various job postings for English technical editors, they mention that they will teach you English as part of your job... verifying... the quality of English technical writing.
I bought a Spring book from Packt which was full of wrong information, code examples that were garbage, et cetera. Packt is still selling the book, errors in place, and attempted to bribe me to remove my public requests to them to fix the book, instead of just fixing the book.
It's a shovel-ware scum publisher from India. They don't edit. Many of their books are essentially whole-sale theft of manuals.
Blu-ray was released globally in June 2006; by December 2010, even with PS3s counted, it had a consumer penetration of 10.7%, according to NPD. This is the slowest adoption of a non-fringe video technology in history.
For scale, DVD was released in Japan in Nov 96, in the US in March 1997 and in Europe in Oct 1998. Even though it took them two years to get to three continents, it passed the 12% penetration mark in under four months (I can't find a number between 8 and 12%, it penetrated so fast.)
So. Global release takes almost three and a half years to reach ten percent, whereas Japan-only release passes the 12% mark in under one financial quarter.
Even LaserDisc, the famously failed standard, hit 10% in under two years.
What is your metric for "catching on just fine?" Is it "I own two of them?"
Even if Blu-Ray doesn't succeed as a movie medium, it will succeed as a data medium
No, it won't, for the same reason that the much more plausible minidisc format failed: it is ridiculously unweildly, slow, expensive-per-byte, fragile and so on. A blu-ray burner starts around $85, and a writable 5-gig disc is in the neighborhood of $3.50 in bulk.
By comparison, the tiny, fast, durable, reliable MicroSD format will give you a reader/writer that pushes ten times the data rate of blu-ray *and* a cartridge five times the maximum size of a blu-ray disc for seven dollars.
Oh, and its stability isn't on the order of single digit year counts.
Why would anyone *ever* turn to blu-ray for storage? It's flash or tape, guy.
It is absolutely amazing to me that you're attempting to justify hardware choices in terms of the hardware being replaced, while ignoring the alternatives available. That's the kind of thinking one expects from a politician, not from someone with a five digit slashdot id.
How are you on an HPC group at LBNL if you think things like blu-ray will succeed as a storage medium? Do you make clusters of 386es?
Old movies that have been re-released in BD format have same visual resolution as on DVD
This is like saying that a CD and an edison wax cylinder have equivalent quality because you have a CD recording of a wax cylinder and you can't tell the difference.
On my 46 inch highdef tv I see no difference between, say The Bourne Identity DVD and BD.
Because thirty million bits a second is significantly smaller than blu-ray's video channel alone, for one; for two, rated bandwidth is rarely actually available; for three no current video vendor offers bitstreams a tenth that size; for four, blu-ray gets content long before non-pirated digital vendors do; for five, you can take it to a buddy's house; for six you can pick it up on the way home; for seven you don't have to worry about outages; et cetera.
When you find me an online video vendor whose quality even begins to approach that of blu-ray, I will show up at their virtual front door, wallet out.
Until then, one has limited options if one is quality focussed.
> Well, for one, what's the product differential? DVDs are movies on disks, Blu-Rays are movies on disks.
Uh. Only one of them can hold hi-def content, for one.
> Maybe Blu-Ray is better suited to archival apps?
Discs are never good for archival. Why would you even bring this up?
> Second, you play DVDs in a DVD player. I have one of those. But you play Blu-Rays on a PS3. Say what?
Er, no. You play DVDs in a DVD player and you play Blu-Ray in a Blu-Ray player. PS3 is a Blu-Ray player, and PS2 was a DVD player. The mistake you just made is equivalent to "you play laserdisc in a laserdisc player, and you play dvd in a PS2."
> Personally, I think Blu-Ray has missed its niche. Leave it to gaming, but design for the massive production values the medium is perfect for.
Yeah, that's actually exactly what they did, was to design for the massive production values the medium is perfect for. That's why the vast bulk of blu-ray sales are movies and TV. In the grand scheme of things, associating blu-ray with gaming is approximately equally stupid to associating DVD with gaming.
> I would love to see Square-Enix actually building fantasies on an unfettered planetary scale -- with, say, seamless pathways to approach the same character's emotions from nine directions, like flying/walking/swimming/riding/motoring over the same landscape that NEVER gets linear. Could we have that, please?
If you take Square-Enix out of the equation, the answer is "you had that 25 years ago."
> Put that on Blu-Ray and smoke it!
No, blu-ray isn't for smoking, just like it isn't for gaming.
Maybe you should stick to the things you know, like smoking and gaming, and stay away from "I can't tell the difference between these two formats, so I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist."
Speaking as someone who owns both a webhost and a SAAS, I can say that by the time the CPU load starts actually costing money, you've long since spent way, way more on bandwidth.
This is like saying that the reason people take the bus instead of owning a car is that you imagine tires must be more expensive, then when it's pointed out to you that even on the best cars tires aren't much of the cost, responding "yeah, but those people can afford tires."
So can everyone who can afford these things. You're defending guessed-at cost structures. Stop being silly, please: this just isn't how hosting economics work.
So, I'm wrong because he said something is too CPU intensive, so I showed that the people with the worst CPU problems aren't the ones doing this, and for giving counterexamples that aren't every site on the internet, you've decided the made up rule which fails in the most important cases must still be right?
Slashdot Mirror
"On the other, I can't help but think that the time spent creating such works is finite, and once complete no further time or resources are spent"
Speaking as a published author from a family of published authors, not only is this not true, but it completely misses the point.
Why would anyone write the books if they didn't receive a benefit? It takes *years*.
If you steal, you reduce the impetus for people to create. Simple as pie.
Helps you understand why indie game studios die, doesn't it? (Also speaking as the owner of an indie studio whose contract was pulled because of changing piracy rates during development.)
Maybe just stop trying to come up with excuses that it's okay for you to take things without paying for them. It isn't.
One, Kindle reads ePub just fine. Amazon used MobiPocket for their own content because it's a better standard. It's still an open standard. You might as well be suggesting they should use HTML2; it's also way more prevalent. It's also a very bad idea.
Two, Amazon books have *no* DRM.
Three, book pricing for eBooks is cheaper than any book system ever has been. Amazon heavily incentivizes authors to offer their books at the two dollar price point. They can't force the author to choose price 1 or price 2 because of archaic author defense laws (yes, I know Steam can do it; books have different rules from the founders' era.) They also *shouldn't* force prices: it's really up to the author.
Four, Amazon knows eBooks should be cheaper. That's why if the author chooses that price structure within a specific window, Amazon doubles the percentage that the author keeps.
Five, Kindle also supports PDF, which is way more standard than ePub or MobiPocket will ever be.
Six, Amazon isn't responsible for the quality of the books. Be serious. If you are unhappy with Glue, return it, and explain that the reason is because it's a garbage scan. Amazon will stop selling it (they've done that with major books before) until the publisher fixes it.
Seven: are you really complaining about Amazon in a post where your signature is an Amazon affiliate link?
RMS is just being a clueless idiot again. Amazon doesn't force anything. Hook the kindle to a USB port and drag a PDF onto it. Not deletable, not identified, not tracked.
You can do that on a Kindle without ever giving it a user account.
As usual, RMS has no idea what he's talking about, and just wants attention for somehow being an advocate for the people, even though nobody can ever explain how this actually benefits the people in a way that holds up to even minor scrutiny.
Cue the fanboy downvotes and the recitations of standard text which don't actually address what's been said.
That's actually their main office, where almost all of their staff are. Their Birmingham office has two people.
Please stop injecting guesses as data.
The England address is just a secretary, there to fool people like you into thinking anything happens in England other than mail forwarding.
So, you're telling me I'm wrong because someone replied to me with a guess at which page I meant, and it doesn't cite what I said?
No, it was not obvious that you were holding me to be responsible for someone else's link. Largely because that's retarded.
Ah, anyone who points out your anonymous errors is a troll. Go back to Digg where you belong.
And customers of Serbian Broadband get 100/100 for less than half that price. And customers of LithuaniaCOM get 300 megabit for a little over half that price. And people in Hong Kong get gigabit symmetric for about that price. Et cetera.
Yes, the price you're used to is fantastically expensive.
> Unless they've edited that page since you commented that's bullshit.
Maybe you shouldn't criticize from anonymous coward attacks in the singular. I'm not sure which "that page" you're talking about - I didn't cite a specific page, so you have no idea which page I'm coming from.
Astroturf much?
> The job posting explicitly says they want native English speakers.
Which one? There are literally hundreds using that exact text, cut and pasted.
It is interesting that you refer to "on their various job postings" in the singular, like it hadn't even dawned on you that your very first hit might not be the one I meant. (Ostensibly this is because you went straight to the page at your employer's website, rather than to look for it, because if you actually Google that text, you get results across dozens of sites.)
Go criticize your own lack of googling skills under someone else's name, sir. I have no interest being attacked by a Packt staffmember from incorrect "facts" so painfully obviously structured from falsehoods.
Anonymous cowards are called cowards for a reason.
They acquired that "office" once I started telling people where they were. It's what an American would think of as a tax drop-box (some people might call it a safety deposit address).
Their real address is
Sagbag Lane, Off.Andheri Kurla Road, Saki Naka,
Andheri East
MUMBAI, Maharashtra, India 400001
Their phone number is
9769235506
On their various job postings for English technical editors, they mention that they will teach you English as part of your job ... verifying ... the quality of English technical writing.
Generally, their code samples don't even compile.
Don't buy Packt. They're just scammers.
Kilgore Trout wouldn't look at a scathing condemnation and assume it to be an advertisement.
I bought a Spring book from Packt which was full of wrong information, code examples that were garbage, et cetera. Packt is still selling the book, errors in place, and attempted to bribe me to remove my public requests to them to fix the book, instead of just fixing the book.
It's a shovel-ware scum publisher from India. They don't edit. Many of their books are essentially whole-sale theft of manuals.
Never buy Packt.
That's because most people's home internet - eg the fantastically expensive Verizon FiOS network - don't even do IPv6 routing yet.
Blu-ray was released globally in June 2006; by December 2010, even with PS3s counted, it had a consumer penetration of 10.7%, according to NPD. This is the slowest adoption of a non-fringe video technology in history.
http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=4554
For scale, DVD was released in Japan in Nov 96, in the US in March 1997 and in Europe in Oct 1998. Even though it took them two years to get to three continents, it passed the 12% penetration mark in under four months (I can't find a number between 8 and 12%, it penetrated so fast.)
So. Global release takes almost three and a half years to reach ten percent, whereas Japan-only release passes the 12% mark in under one financial quarter.
Even LaserDisc, the famously failed standard, hit 10% in under two years.
What is your metric for "catching on just fine?" Is it "I own two of them?"
No, it won't, for the same reason that the much more plausible minidisc format failed: it is ridiculously unweildly, slow, expensive-per-byte, fragile and so on. A blu-ray burner starts around $85, and a writable 5-gig disc is in the neighborhood of $3.50 in bulk.
By comparison, the tiny, fast, durable, reliable MicroSD format will give you a reader/writer that pushes ten times the data rate of blu-ray *and* a cartridge five times the maximum size of a blu-ray disc for seven dollars.
Oh, and its stability isn't on the order of single digit year counts.
Why would anyone *ever* turn to blu-ray for storage? It's flash or tape, guy.
It is absolutely amazing to me that you're attempting to justify hardware choices in terms of the hardware being replaced, while ignoring the alternatives available. That's the kind of thinking one expects from a politician, not from someone with a five digit slashdot id.
How are you on an HPC group at LBNL if you think things like blu-ray will succeed as a storage medium? Do you make clusters of 386es?
"Because it just works, oh wait"
This is like saying that a CD and an edison wax cylinder have equivalent quality because you have a CD recording of a wax cylinder and you can't tell the difference.
Perhaps mention that to an optician.
Because thirty million bits a second is significantly smaller than blu-ray's video channel alone, for one; for two, rated bandwidth is rarely actually available; for three no current video vendor offers bitstreams a tenth that size; for four, blu-ray gets content long before non-pirated digital vendors do; for five, you can take it to a buddy's house; for six you can pick it up on the way home; for seven you don't have to worry about outages; et cetera.
When you find me an online video vendor whose quality even begins to approach that of blu-ray, I will show up at their virtual front door, wallet out.
Until then, one has limited options if one is quality focussed.
Leave it to a slashdotter to try to explain the failure of a popular video distribution medium in terms of hard-drive space.
> Well, for one, what's the product differential? DVDs are movies on disks, Blu-Rays are movies on disks.
Uh. Only one of them can hold hi-def content, for one.
> Maybe Blu-Ray is better suited to archival apps?
Discs are never good for archival. Why would you even bring this up?
> Second, you play DVDs in a DVD player. I have one of those. But you play Blu-Rays on a PS3. Say what?
Er, no. You play DVDs in a DVD player and you play Blu-Ray in a Blu-Ray player. PS3 is a Blu-Ray player, and PS2 was a DVD player. The mistake you just made is equivalent to "you play laserdisc in a laserdisc player, and you play dvd in a PS2."
> Personally, I think Blu-Ray has missed its niche. Leave it to gaming, but design for the massive production values the medium is perfect for.
Yeah, that's actually exactly what they did, was to design for the massive production values the medium is perfect for. That's why the vast bulk of blu-ray sales are movies and TV. In the grand scheme of things, associating blu-ray with gaming is approximately equally stupid to associating DVD with gaming.
> I would love to see Square-Enix actually building fantasies on an unfettered planetary scale -- with, say, seamless pathways to approach the same character's emotions from nine directions, like flying/walking/swimming/riding/motoring over the same landscape that NEVER gets linear. Could we have that, please?
If you take Square-Enix out of the equation, the answer is "you had that 25 years ago."
> Put that on Blu-Ray and smoke it!
No, blu-ray isn't for smoking, just like it isn't for gaming.
Maybe you should stick to the things you know, like smoking and gaming, and stay away from "I can't tell the difference between these two formats, so I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist."
My local CostCo still sells VCRs, and the last VHS factory was shut down half a decade ago.
CostCo just sells dead things.
The reason I don't buy Blu-Ray is that DVDs tend to be cheaper than the amount Sony charges just to put the logo on the box.
I bought HD-DVD because Sony wasn't making it hideously expensive.
Anyone who's read Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card, is now fidgeting nervously.
> yes it is familiar to me, so I think it's something we would consider for inclusion.
And people wonder why I laugh at them when they hold up the OED as a source to be taken seriously.
Speaking as someone who owns both a webhost and a SAAS, I can say that by the time the CPU load starts actually costing money, you've long since spent way, way more on bandwidth.
This is like saying that the reason people take the bus instead of owning a car is that you imagine tires must be more expensive, then when it's pointed out to you that even on the best cars tires aren't much of the cost, responding "yeah, but those people can afford tires."
So can everyone who can afford these things. You're defending guessed-at cost structures. Stop being silly, please: this just isn't how hosting economics work.
So, I'm wrong because he said something is too CPU intensive, so I showed that the people with the worst CPU problems aren't the ones doing this, and for giving counterexamples that aren't every site on the internet, you've decided the made up rule which fails in the most important cases must still be right?
Yeesh.
Except it is default on Facebook and Twitter, and his answer would be wrong in those cases otherwise anyway.
Except the sites that offer HTTPS are the highest traffic sites on the web: facebook, gmail, twitter.
You are dead wrong.