Well, even if you haven't expressed yourself in the original posts, when you compile all your Face-Tweets into a journal and self-publish as an e-book then you've *really* expressed yourself!
Ah. As described, that's pretty reasonable. I play another game where chat commands are more like command-line interfaces, and by the time you've typed "/r" and then a whole message, if someone else talks to you in the meantime you misfire.
This is incredibly informative. I'm not in your readership market, but I don't object in the least that you mentioned your product while also providing useful information. I've thought about self publishing, and I wish there were a few dozen more posts expansively detailed like yours, so I could have a great spectrum of experiences to draw from.
For what it's worth, I go out of my way to mention my computer game on slashdot any chance I get, as long as I can be on topic. Nobody's yelled at me yet for self-promotion, though quite a few can't get past the word "Twilight" and assume it must mean vampires, rather than the deprecated, historical meaning of "sunset." But now I'm going to really push it by telling the Shakespeare fan that the game even has a villainous 'Bard' wannabe along with a cast of Shakespearean villains who you get to beat up as part of fighting crime.
Have I gone too far now? Probably. But thank you for your information. It really was useful for me.
I agree editing matters, and I suspect that's going to be one of the really big problems that needs to be sorted out with self-publishing. For most beginning authors, it's probably too expensive to pay out of pocked for a professional editing job. An alternative might be to let the editor in on a cut of the profits, but then A) you've got to find an editor willing to take a risk doing work for free (or possibly even an agent to help you find that editor), and B) the author's profits start to get diluted. Add in some design, and possibly some marketing, and pretty soon you're back to needing a proper publishing house to selectively pick winners, shell out cash up front for the expenses, and reap the lion's share of the profits. If you don't you've got the author going it alone, releasing an inferior product, and hoping despite that they can either scrape by or even be successful enough to afford better services next time around. Assuming the poor first effort doesn't hurt their reputation too much.
I don't really have the answers, but I think it's likely we'll see some digital-only "publisher lite" houses come out of this. Places able to do just enough to make a book palatable, while still accepting some up-front costs and splitting the difference between current publisher rates and a scenario where the author gets all the profits.
On the other hand, we might see a grass-roots community effort where authors and editors can come together on a web site to get decent quality work done (no idea of the financial arrangements). That would be sort of the back-end of the web site, while on the front end it would be a coordinated user experience, with an online store, book reviews and ratings, an intelligent recommender to help people find other writers based on their current interests and tastes. Obviously Amazon sort of does a little bit of the latter, but I think it's too big and too jumbled in with too many other things (as it exists now) to really serve as a go-between for self-published authors and interested readers. They'll probably get there eventually, given enough time, but I think there's definitely room for some other entity to rise up in that market space right now.
They're also adding a shortcut to reply to whisper messages directly.
The funny thing is that, yes you can. It's bugged as hell. Control-R currently pulls up a tell to the last person you sent a tell to, not who sent a tell to you. So basically, they're listing a bug fix as a feature.
A "repeat to last recipient" feature is actually pretty nice. And honestly, I've always thought the "reply to last" was fundamentally unreliable. Maybe some games have a kind of protection, but if someone else sends you a tell at the wrong time, you end up replying to the wrong person. I understand people like the reply option, but it's always seemed pretty breakable to me.
Trying again. The rules of the game are, you pick one ticket, which is or isn't a winner. It's got very low odds of being the winner.
The rules of the Monty Hall game now say I have to select two tickets. I HAVE to select yours (which has very little odds of winning), and I HAVE to select the winner.
I'm not allowed to choose two losers, so if yours was a loser (and the odds were very good this is the case), then the odds are very good that the second ticket is the winner. Thus, just because your ticket is one of the remaining two doesn't mean it's got a 50% chance of being the winner.
In other words, while your choice is random, and thus subject to the laws of probability, my choice is NOT random. My choice is guided by the rules of the game to force me to pick a winner. In a lottery, you stand almost no chance of winning outright, so it's almost guaranteed that I was forced to select the real winning ticket to provide the second option.
If you still don't buy it, try mapping out the a ten-door scenario on paper. Mark the ten doors, mark the winner. Now pick a loser, any loser, and see how the rules of the game force Monty Hall to eliminate all of the other losers, and feed you the winner.
This is definitely not related to the gambler's fallacy, which applies when comparing a series of outcomes, all determined by chance. I think you're failing to see that while the first choice is determined by chance, the second choice is not determined by chance at all -- it is in fact a tremendous reducer of probability.
The others have explained it pretty well, but let's take the example even further. You've got a lottery ticket. It has a 1:60 million odds of winning. After the drawing, but before you get a chance to check the numbers, I check your ticket and then produce a second ticket, and tell you that one of the two is a winner.
The answer is that, just because I have reduced the pool to two tickets, it does NOT mean that the odds of your ticket being the winner have changed. Your odds are still only 1:60 million. By guaranteeing one of the two is the winner, the other 59,999,999 times I have to provide the winning ticket.
While you're right, generally people mistakenly believe you can have an infinite number of zeroes and still put another number at the end. I've seen people write 0.xxxxx....y about twenty times just in this discussion. You and I both know you can't have both an infinite number of things and also another thing at the end, but the same people who don't buy the other arguments probably won't understand this.
I had "bill shock" on my very first phone bill. The day I got my phone, they dropped me into a billing cycle that ended in 48 hours and then started the new monthly cycle. Because they pro-rated the number of minutes on that first cycle, I basically only got 20 minutes (300 minutes / 30 days in the month * 2 days in the cycle) for those two days. Of course they didn't tell me this when I bought the phone, so when I spent a couple of hours calling people on my brand new phone during those first two days, my initial bill was nearly $100 over the expected price due to overage charges.
They did eventually reverse the charges, but I had to argue with them for nearly half an hour to get them to see my point. They kept telling me, "you only had 20 minutes and you used 2 hours." I had to repeatedly point out that I had no way of knowing when the billing cycle was set, or how many minutes I had available to me, and that as a new customer the only reasonable expectation I could have would be that I would be able to use my 300 minutes.
I've been stung a few other times. Twice when the phone decided it was "roaming" while I was inside a major city (back in the late 90's), once by massive overages when my wife and I combined accounts and the minutes didn't add up right, and once when my wife discovered texting along with a gaggle of friends and didn't know that the default per-text message rate was $.10.
I called Verizon when I got a few pieces of text spam, and they gave me a $5 credit, which will cover that cost plus a decent amount of future text spam. If I get to more than 50 pieces, I'll call them up again. They were pretty easy-going about the whole deal.
Ideally Facebook has your real password in a hash and doesn't know what it actually is. Meaning they shouldn't be able to know the first character to be able to combine it with the temporary one. If they do know your password, they're doing it wrong.
How come nobody makes this argument in the intellectual property discussions, where we get the reverse "it's not actually theft, it's just piracy" comments?
Quite aware it's an unfortunate name. When I started development 4 years ago, "twilight" mostly just meant "sunset" to most people. No way I'm changing the game name now.
That said, one of the game's taglines (and one I've put on some t-shirts) is: "Superheroes. No vampires." I'm hoping that'll get the word out to most people.
Still, the majority of my players either hear about the game by word of mouth or by doing internet searches for appropriate keywords, so the name may not be hurting me too much.
Why would I care about errors when I could identify and fix them? Well, for one, to fix them. Specifically when someone's paying me for copy editing, not leaving mistakes is critical, but in a general sense I like things to be correct.
Shouldn't this mean you also lock her out every time you log in? Trying to figure out if there's some reason why it only works one direction, or if you simply only care about what affects you.:)
Also quoting Bruce, this headline should be rewritten entirely. The survey isn't showing how stupid people are, it's showing where users put their priorities. In this case, users value convenience over security, in an overwhelming number of occasions. Most of the time, *I* prefer convenience over security, and behave accordingly, though I also choose appropriately on occasions when security does matter.
We should do a study to compare this to the number of bird calls that are replied to. I bet birds get a lower number of responses and retweets than twitter accounts do.
Absolutely. I use a twitter account to post notices about updates to my online game. I've got several hundred people following the account, but the proper "response" is to go log in to the game and see what the updates are all about, not respond to the automated system or retweet it anywhere else. It would be *dumb* for my users to "acknowledge" my tweets in any of the ways this article indicates are acceptable; that's just not what my posts are for.
Just out of curiosity, does that research distinguish between reading on the printed page and reading on a computer screen? I agree Times is just fine in print, but I find practically illegible on the screen. It seems like it's always super blurry from anti-aliasing, and certain letter combinations can be hard to discern as they kind of cram together. (The difference between an rn and an m, for one example.) I am also incapable of telling the difference between one space or two (or sometimes none, if it's at the boundary between italics and normal lettering). For editing on-screen, I genuinely find a monospace font far more legible. Lots of space to pick out every individual letter, very easy to detect if you've got an extraneous space between words.
Now yes, when you print it out, monospace is horrible. You wouldn't ever want to do that.
For the record, I'm not sure most web sites do use times. I think the Arial/Helvetica combo is many times more common.
Actually as distractions go, I think the editor is the least of it. What I regret, continually, is having internet access on the same machine I'm trying to use to do my creative writing. Once, when under a serious deadline, I actually got out little post-its and had to place them over the three separate locations on my screen where clocks were visible, because I kept checking them reflexively and then staring at the minutes ticking away. There would be a fantastic argument for an internet-less netbook, or some kind of laptop that's simply a dedicated word processor, where the distractions are limited. Having access to formatting tools is a far less serious issue (at least for me) -- I'm just not going to get tied up messing with bold, italic, different fonts, etc.
I do kind of like some of the bare-bones editors because they seem fast, streamlined, and don't have file bloat, but it's not quite about the distractions. For this year's National Novel Writing Month I'm dabbling with Scrivener, because it's got extra tools designed to help writers, like the ability to attach notes and reference documents to a project (I'm always forgetting everything, down to character names) and the ability to rearrange the order of chapters. Arguably a lot of the rearranging should come after the first draft, but if you can put it into the system the first time it saves later work converting the documents, and like I said, the reference documents stored in the same place can be very handy.
Absolutely. I can type 60-80 words per minute when I'm in a groove. Can't write at half that speed, and the legibility of longhand is probably a quarter of what I get from typing. Of course with creative writing it's often the brain that is the bottleneck, and output speed may not matter quite so much. However, I know I've had multiple occasions writing longhand where I couldn't keep up and actually forgot what I was saying before getting it down on paper; that simply doesn't happen to me when typing.
Thank you. I was thinking the same thing. You wouldn't really expect that number to dip below 50% at any time (some places give smaller raises more often, but other places don't give raises at all). While there are any number of ways in which raises might be scheduled, I'd bet there's at least a little bit of weight toward the end of the calendar year and the beginning of the next one, which would cause that number to be higher in the fall. And in a slow economy, I'd expect it to go higher.
Still, I'm sure these survey people know what a "normal" year looks like and can probably tell if 69% is higher than typical for the same timeframe. Just wish they would have told us what that normal number is.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, even if you haven't expressed yourself in the original posts, when you compile all your Face-Tweets into a journal and self-publish as an e-book then you've *really* expressed yourself!
Ah. As described, that's pretty reasonable. I play another game where chat commands are more like command-line interfaces, and by the time you've typed "/r" and then a whole message, if someone else talks to you in the meantime you misfire.
For what it's worth, I go out of my way to mention my computer game on slashdot any chance I get, as long as I can be on topic. Nobody's yelled at me yet for self-promotion, though quite a few can't get past the word "Twilight" and assume it must mean vampires, rather than the deprecated, historical meaning of "sunset." But now I'm going to really push it by telling the Shakespeare fan that the game even has a villainous 'Bard' wannabe along with a cast of Shakespearean villains who you get to beat up as part of fighting crime.
Have I gone too far now? Probably. But thank you for your information. It really was useful for me.
I don't really have the answers, but I think it's likely we'll see some digital-only "publisher lite" houses come out of this. Places able to do just enough to make a book palatable, while still accepting some up-front costs and splitting the difference between current publisher rates and a scenario where the author gets all the profits.
On the other hand, we might see a grass-roots community effort where authors and editors can come together on a web site to get decent quality work done (no idea of the financial arrangements). That would be sort of the back-end of the web site, while on the front end it would be a coordinated user experience, with an online store, book reviews and ratings, an intelligent recommender to help people find other writers based on their current interests and tastes. Obviously Amazon sort of does a little bit of the latter, but I think it's too big and too jumbled in with too many other things (as it exists now) to really serve as a go-between for self-published authors and interested readers. They'll probably get there eventually, given enough time, but I think there's definitely room for some other entity to rise up in that market space right now.
They're also adding a shortcut to reply to whisper messages directly.
The funny thing is that, yes you can. It's bugged as hell. Control-R currently pulls up a tell to the last person you sent a tell to, not who sent a tell to you. So basically, they're listing a bug fix as a feature.
A "repeat to last recipient" feature is actually pretty nice. And honestly, I've always thought the "reply to last" was fundamentally unreliable. Maybe some games have a kind of protection, but if someone else sends you a tell at the wrong time, you end up replying to the wrong person. I understand people like the reply option, but it's always seemed pretty breakable to me.
The rules of the Monty Hall game now say I have to select two tickets. I HAVE to select yours (which has very little odds of winning), and I HAVE to select the winner.
I'm not allowed to choose two losers, so if yours was a loser (and the odds were very good this is the case), then the odds are very good that the second ticket is the winner. Thus, just because your ticket is one of the remaining two doesn't mean it's got a 50% chance of being the winner.
In other words, while your choice is random, and thus subject to the laws of probability, my choice is NOT random. My choice is guided by the rules of the game to force me to pick a winner. In a lottery, you stand almost no chance of winning outright, so it's almost guaranteed that I was forced to select the real winning ticket to provide the second option.
If you still don't buy it, try mapping out the a ten-door scenario on paper. Mark the ten doors, mark the winner. Now pick a loser, any loser, and see how the rules of the game force Monty Hall to eliminate all of the other losers, and feed you the winner.
This is definitely not related to the gambler's fallacy, which applies when comparing a series of outcomes, all determined by chance. I think you're failing to see that while the first choice is determined by chance, the second choice is not determined by chance at all -- it is in fact a tremendous reducer of probability.
The answer is that, just because I have reduced the pool to two tickets, it does NOT mean that the odds of your ticket being the winner have changed. Your odds are still only 1:60 million. By guaranteeing one of the two is the winner, the other 59,999,999 times I have to provide the winning ticket.
While you're right, generally people mistakenly believe you can have an infinite number of zeroes and still put another number at the end. I've seen people write 0.xxxxx....y about twenty times just in this discussion. You and I both know you can't have both an infinite number of things and also another thing at the end, but the same people who don't buy the other arguments probably won't understand this.
They did eventually reverse the charges, but I had to argue with them for nearly half an hour to get them to see my point. They kept telling me, "you only had 20 minutes and you used 2 hours." I had to repeatedly point out that I had no way of knowing when the billing cycle was set, or how many minutes I had available to me, and that as a new customer the only reasonable expectation I could have would be that I would be able to use my 300 minutes.
I've been stung a few other times. Twice when the phone decided it was "roaming" while I was inside a major city (back in the late 90's), once by massive overages when my wife and I combined accounts and the minutes didn't add up right, and once when my wife discovered texting along with a gaggle of friends and didn't know that the default per-text message rate was $.10.
I called Verizon when I got a few pieces of text spam, and they gave me a $5 credit, which will cover that cost plus a decent amount of future text spam. If I get to more than 50 pieces, I'll call them up again. They were pretty easy-going about the whole deal.
Sorry, but deleting one's account is not actually a solution for people who want to access their account.
Ideally Facebook has your real password in a hash and doesn't know what it actually is. Meaning they shouldn't be able to know the first character to be able to combine it with the temporary one. If they do know your password, they're doing it wrong.
How come nobody makes this argument in the intellectual property discussions, where we get the reverse "it's not actually theft, it's just piracy" comments?
That said, one of the game's taglines (and one I've put on some t-shirts) is: "Superheroes. No vampires." I'm hoping that'll get the word out to most people.
Still, the majority of my players either hear about the game by word of mouth or by doing internet searches for appropriate keywords, so the name may not be hurting me too much.
Why would I care about errors when I could identify and fix them? Well, for one, to fix them. Specifically when someone's paying me for copy editing, not leaving mistakes is critical, but in a general sense I like things to be correct.
Shouldn't this mean you also lock her out every time you log in? Trying to figure out if there's some reason why it only works one direction, or if you simply only care about what affects you. :)
Also quoting Bruce, this headline should be rewritten entirely. The survey isn't showing how stupid people are, it's showing where users put their priorities. In this case, users value convenience over security, in an overwhelming number of occasions. Most of the time, *I* prefer convenience over security, and behave accordingly, though I also choose appropriately on occasions when security does matter.
To which I say "my table" not "by table", "over-engineered" not "over engineered" and it's either "sense is" or "senses are" but not "sense are".
We should do a study to compare this to the number of bird calls that are replied to. I bet birds get a lower number of responses and retweets than twitter accounts do.
Absolutely. I use a twitter account to post notices about updates to my online game. I've got several hundred people following the account, but the proper "response" is to go log in to the game and see what the updates are all about, not respond to the automated system or retweet it anywhere else. It would be *dumb* for my users to "acknowledge" my tweets in any of the ways this article indicates are acceptable; that's just not what my posts are for.
I've seen one of these hit a brand-new box from the NYtimes web site. They do not all come from disreputable sites.
Now yes, when you print it out, monospace is horrible. You wouldn't ever want to do that.
For the record, I'm not sure most web sites do use times. I think the Arial/Helvetica combo is many times more common.
I do kind of like some of the bare-bones editors because they seem fast, streamlined, and don't have file bloat, but it's not quite about the distractions. For this year's National Novel Writing Month I'm dabbling with Scrivener, because it's got extra tools designed to help writers, like the ability to attach notes and reference documents to a project (I'm always forgetting everything, down to character names) and the ability to rearrange the order of chapters. Arguably a lot of the rearranging should come after the first draft, but if you can put it into the system the first time it saves later work converting the documents, and like I said, the reference documents stored in the same place can be very handy.
Absolutely. I can type 60-80 words per minute when I'm in a groove. Can't write at half that speed, and the legibility of longhand is probably a quarter of what I get from typing. Of course with creative writing it's often the brain that is the bottleneck, and output speed may not matter quite so much. However, I know I've had multiple occasions writing longhand where I couldn't keep up and actually forgot what I was saying before getting it down on paper; that simply doesn't happen to me when typing.
Thank you. I was thinking the same thing. You wouldn't really expect that number to dip below 50% at any time (some places give smaller raises more often, but other places don't give raises at all). While there are any number of ways in which raises might be scheduled, I'd bet there's at least a little bit of weight toward the end of the calendar year and the beginning of the next one, which would cause that number to be higher in the fall. And in a slow economy, I'd expect it to go higher.
Still, I'm sure these survey people know what a "normal" year looks like and can probably tell if 69% is higher than typical for the same timeframe. Just wish they would have told us what that normal number is.