We're an independent publishing/writing team here, everything still goes through multiple edits, proofings and all the same stuff, it's essential to edit (doing your own editing is like testing your own software - it does not work!).
It costs anything between $1000 and $5000 to get a started after you've paid for editing/coverart/PoD-setup but it's a small upfront cost to pay compared to what you lose when a publisher just sits on your work.
The tide has begun to swing around - with no shortage support and cooperative marketing groups/forums on the net now the publishers really are going to have to fight to get a hold of the next group of big writers. The thing is, if the publisher is already trying to make you a sweet deal, then it's a deal you don't actually need.
Right now I'm running an Intel D510 rack server with dual 2.5" drives, it's great, does a lovely job even with it running Ubuntu 10.04 server + VirtualBox ( Ubuntu 8.04 LTS ), however, I'd dearly love to shift over to something even more low-power/compact/SOC, so long as it has SATA, Ethernet, USB and runs a debian-based distro I'd be happy.
Something like a dual-core ARM machine would run ample for the server loads I'm seeing.
So, anyone seen anything like that yet? Or even just a MB in Mini-ITX ?
(btw, why is it that Intel HT enabled still seems to cause random hangs... or maybe it's just coincidental).
> And if publishers lose, we all lose, because quite honestly ebooks are a far inferior experience to real, dead tree books
On some readers, eBooks are awful, on the Kindle 3 it's a blessed experience. There's countless scores of people who swore they'd never like an eBook only to turn about and give away their DTB novel collections once they had a Kindle3 in their hands for a few days. Some people still don't like it admittingly, they can be used for anecdotal evidence that "ebooks are inferior" but their numbers are a small percentage of all those who have tried and now love the ebook experience. (For novels, in mobi/epub format, not PDF).
It's why a "good" server has a lights-out system in it that lets you gain access to the machine as it boots as if you were there with a keyboard/console.
Of course, yes, the VM-route is nice, I do that too now ( so long as you don't mess up the host:D ).
NFS is designed to be like that, block/hang until connection is restored... though not sure about the resilliance to the sig-9 though. You do now have the option on some NFS systems to have a soft-block.
That basically reflects what's happening here, though I stuck hard with Slackware till about 2006 and I just couldn't be bothered anymore having to recursively chase down and build from source to install new versions of packages that weren't in the Slackware repository.
If there's a specific program that I feel isn't performing as good as it could, then I'll consider pulling down the source and building it with optimal settings for my hardware but that's really at a push. Even with these puny Atom 1.6GHz machines things are plenty fast (doing GIMP, Inkscape, Eagle PCB and other electronics work) with the standard builds.
It's nice to be able to just apt-get install stuff and get to actually using them to do what you want.
A lot of people are upset that Ubuntu doesn't give back a lot to Debian in terms of packages/software/whatever, however what Ubuntu gives Debian (and indeed Linux) is a more approachable OS package as a whole, something more suitable to the non-geek, this is something that Linux/Debian have never really bothered with a lot while in the realm of genuine geeks but it's something that Ubuntu adds and which is greatly appreciated by people outside of the geek circle. So while you cannot measure Ubuntu's 'give back' in quantitative terms it is still giving a huge amount in other areas where advancements were sorely needed.
I don't see the problem with Ubuntu being a Debian based distro - isn't this what Debian or any other distro would want - a larger adoption rate? It's all GPL, it's not like licences are being broken.. or is the crying from a minority more to do with a bad case of sour-grapes?
The GST issue is actually a non-issue but it's a highly visible one that can be driven hard. As it is, the 10% isn't the cause of the make/break when it comes to retailing. The bigger issue at hand here however is the constant desire we all have to increase our income more and decrease our expenditure (for the same quantity of goods). However, it's a circular system (I won't say closed, since we have inflation) and if you demand more wages then those wages have to come from... PROFIT. What people need to get into their heads is that you can't magically get more money to spend and expect everything (domestically) to be cheaper at the same time, not without you either climbing the ladder to a higher income job or something else to genuinely leap up to more income.
The problem with direct sales to China etc is that the cash has now left the country and isn't greasing the economic engine. I'm not saying that everyone should be forced to buy "Australian", however I think that people are failing to realise that they're ultimately selling themselves down a river without a paddle if they continue to send all their income overseas.
Another aspect is, I'm a domestic manufacturer (amongst other things) and it's brutally painful to see people being able to purchase complete electronics devices for less money than what I can even buy the raw parts for (also direct from China). So when people see my product at $40, they think I'm 'gouging' them $20 when they can get the same sort of thing direct for $20, where's the reality is I can't even buy the parts for less! When that happens I just drop the product line and if people ask why I don't have it, I give them the explanation. So even if you take personal profit out of the equation it's still impossible to compete against direct-buy for a lot of things. Yes, one has to get smarter about it and find new niche markets but don't go to town bitching at domestic companies about profit-gouging when we already have to be twice as nimble on our feet just to keep the doors open.
Other than plain text, are there really many other alternatives which don't endure levels of difficulty. Only other options I can see out there at the moment are ePub, simplified HTML or RTF - but of course then they all fall short of the possibly desired 'fancy formatting'.
As someone will likely also mention, why not just mandate that the PDF contents are actually text, as opposed to images (which is annoying to anyone!).
Agreed, it's not revolutionary - but each generation is a nice improvement.
The tech is new but the design is biased towards factors other than outright performance (obviously). If you consider microcontrollers like the very popular Atmel AVR32 series, they're barely pushing the speed but their technology is very current. Things like integrated ADC/DAC/SPI/TWI~I2C/USARTS/USB/CAN/opamps/comparators/counters~timers/safety-circuits/power-savings (down to nA range) are what's important. The modern microcontroller is an amazing toolkit of modules, vastly reducing your board build complexity and improving your longevity.
Looking at the highres photo of the board, you can see it's mostly just a hell of a lot of power regulators, switchmode-controllers and MOSFETS (for the switchmode power) with a couple of ASICs. There's also a lot of safety bits on there such as polyfuses. My first impression of this design is that there's a lot of isolated power channels to ensure that even if one goes down everything else keeps on going.
Of course, the fun thing isn't so much doing the book for Kindle (that's dead easy, especially if you've used something like LyX + Calibre), the hard bit as always is breaking into the market. Independent authors/publishers are becoming great in numbers with everyone screaming "me too!" it reminds me of the earlier days of places like Freshmeat where ~2000 the place exploded with packages that were near clones of already existing packages, after a while you just had to tune out because of the noise levels swamping out the legitimately good independent/OpenSource packages.
I'm an independent publisher for my wife's fantasy novels - most of the time and money is spent just trying to differentiate oneself from the pack, at $2.99 on Amazon (or even direct) you it's really not a profitable venture for quite a while because of essential costs like editing ($5000), proofing ($500), artwork ($1000) and many other things. Trying to sell a few thousand copies of a book is quite a task.
For all the people who get exposed to this new video by what ever means, if they never heard of OpenOffice before they sure have now - thanks Microsoft:)
The hoon-car laws are actually one thing that's pretty damned good, it's not targeting custom cars, it's targeting gits who see it fit to light up rubber, forget their exhaust or think they're exempt from engineering standards.
If you want to really let the lead-foot fly then go join up to CAMS or other similar racing clubs - oooh but of course, you're probably too cool for that (but really your car is just shit and those Type-R stickers will peel off when the CAMS boys fly by your sad piece of bling).
Oh yeah, I'm a crusty grumpy old man who loves his motorbikes and drags them at the right place.
Because sensationalism sells and best of all, people on the other side of the fence (eg, MS) can then link to the article as way of providing "proof" of how insecure Linux really is. Facts be damned, let's just spray some more fear-mongering around and scare the dillys out of every person. It's just not a/. story anymore unless it's an advert or traffic-whore.
Always makes me wonder how these people manage to push the 'articles' through when you see a lot of other vastly more decent articles get voted down on the Firehose.
>>Add to it the 800lbs GVW and if the thing gets hit by another vehicle in the 2000lbs range it will certainly fly off the road.
What about a huge truck ploughing into your SUV, or a train into your truck... At some point we have to move back down the weight scale for general commuting, as the heavier cars are displaced the roads become comparatively safer.
They (aerodynamic rules) haven't - they just found an even better shape. For a very long time the 'teardrop' was considered the lowest drag profile, a few years ago they found something better.
Slashdot Mirror
Gharr... stupid AC login (or lack thereof).
We're an independent publishing/writing team here, everything still goes through multiple edits, proofings and all the same stuff, it's essential to edit (doing your own editing is like testing your own software - it does not work!).
It costs anything between $1000 and $5000 to get a started after you've paid for editing/coverart/PoD-setup but it's a small upfront cost to pay compared to what you lose when a publisher just sits on your work.
The tide has begun to swing around - with no shortage support and cooperative marketing groups/forums on the net now the publishers really are going to have to fight to get a hold of the next group of big writers. The thing is, if the publisher is already trying to make you a sweet deal, then it's a deal you don't actually need.
Paul - http://elitadaniels.com/
Bloomen heck, the one time I really wanted to stamp my name onto a post I log in on the different browser and I AC post to /. ... stupid editors! ;)
A shame, even with 50% off on some, they're as expensive as something like a FitPC2 :(
I'm hoping at some point we can see a $99 personal server option, maybe cram 4~6 into a 1U rack.
Thanks - I've seen some Netgear MS-2000 ones on sale recently for about $130 AUD. and then the RND-2000 for $250.
Meh, maybe I'll just wait for AMD to bring out their "low power" options in Mini-ITX :sigh:
That's a good point about the NAS systems, they're comparatively cheap too!
Right now I'm running an Intel D510 rack server with dual 2.5" drives, it's great, does a lovely job even with it running Ubuntu 10.04 server + VirtualBox ( Ubuntu 8.04 LTS ), however, I'd dearly love to shift over to something even more low-power/compact/SOC, so long as it has SATA, Ethernet, USB and runs a debian-based distro I'd be happy.
Something like a dual-core ARM machine would run ample for the server loads I'm seeing.
So, anyone seen anything like that yet? Or even just a MB in Mini-ITX ?
(btw, why is it that Intel HT enabled still seems to cause random hangs... or maybe it's just coincidental).
> And if publishers lose, we all lose, because quite honestly ebooks are a far inferior experience to real, dead tree books
On some readers, eBooks are awful, on the Kindle 3 it's a blessed experience. There's countless scores of people who swore they'd never like an eBook only to turn about and give away their DTB novel collections once they had a Kindle3 in their hands for a few days. Some people still don't like it admittingly, they can be used for anecdotal evidence that "ebooks are inferior" but their numbers are a small percentage of all those who have tried and now love the ebook experience. (For novels, in mobi/epub format, not PDF).
Amen to that.... tried it twice and could not believe the amount of crap it left me to fix afterwards, that's what I got for straying from vi[m].
It's why a "good" server has a lights-out system in it that lets you gain access to the machine as it boots as if you were there with a keyboard/console.
Of course, yes, the VM-route is nice, I do that too now ( so long as you don't mess up the host :D ).
NFS is designed to be like that, block/hang until connection is restored... though not sure about the resilliance to the sig-9 though. You do now have the option on some NFS systems to have a soft-block.
That basically reflects what's happening here, though I stuck hard with Slackware till about 2006 and I just couldn't be bothered anymore having to recursively chase down and build from source to install new versions of packages that weren't in the Slackware repository.
If there's a specific program that I feel isn't performing as good as it could, then I'll consider pulling down the source and building it with optimal settings for my hardware but that's really at a push. Even with these puny Atom 1.6GHz machines things are plenty fast (doing GIMP, Inkscape, Eagle PCB and other electronics work) with the standard builds.
It's nice to be able to just apt-get install stuff and get to actually using them to do what you want.
I have heard that a lot of the Debian developers are already on the Ubuntu payroll; I don't have sources to cite though.
A lot of people are upset that Ubuntu doesn't give back a lot to Debian in terms of packages/software/whatever, however what Ubuntu gives Debian (and indeed Linux) is a more approachable OS package as a whole, something more suitable to the non-geek, this is something that Linux/Debian have never really bothered with a lot while in the realm of genuine geeks but it's something that Ubuntu adds and which is greatly appreciated by people outside of the geek circle. So while you cannot measure Ubuntu's 'give back' in quantitative terms it is still giving a huge amount in other areas where advancements were sorely needed.
I don't see the problem with Ubuntu being a Debian based distro - isn't this what Debian or any other distro would want - a larger adoption rate? It's all GPL, it's not like licences are being broken.. or is the crying from a minority more to do with a bad case of sour-grapes?
Gotta love Townsville, at least the Strand is a fantastic place to be now.
The GST issue is actually a non-issue but it's a highly visible one that can be driven hard. As it is, the 10% isn't the cause of the make/break when it comes to retailing. The bigger issue at hand here however is the constant desire we all have to increase our income more and decrease our expenditure (for the same quantity of goods). However, it's a circular system (I won't say closed, since we have inflation) and if you demand more wages then those wages have to come from... PROFIT. What people need to get into their heads is that you can't magically get more money to spend and expect everything (domestically) to be cheaper at the same time, not without you either climbing the ladder to a higher income job or something else to genuinely leap up to more income.
The problem with direct sales to China etc is that the cash has now left the country and isn't greasing the economic engine. I'm not saying that everyone should be forced to buy "Australian", however I think that people are failing to realise that they're ultimately selling themselves down a river without a paddle if they continue to send all their income overseas.
Another aspect is, I'm a domestic manufacturer (amongst other things) and it's brutally painful to see people being able to purchase complete electronics devices for less money than what I can even buy the raw parts for (also direct from China). So when people see my product at $40, they think I'm 'gouging' them $20 when they can get the same sort of thing direct for $20, where's the reality is I can't even buy the parts for less! When that happens I just drop the product line and if people ask why I don't have it, I give them the explanation. So even if you take personal profit out of the equation it's still impossible to compete against direct-buy for a lot of things. Yes, one has to get smarter about it and find new niche markets but don't go to town bitching at domestic companies about profit-gouging when we already have to be twice as nimble on our feet just to keep the doors open.
Paul.
Other than plain text, are there really many other alternatives which don't endure levels of difficulty. Only other options I can see out there at the moment are ePub, simplified HTML or RTF - but of course then they all fall short of the possibly desired 'fancy formatting'.
As someone will likely also mention, why not just mandate that the PDF contents are actually text, as opposed to images (which is annoying to anyone!).
Agreed, it's not revolutionary - but each generation is a nice improvement.
The tech is new but the design is biased towards factors other than outright performance (obviously). If you consider microcontrollers like the very popular Atmel AVR32 series, they're barely pushing the speed but their technology is very current. Things like integrated ADC/DAC/SPI/TWI~I2C/USARTS/USB/CAN/opamps/comparators/counters~timers/safety-circuits/power-savings (down to nA range) are what's important. The modern microcontroller is an amazing toolkit of modules, vastly reducing your board build complexity and improving your longevity.
Looking at the highres photo of the board, you can see it's mostly just a hell of a lot of power regulators, switchmode-controllers and MOSFETS (for the switchmode power) with a couple of ASICs. There's also a lot of safety bits on there such as polyfuses. My first impression of this design is that there's a lot of isolated power channels to ensure that even if one goes down everything else keeps on going.
And the great thing about putting it on the credit is that you end up paying about 3~4 times as much by the time it's paid back.
Of course, the fun thing isn't so much doing the book for Kindle (that's dead easy, especially if you've used something like LyX + Calibre), the hard bit as always is breaking into the market. Independent authors/publishers are becoming great in numbers with everyone screaming "me too!" it reminds me of the earlier days of places like Freshmeat where ~2000 the place exploded with packages that were near clones of already existing packages, after a while you just had to tune out because of the noise levels swamping out the legitimately good independent/OpenSource packages.
I'm an independent publisher for my wife's fantasy novels - most of the time and money is spent just trying to differentiate oneself from the pack, at $2.99 on Amazon (or even direct) you it's really not a profitable venture for quite a while because of essential costs like editing ($5000), proofing ($500), artwork ($1000) and many other things. Trying to sell a few thousand copies of a book is quite a task.
Paul.
For all the people who get exposed to this new video by what ever means, if they never heard of OpenOffice before they sure have now - thanks Microsoft :)
The hoon-car laws are actually one thing that's pretty damned good, it's not targeting custom cars, it's targeting gits who see it fit to light up rubber, forget their exhaust or think they're exempt from engineering standards.
If you want to really let the lead-foot fly then go join up to CAMS or other similar racing clubs - oooh but of course, you're probably too cool for that (but really your car is just shit and those Type-R stickers will peel off when the CAMS boys fly by your sad piece of bling).
Oh yeah, I'm a crusty grumpy old man who loves his motorbikes and drags them at the right place.
Because sensationalism sells and best of all, people on the other side of the fence (eg, MS) can then link to the article as way of providing "proof" of how insecure Linux really is. Facts be damned, let's just spray some more fear-mongering around and scare the dillys out of every person. It's just not a /. story anymore unless it's an advert or traffic-whore.
Agree++
Always makes me wonder how these people manage to push the 'articles' through when you see a lot of other vastly more decent articles get voted down on the Firehose.
>>Add to it the 800lbs GVW and if the thing gets hit by another vehicle in the 2000lbs range it will certainly fly off the road.
What about a huge truck ploughing into your SUV, or a train into your truck... At some point we have to move back down the weight scale for general commuting, as the heavier cars are displaced the roads become comparatively safer.
They (aerodynamic rules) haven't - they just found an even better shape. For a very long time the 'teardrop' was considered the lowest drag profile, a few years ago they found something better.