A large number of technical book authors share their (sometimes insightful) views on the list.
When I (co-)wrote PHP & MySQL Web Development I found that mailing list really useful. From the archives, you can get a pretty good idea what issues other authors face.
Firstly, I believe that there are a few enigma machines stil around. The article in the link above, says that there are two on public exhibition, which is not the same as two surviving.
This means that some probably have come up for sale from time to time over the years. Somebody could extrapolate from those sales an approximation of today's value. The thing of course is that this would only be an approximation.
I suspect that the reason this value sounds so precise is that it has been converted from pounds to dollars. Somebody quoted a value of 100000 UK pounds. Some concrete thinking journalist pulled out their calculator and put $144000 dollars into an article.
Journalists generally do not understand significant figures. I suspect that the person who originally came up with the approximation of 100000 was not claiming to be accurate down to the nearest $1000.
There is probably a market for a highly customisable herd of office applets, but it would not be a big market. To you and even to some extent to me, the the idea of replacing, for instance, the graphing applet with a better one from a competitor sounds appealing. How many people really like to fiddle with their computers though?
Most users are uncomfortable even installing software on machines for fear of doing it wrong and breaking things. If an office install program that asks them what directory and if they want MS or WordPerfect shortcut keys scares them, what do you think they would make of an install program that offers them a 1000 choices.
You also ignore training and interoperability. One of the main reasons for MS Office's complete domination at the moment is that people know if they use it it will be the same at every office, all their staff will have a pirate copy at home and all new hires will already know how to use it. Using anything that is not the market leader gives you problems with all of these things. Using something that is going to behave completely differently and maybe have different capabilities for opening files is going to make it impossible to assume anything.
What is needed now is a high quality set of MS Office file format filters for some of the existing office clones, not a new paradigm altogether.
If you find early computers fascinating, visit Melbourne Australia sometime. The only surviving first generation computer is displayed at the Melbourne Museum.
CSIRAC was built in 1949, and unlike other similar machines, was not upgraded or broken up.
Jacinta Collins is noisy enough that you would have heard of her if you ever read a newspaper.
How about you look at the federal government
site?
Sure the article described her as "Victorian Labor Senator Jacinta Collins", which is a little ambiguous. In this instance, they meant "Senator for Victoria", not "Member of the Legislative Assembly in Victoria" nor even "Labor Senator during Queen Victoria's reign".
Aazz wrote:
"...how to do math(s)?????????? Why is that plyral there?? Maybe we should learn how to do grammarS like you. Never mind the mathS."
I don't know why I am even bothering to respond to a feeble pedant, but I hate pedants who are wrong.
Newsflash Aazz. The Internet is not America. America is not the Internet.
In "American English", people do math, in English people do maths.
Language convention varies around the world. Get over it.
Some people on Slashdot have poor spelling and/or grammar. Get over it.
The Wired article contains the following sentence:
"While the company has yet to finalize its tally, it now believes there are as many as 13,000 public toilets in the country, or 4.4 per square mile. "
Now I do not go and check the maths in every lighthearted news story I read, but at a glance, I could see that this number was very wrong. (Either that or Australia was shrinking rapidly)
Australia has an area of 7,741,220 Km2
This is about 2,988,900 square miles.
We have a population of about 18 Million, which is on average 6 per square mile.
If we really have 4.4 public toilets per square mile, we would have about 13 million public toilets - almost as many public toilets as people.
I think somebody lost a decimal place somewhere. If we have 13,000 public toilets, then we have 0.0043 per square mile.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no prior edition, which as others have pointed out makes the review's "best selling" claim a little silly.
There are other books in the same series, that have one or two authors in common, but no prior editions.
I think you might be surprised. There is a lot of FS/OSS activity in Australia.
It might even be third after USA and Germany.
How about a bit of common sense?
Ask yourself this, how many squirrel weddings have you been invited to?
How likely is it that the squirrels in the movie were married?
I'd rather pay for expensive experts than hand over $4 for a six pack of MCSEs.
One useful place to ask this question (other than slashdot might be the Studio B mailing list.
You can read the archives here: http://www.studiob.com/mailinglist.asp
A large number of technical book authors share their (sometimes insightful) views on the list.
When I (co-)wrote PHP & MySQL Web Development I found that mailing list really useful. From the archives, you can get a pretty good idea what issues other authors face.
Firstly, I believe that there are a few enigma machines stil around. The article in the link above, says that there are two on public exhibition, which is not the same as two surviving.
This means that some probably have come up for sale from time to time over the years. Somebody could extrapolate from those sales an approximation of today's value. The thing of course is that this would only be an approximation.
I suspect that the reason this value sounds so precise is that it has been converted from pounds to dollars. Somebody quoted a value of 100000 UK pounds. Some concrete thinking journalist pulled out their calculator and put $144000 dollars into an article.
Journalists generally do not understand significant figures. I suspect that the person who originally came up with the approximation of 100000 was not claiming to be accurate down to the nearest $1000.
There is probably a market for a highly customisable herd of office applets, but it would not be a big market. To you and even to some extent to me, the the idea of replacing, for instance, the graphing applet with a better one from a competitor sounds appealing. How many people really like to fiddle with their computers though?
Most users are uncomfortable even installing software on machines for fear of doing it wrong and breaking things. If an office install program that asks them what directory and if they want MS or WordPerfect shortcut keys scares them, what do you think they would make of an install program that offers them a 1000 choices. You also ignore training and interoperability. One of the main reasons for MS Office's complete domination at the moment is that people know if they use it it will be the same at every office, all their staff will have a pirate copy at home and all new hires will already know how to use it. Using anything that is not the market leader gives you problems with all of these things. Using something that is going to behave completely differently and maybe have different capabilities for opening files is going to make it impossible to assume anything. What is needed now is a high quality set of MS Office file format filters for some of the existing office clones, not a new paradigm altogether.
If you find early computers fascinating, visit Melbourne Australia sometime. The only surviving first generation computer is displayed at the Melbourne Museum.
CSIRAC was built in 1949, and unlike other similar machines, was not upgraded or broken up.
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/csirac/csirac.html
Jacinta Collins is noisy enough that you would have heard of her if you ever read a newspaper.
How about you look at the federal government site?
Sure the article described her as "Victorian Labor Senator Jacinta Collins", which is a little ambiguous. In this instance, they meant "Senator for Victoria", not "Member of the Legislative Assembly in Victoria" nor even "Labor Senator during Queen Victoria's reign".
There are a nubmer of PHP editors with differning degrees of maturity available.
Have you seen PHPEdit (http://www.phpedit.com/)
Aazz wrote: "...how to do math(s)?????????? Why is that plyral there?? Maybe we should learn how to do grammarS like you. Never mind the mathS." I don't know why I am even bothering to respond to a feeble pedant, but I hate pedants who are wrong. Newsflash Aazz. The Internet is not America. America is not the Internet. In "American English", people do math, in English people do maths. Language convention varies around the world. Get over it. Some people on Slashdot have poor spelling and/or grammar. Get over it.
The Wired article contains the following sentence:
"While the company has yet to finalize its tally, it now believes there are as many as 13,000 public toilets in the country, or 4.4 per square mile. "
Now I do not go and check the maths in every lighthearted news story I read, but at a glance, I could see that this number was very wrong. (Either that or Australia was shrinking rapidly)
Australia has an area of 7,741,220 Km2
This is about 2,988,900 square miles.
We have a population of about 18 Million, which is on average 6 per square mile.
If we really have 4.4 public toilets per square mile, we would have about 13 million public toilets - almost as many public toilets as people.
I think somebody lost a decimal place somewhere. If we have 13,000 public toilets, then we have 0.0043 per square mile.