At least they're upfront and forthcoming about it. It's they're gamble on if it will affect sales or not, but at least they were responsible enought not to try sneaking it in.
Also, it's worthwhile to consider location... I'd imagine two colleges roughly equal in quality but in cities with drastically different economies, would have a disparity in starting salaries, just for the availability of jobs close to "home."
"I intend on figuring out the way that some writers--that this writer, right
here, wearing my underwear--is going to get rich and famous
from his craft. I intend on figuring out how this writer's words
can become part of the social discourse, can be relevant in the
way that literature at its best can be."
"I don't know what the future of book looks like. To figure it
out, I'm doing some pretty basic science. I'm peering into this
opaque, inscrutable system of publishing as it sits in the year
2004, and I'm making a perturbation. I'm stirring the pot to see
what surfaces, so that I can see if the system reveals itself to
me any more thoroughly as it roils. Once that happens, maybe
I'll be able to formulate an hypothesis and try an experiment or
two and maybe--just maybe--I'll get to the bottom of book-
in-2004 and beat the competition to making it work, and maybe
I'll go home with all (or most) of the marbles."
It seems very much to me like he's interested in the future possibilities of publishing as art form and lucrative career... A very important part of the latter is the economics and relationships of publishing and e-publishing. I'm simply raising the obvious question of quantifying and comparing the data for discussion. Are there ingenious schemes anyone can think of to do so?
I'm not contesting his right to release it as he sees fit... I applaud it. But he refers to it as an experiment, and I'm interesting in techniques one could use to track the results. Even if Doctorow doesn't care whether you buy it or not, one of the innate questions to the experiment (and probably on the mind of many publishers) is what kind of effect releasing the book for free has on the sales.
...it worked really well? How can he track the correspondence between downloads and purchases and tell if one directly affected the other? It's hard to even say what those download statistics mean. I know I've downloaded the new book three times now, on multiple PCs, just to take a look at it.
As he points out, he doesn't have a first novel released in a non-e format to compare against. How would you go about deciding the correlation? Maybe if he included a coupon for the paper copy in the e format version?
NPR reported that the tape changes color when tampered with... whether it's removed or not. But you raise a disturbing alternate reality... could you imagine if TSA were put in charge of voting security?
So they break the tape, pick the lock, break the tape. Still faster than tampering with the votes, and just as effective at disenfranchising voters. My point still stands.
Great idea... cover the locks with tamper tape. So rather than rigging the election outright by going to the trouble and difficulty of changing the votes on the server, etc., criminals can do it by disqualifying voting machines by breaking the tape, disenfranchising thousands of voters at a time.
(Can they cover the software issues with tamper tape, too? That might be helpful.)
What have I told you about unsafe docking procedures? Everytime you dock with a ship, you're docking with every other space station they've docked with. And who knows what kind of payload they were carrying? I knew this would happen sooner or later, with the rate you're going. Times are changing, this isn't the Space Age anymore.
Uhmmm... yeah. Actually there's just an extra bullet in the article. Trick (Oh... irony. We haven't had any of that around here since 1985. And back then I was the sole practitioner.)
Actually, if you read the MSNBC article in the original posting carefully, you'll see that it would take a 100 teraflop computer a month to do the first 1/100 sec of the demo. The 12 teraflop machine they've built would take considerably longer.
I've always felt the Dirk Gently universe and the limitless possibilities it presents would be an ideal playground for a writer's imagination. Often I found the situations in that series far more interesting than some of the plots in the HH trilogy... Why haven't we seen anything since The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul? Can we expect any more of Gently and his Hollistic adventures sometime in the future? trick
Slashdot Mirror
See also here and here.
-Trick
Actually, as the comment below that post mentions, it doesn't really counter his claim concerning "exploits." But this post does, as does this one.
-Trick
At least they're upfront and forthcoming about it. It's they're gamble on if it will affect sales or not, but at least they were responsible enought not to try sneaking it in.
-Trick
Also, it's worthwhile to consider location... I'd imagine two colleges roughly equal in quality but in cities with drastically different economies, would have a disparity in starting salaries, just for the availability of jobs close to "home."
-Trick
"I intend on figuring out the way that some writers--that this writer, right here, wearing my underwear--is going to get rich and famous from his craft. I intend on figuring out how this writer's words can become part of the social discourse, can be relevant in the way that literature at its best can be."
"I don't know what the future of book looks like. To figure it out, I'm doing some pretty basic science. I'm peering into this opaque, inscrutable system of publishing as it sits in the year 2004, and I'm making a perturbation. I'm stirring the pot to see what surfaces, so that I can see if the system reveals itself to me any more thoroughly as it roils. Once that happens, maybe I'll be able to formulate an hypothesis and try an experiment or two and maybe--just maybe--I'll get to the bottom of book- in-2004 and beat the competition to making it work, and maybe I'll go home with all (or most) of the marbles."
It seems very much to me like he's interested in the future possibilities of publishing as art form and lucrative career... A very important part of the latter is the economics and relationships of publishing and e-publishing. I'm simply raising the obvious question of quantifying and comparing the data for discussion. Are there ingenious schemes anyone can think of to do so?
-Trick
I'm not contesting his right to release it as he sees fit... I applaud it. But he refers to it as an experiment, and I'm interesting in techniques one could use to track the results. Even if Doctorow doesn't care whether you buy it or not, one of the innate questions to the experiment (and probably on the mind of many publishers) is what kind of effect releasing the book for free has on the sales.
-Trick
...it worked really well? How can he track the correspondence between downloads and purchases and tell if one directly affected the other? It's hard to even say what those download statistics mean. I know I've downloaded the new book three times now, on multiple PCs, just to take a look at it.
As he points out, he doesn't have a first novel released in a non-e format to compare against. How would you go about deciding the correlation? Maybe if he included a coupon for the paper copy in the e format version?
-Trick
If I had mod points, they'd be yours. All of 'em. Don't care that you're already at 5. Good to see someone read the ruling.
-Trick
NPR reported that the tape changes color when tampered with... whether it's removed or not. But you raise a disturbing alternate reality... could you imagine if TSA were put in charge of voting security?
So they break the tape, pick the lock, break the tape. Still faster than tampering with the votes, and just as effective at disenfranchising voters. My point still stands.
Great idea... cover the locks with tamper tape. So rather than rigging the election outright by going to the trouble and difficulty of changing the votes on the server, etc., criminals can do it by disqualifying voting machines by breaking the tape, disenfranchising thousands of voters at a time.
(Can they cover the software issues with tamper tape, too? That might be helpful.)
-Trick
Finally my childhood dreams of joining the M.A.S.K. team can be realized!
Still tries to bring down Windows Update, but now it gets Slashdot to do the dirty work for it!
-Trick
Mir,
What have I told you about unsafe docking procedures? Everytime you dock with a ship, you're docking with every other space station they've docked with. And who knows what kind of payload they were carrying? I knew this would happen sooner or later, with the rate you're going. Times are changing, this isn't the Space Age anymore.
trick
Uhmmm... yeah. Actually there's just an extra bullet in the article. Trick (Oh... irony. We haven't had any of that around here since 1985. And back then I was the sole practitioner.)
Actually, if you read the MSNBC article in the original posting carefully, you'll see that it would take a 100 teraflop computer a month to do the first 1/100 sec of the demo. The 12 teraflop machine they've built would take considerably longer.
Trick
I've always felt the Dirk Gently universe and the limitless possibilities it presents would be an ideal playground for a writer's imagination. Often I found the situations in that series far more interesting than some of the plots in the HH trilogy... Why haven't we seen anything since The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul? Can we expect any more of Gently and his Hollistic adventures sometime in the future? trick