I worked for 7 years for a major publisher. The report says: "paper, printing and editorial costs account for an average of 32.3 cents of every dollar of the textbook cost".
Okay, so it's the printing, right? WRONG.
"Paper, Printing, & Binding" (PP&B) is anywhere from 4-8 bucks for your typical "real" textbook. Calculus, Chemistry, Finance.
Editorial is usually $20k per book, and most of that comes out of the author's royalties - the better the book, the less editorial needed.
I remember the numbers for one book in particular. PP&B was ~$4.50. Retail was something around 65 bucks. We sold it for 40. That covered the PP&B (which is JUST the cost of the physical item. The marginal cost), plus my salary, company profit, etc. The three big reasons books cost?
(1) Bookstores. That $40 book cost you $60 because of the bookstore. All they did is have it. Nice gig.
(2) Professors/Ancillaries. You would not BELIEVE the stuff we make for the professors. Transparency sets ($300 for one set). Software. Testbanks. Grading testbanks. Teacher's manuals. If you had all the stuff we provide for professors, anyone could teach the course. And all of that has to be paid for by you, the students.
(3) Indirect market. Just like your doctor, your professor doesn't know (or care) how much the book costs. It's what he likes. (One professor adopted a book solely because the cover was "his school's" color)
So, make the prof happy, no matter what it takes or costs. And this is why books cost so much.
no amount of CGI can beat the infinite movie screen of the imagination when fueled by a good book
Fortunately for us, they made a movie based off the Lord of the Rings books instead. You're right, but LOTR were not good books. They were written to showcase the languages. I read the first one, and didn't bother to read the other two. Groundbreaking fantasy, created the genre, yadda yadda. I found the book dull, boring, and not nearly as good as the movie.
Yes, but they have to be invited in to your group. From the outside, it's random noise on random ports. The point is for your group of friends to have a secure network.
My personal thought - does the scroll wheel actually do anything? Considering Apple knock-offs in the past, I wouldn't be surprised to see that it's just a decorative piece, that you use all the buttons around the edge to do things.
Getting Gentoo up and running is harder than most distributions since you have to do the work yourself and not depend on some install program.
So, like Debian.
"rc-update", "env-update", "etc-update", "modules-update", etc.
Ah, like Debian.
*grin*
Re:If the dock had been introduced back in the day
on
Tog Takes on Mac OS X 10.3
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It was like the boys from NeXT came in and simply assumed they knew better than everybody else I wish they had done it, rather than the compromise they came up with. With 10.3, the finder window is now pretty decent. I remember the NeXT browser being a bit more elegant, but this will work. The dock is not as good as the NeXT dock. Especially with the widescreen displays the macs have these days, the original NeXT dock would've rocked.
If only digital cable was actually digital cable. At least where I am (Charter), the first 100 channels are normal, OTA. Nothing special needed. Above 100 you need their decoder box, and at that point you're (theoretically) stuck taping one program. But, that leaves you one digital channel to tape, and one tuner for regular programming.
Agreed on Opeth. There are some truly amazing albums in their repertoire (my fave is either Blackwater Park or Damnation), but their whole catalog is great. You need to tell them about the "heavy" Opeth album (Deliverance). Alternatively, if you liked the vibe from Damnation, get Anekdoten's "Gravity". Excellent stuff.
majority of people would be hard pushed to tell the difference between CD and MP3 at, say, 320kbps using [an] average [...] hifi
Maybe, maybe not. At 128kbps, I can't tell the difference on crappy headphones, and barely notice on the crappy desktop speakers most people have. The real difference isn't the codec, the bitrate, it's the speakers/headphone. At higher bitrates it becomes the sound card, and somewhere it becomes the codec/bitrate. That's why people love it - it sounds fine on their computers/walkmen.
Take that as a jab at it only being 4 gig, or a plus since it's frickin' tiny.
Rio PMP300: 3.5x2.5x.625, 2.4oz (w/o battery?) MiniPod: 3.6x2.0x.5, 3.6oz
(another thing I just noticed - the new scroll wheel acts pretty much the same as the rio, just with a better (G)UI and a nice screen)
Some people will buy them because of the size. It's tempting. $50 bucks less, it's not like the 40 will hold all my music anyway, and I can keep it in a shirt pocket if I want. And 8 hours of battery life... about the same as my Rio.
Good list. I didn't see the latest Finntroll - have you gotten it? And it's odd - I've been listening to a lot more metal lately. Almost like I hit 30 and decided it was fresh. Doom, Death, Black, Power, Progressive. I think 2002 was a better year for music (Blind Guardian, Symphony X, Opeth, Opeth (hey, two albums!)), but this was a good year.
Compensatory damages equal to the total cost of bandwidth, server space, etc. that he has used sending out emails over the years, and punitive damages ten times the compensatory amount.
Couple questions. One, who gets that money? The government? Two, what about the lost time? Say he sends it to two million people, 50% of whom never even see it. The rest spend 10 seconds each (5 to see it and recognize it, 5 to delete and go to the next person). That's ten million seconds. One third of a man-year. Damn. (actually lower than I'd thought - I wanted to mention the Steve Jobs "if you can make it boot 10 seconds faster, you just saved lives")
I remember reading, long ago, that the reason wasn't to sell the car, but for you to see the ad and say, "see, I didn't waste my money - other people are buying them too". It's for the people who own the car, not the people who may buy the car.
Unfortunately, Hollywood needs to realize that. The saddest thing about Wild Wild West was _not_ that they butchered a great series, or that Will Smith sucked in it, but that the reason they made the movie was because HE wanted to play Jim West. Yet when they wrote it, they wrote the part to be the same as every other major-movie Will Smith character. The question then becomes - if Will really wanted to be Jim West, why did he go along with it? Surely he recognized the writing as, well, sucking. Oh, well. Here's hoping that if he sucks, at least Wash will do a good job as the 'bot.
David Brin - Kiln People. Pretty damn clever way to write a detective novel - from the point of view of the cast-off "clones" of the main character that will die in a couple of days.
James Alan Gardner - Trapped. Far future sci-fi, set on a reconstructed earth, that turns out to be a Fantasy novel. (nano used as magic). And the 90-degree turn at the end that makes you question everything that's happened so far.
Sean Williams, Shane Dix: Orphans of Earth. Book 2 of a ultra-far-future space opera. Very well done, but you need to read book 1 first.
China Mieville - Perdido Street Station. Still working on it, as it's a dense book (600+ pages, small type, dense wording). I have no idea what genre this would be - Steampunk Fantasy, maybe? But he tells a compelling story, very descriptively, but without becoming "The Description of Shannara".
John Barnes - Candle. Not from 2003, but a nice finisher for his Resuna books.
Jack McDevitt - Engines of God. Another not-his-latest, but now having read 3 of his books, they all seem very similar anyhow. Well worth reading.
Warren Ellis - Planetary. Picked up Vol 2 this year, utterly fantastic. The "secret history" of a world with modern superheroes.
Re:Future support? Driver updates?
on
The Return of S3
·
· Score: 1
Tell him to check the web site. There are new drivers in the last month or two. Get them from Powervr.com, not Guillemot. I did the same thing and bought one. While it mostly rocks, it does run into the not-supported-game problem, and I'm about to have to get my THIRD fan for it.:(
Depends on your needs. I use mine for much more than simple firewall functionality - downloading stuff just announced on slashdot, ICQ, remote access to my house, etc.
My dad was having the same problem - I moved him to Moz, since setting up a (1)Pop-up Blocker and (2) Junk Mail filter, via him on the phone, was more involved than just having him download/install Moz. He loves it - it moved over all his settings from IE, no more problems and no tech calls.
Slashdot Mirror
OT Question - where'd you get your screen, how do you like it, and how much did you pay for it? Thanks.
I worked for 7 years for a major publisher. The report says: "paper, printing and editorial costs account for an average of 32.3 cents of every dollar of the textbook cost".
Okay, so it's the printing, right? WRONG.
"Paper, Printing, & Binding" (PP&B) is anywhere from 4-8 bucks for your typical "real" textbook. Calculus, Chemistry, Finance.
Editorial is usually $20k per book, and most of that comes out of the author's royalties - the better the book, the less editorial needed.
I remember the numbers for one book in particular. PP&B was ~$4.50. Retail was something around 65 bucks. We sold it for 40. That covered the PP&B (which is JUST the cost of the physical item. The marginal cost), plus my salary, company profit, etc. The three big reasons books cost?
(1) Bookstores. That $40 book cost you $60 because of the bookstore. All they did is have it. Nice gig.
(2) Professors/Ancillaries. You would not BELIEVE the stuff we make for the professors. Transparency sets ($300 for one set). Software. Testbanks. Grading testbanks. Teacher's manuals. If you had all the stuff we provide for professors, anyone could teach the course. And all of that has to be paid for by you, the students.
(3) Indirect market. Just like your doctor, your professor doesn't know (or care) how much the book costs. It's what he likes. (One professor adopted a book solely because the cover was "his school's" color)
So, make the prof happy, no matter what it takes or costs. And this is why books cost so much.
no amount of CGI can beat the infinite movie screen of the imagination when fueled by a good book
Fortunately for us, they made a movie based off the Lord of the Rings books instead. You're right, but LOTR were not good books. They were written to showcase the languages. I read the first one, and didn't bother to read the other two. Groundbreaking fantasy, created the genre, yadda yadda. I found the book dull, boring, and not nearly as good as the movie.
Flame away.
...and I'll be using the other to gouge out my eyes.
Heck, here's another way to look at it - you have 93 gig. So you'd fill whatever iPod you got. So why not get one that's smaller?
But most people have very few mp3s. And 4 gig is, what, 60 albums or so?
Yes, but they have to be invited in to your group. From the outside, it's random noise on random ports. The point is for your group of friends to have a secure network.
My personal thought - does the scroll wheel actually do anything? Considering Apple knock-offs in the past, I wouldn't be surprised to see that it's just a decorative piece, that you use all the buttons around the edge to do things.
Getting Gentoo up and running is harder than most distributions since you have to do the work yourself and not depend on some install program.
So, like Debian.
"rc-update", "env-update", "etc-update", "modules-update", etc.
Ah, like Debian.
*grin*
It was like the boys from NeXT came in and simply assumed they knew better than everybody else
I wish they had done it, rather than the compromise they came up with. With 10.3, the finder window is now pretty decent. I remember the NeXT browser being a bit more elegant, but this will work. The dock is not as good as the NeXT dock. Especially with the widescreen displays the macs have these days, the original NeXT dock would've rocked.
If only digital cable was actually digital cable. At least where I am (Charter), the first 100 channels are normal, OTA. Nothing special needed. Above 100 you need their decoder box, and at that point you're (theoretically) stuck taping one program. But, that leaves you one digital channel to tape, and one tuner for regular programming.
Rio Nitrus. Just went looking tonight. 1.5 gig for $200. 20 gig for $329. Ya know, neither of those seems superior than the (mini) iPod.
Agreed on Opeth. There are some truly amazing albums in their repertoire (my fave is either Blackwater Park or Damnation), but their whole catalog is great. You need to tell them about the "heavy" Opeth album (Deliverance). Alternatively, if you liked the vibe from Damnation, get Anekdoten's "Gravity". Excellent stuff.
majority of people would be hard pushed to tell the difference between CD and MP3 at, say, 320kbps using [an] average [...] hifi
Maybe, maybe not. At 128kbps, I can't tell the difference on crappy headphones, and barely notice on the crappy desktop speakers most people have. The real difference isn't the codec, the bitrate, it's the speakers/headphone. At higher bitrates it becomes the sound card, and somewhere it becomes the codec/bitrate. That's why people love it - it sounds fine on their computers/walkmen.
Size. Does. Matter.
Take that as a jab at it only being 4 gig, or a plus since it's frickin' tiny.
Rio PMP300: 3.5x2.5x.625, 2.4oz (w/o battery?)
MiniPod: 3.6x2.0x.5, 3.6oz
(another thing I just noticed - the new scroll wheel acts pretty much the same as the rio, just with a better (G)UI and a nice screen)
Some people will buy them because of the size. It's tempting. $50 bucks less, it's not like the 40 will hold all my music anyway, and I can keep it in a shirt pocket if I want. And 8 hours of battery life... about the same as my Rio.
Anyone have information about the MacWorld keynote? I know that G5 Xserves have been announced, as well as a new Xraid.
Good list. I didn't see the latest Finntroll - have you gotten it? And it's odd - I've been listening to a lot more metal lately. Almost like I hit 30 and decided it was fresh. Doom, Death, Black, Power, Progressive. I think 2002 was a better year for music (Blind Guardian, Symphony X, Opeth, Opeth (hey, two albums!)), but this was a good year.
Compensatory damages equal to the total cost of bandwidth, server space, etc. that he has used sending out emails over the years, and punitive damages ten times the compensatory amount.
Couple questions. One, who gets that money? The government? Two, what about the lost time? Say he sends it to two million people, 50% of whom never even see it. The rest spend 10 seconds each (5 to see it and recognize it, 5 to delete and go to the next person). That's ten million seconds. One third of a man-year. Damn. (actually lower than I'd thought - I wanted to mention the Steve Jobs "if you can make it boot 10 seconds faster, you just saved lives")
I remember reading, long ago, that the reason wasn't to sell the car, but for you to see the ad and say, "see, I didn't waste my money - other people are buying them too". It's for the people who own the car, not the people who may buy the car.
Unfortunately, Hollywood needs to realize that. The saddest thing about Wild Wild West was _not_ that they butchered a great series, or that Will Smith sucked in it, but that the reason they made the movie was because HE wanted to play Jim West. Yet when they wrote it, they wrote the part to be the same as every other major-movie Will Smith character. The question then becomes - if Will really wanted to be Jim West, why did he go along with it? Surely he recognized the writing as, well, sucking. Oh, well. Here's hoping that if he sucks, at least Wash will do a good job as the 'bot.
David Brin - Kiln People. Pretty damn clever way to write a detective novel - from the point of view of the cast-off "clones" of the main character that will die in a couple of days.
James Alan Gardner - Trapped. Far future sci-fi, set on a reconstructed earth, that turns out to be a Fantasy novel. (nano used as magic). And the 90-degree turn at the end that makes you question everything that's happened so far.
Sean Williams, Shane Dix: Orphans of Earth. Book 2 of a ultra-far-future space opera. Very well done, but you need to read book 1 first.
China Mieville - Perdido Street Station. Still working on it, as it's a dense book (600+ pages, small type, dense wording). I have no idea what genre this would be - Steampunk Fantasy, maybe? But he tells a compelling story, very descriptively, but without becoming "The Description of Shannara".
John Barnes - Candle. Not from 2003, but a nice finisher for his Resuna books.
Jack McDevitt - Engines of God. Another not-his-latest, but now having read 3 of his books, they all seem very similar anyhow. Well worth reading.
Warren Ellis - Planetary. Picked up Vol 2 this year, utterly fantastic. The "secret history" of a world with modern superheroes.
Tell him to check the web site. There are new drivers in the last month or two. Get them from Powervr.com, not Guillemot. I did the same thing and bought one. While it mostly rocks, it does run into the not-supported-game problem, and I'm about to have to get my THIRD fan for it. :(
1991 or so. The NeXT had a WORM drive. I remember specifically because the retail cost of the drive was more than the retail cost of the NeXT.
Depends on your needs. I use mine for much more than simple firewall functionality - downloading stuff just announced on slashdot, ICQ, remote access to my house, etc.
XMLTV - not an issue, there's a company that will sell you the data. Yes, you have to pay, but there you go.
My dad was having the same problem - I moved him to Moz, since setting up a (1)Pop-up Blocker and (2) Junk Mail filter, via him on the phone, was more involved than just having him download/install Moz. He loves it - it moved over all his settings from IE, no more problems and no tech calls.