Authors deserve whatever financial compensation the markets will provide, but there are other (possibly greater) motives for writing and publishing such as the desire to share ideas, knowledge, spirituality, etc. I say this having co-/authored a number of books for which my effective book-based compensation was approximately $2/hr with no benefits, and having compared notes with "best-selling" authors (thousands of copies) who get slightly better deals at effectively $3.5/hr.
For most individual authors, selling a pirated copy is about as profitable as selling a remaindered copy, in that the cost of tracking it exceeds the monetary value of doing so, but someone has hopefully been enlightened by the knowledge or story. (If my goal is to share a story or get social buy-in for some idea/knowledge, I might even place a higher value on easily spreading the pirated digital copy to as many eyeballs as possible, since publishing and distribution eats most of the income anyway.)
To be clear, my argument is not that authors should not receive any compensation for their work. It is that absent a compelling collective reason such as preserving/spreading endangered culture, enhancing public safety, education, etc. for producing particular classes of works, there should be no expectation that state or society guarantee the profitability of the book authorship vocation or activity, just as we do not make any special attempt to ensure that DHTML authors are profitable.
Outside of the successful authors (functionally more like editors and producers) of serialized books, I would estimate that successful, full-time (living or dead) authors are in the low dozens, and even then their incomes have to be supplemented by other professional activities in publishing, speaking, teaching or professional activities in other fields.
Also applications: decompression on PMPs and other ASIC/SoC embedded devices, advances in lossy stream compression that make pirated movies watchable, network and distributed data/computing applications, use of compression for spam and other detection purposes, new considerations for use with encryption, compression of three dimensional objects...
If people are bothering to pirate this book that means that it is still relevant.
If this book is being pirated, that likely means that it is still in "500 vaguely related computer e-books DVD ISO.rar.torrent".
Just because he hasn't updated it lately does not give people the right to rip it off. He invested his time and energy into writing it and most works do not pay for themselves instantly, but over time.
Book authorship has been non-viable as a primary source of income for the vast majority of authors for far longer than e-books have been around.
And then what? What would the average non-technical user, the average corporation, the average web application developer gain by having a different most popular browser than the current one?
If the web browser is assumed to be moving up the stack in being more than just a protocol interpreter like FTP clients, to becoming a rich desktop or application environment where differentiators in the environment and not the protocol help determine market share and value, I would want each of perhaps four dominant browsers to attempt to specialize in their own areas of strength (like real operating systems do), while retaining a shared set of basic functionality required to operate as a browser.
Otherwise, the argument for diversity in browser choice risks degenerating into one in favour of additional commodity offerings for the sake of more _apparent_ choice alone (if every browser performed equally for the majority of purposes, time cost becomes the only differentiator; and if IE, Safari, Firefox are already installed, most people are already satisfied while the specialists who have niche needs can deal with it just as in every other market), or into one in which the right to be exclusionary rests mostly on labels.
They could do many acquisitions without the bond, but borrowing with the bond probably costs less in interest paid on the bond, than they would lose on interest received were they to withdraw it from their cash-equivalent holdings. For example, their bonds might pay out at 3 per cent, but if their GICs (or cash equivalents) were invested at a larger rate, like 5 per cent, it makes more sense to borrow against their holdings than to convert their holdings to cash (percentages and holding types are made up). Saving two per cent on $billions is worth enough Zunes for this move to be worthwhile.
Yes, but B5 already did a good job at that final story arc. The show was still above good after 1996, but stopped being Star Trek when it all but abandoned the moral/ethical/humanity dimensions of our choices and became WWII in space.
> How do you know they didn't have several million people living underground on that planet?
The Spocks lamented near the end of the movie that the surviving population of Vulcans was approximately 10,000. That would not preclude millions of individuals from other species from being on the ice planet.
Zeroing the MBR doesn't remove the primary or secondary GUID partition tables, which is important for EFI systems. (It's real fun when the three major fdisks disagree about what kinds of partitions exist.)
Having worked with related requirements before, I've encountered some awful "remembering" implementations where timers, network and other things that go weird if they don't regularly interact. Such implementations cn force really bad things to happen with dirty pages and apparent and actual memory usage. With all the embedded javascript-based DHTML, Flash, Java and other fun plugins and add-ons that walk all over memory and/or assume statefulness in the browser, the developers would almost need to do virtualisation of browser document instances in order to not frequently break pages when resuming, and/or risk relying on some ugly stuff to deal with cohesion.
Tabs in separate processes would reduce the active memory footprint and would be a good way to let the OS decide how to use multiple "cores" and memory, but individual tabs would be more liable to be paged out and back in under a significant number of the common installation/use scenarios.
Given Firefox routinely consumes 4-20 MB for every 1% of CPU it uses (on well memoried and processored systems; per page memory usage has increased steadily for 10 years now in FireFox, even on static pages), I'm confident that the faster/elegant implementation options will lose to portability, but I don't yet know how they'll manage to make it go sideways.
I like this idea a lot, but I also fear that somehow, the developers will find a way to increase memory usage to compensate, perhaps by having to remember the entire memory state of each paused tab or some such. I like and use Firefox, I just don't appreciate the condition that an otherwise naked v3 install with Adblock somehow chews up 4% of a 2 GHz CPU per static page open in a tab, even when the entire browser is in the background.
I'm glad that that has become the issue with USB runs now. For several years, the combination of commonly available host controllers with undocumented behaviour, cables with higher than expected internal resistance, poor connector alloys, and devices that didn't report correct power requirements conspired to defeat standards-compliant topologies at much less than 5m.
The proportion of the installed software (applications, libraries, system) which is useful to the vast majority of users (server, desktop, other) has decreased as total capabilities increased. Part of this is due to the increasing diversity of the userbase which can demand increasingly niche features. Another part is due to a decade of pumping out CS grads who grew up programming without running hardware resource limitations. At the same time, many programs started teaching code legibility and code optimization as opposites and mutually exclusive, when in fact the ability to do both resulted in secure and beautiful code.
Having all but exiled, in the name of portability, the practice of producing hand-tuned machine code and assembly separately optimised for perhaps four truly different but wide spread hardware platforms (16/32 bit, VLB/ISA/PCI), we're now reliant on massive constellations of bloated but sparsely used libraries on top of non-optimised lower level *stuff* which is expected to run on processors which qualitatively vary in several dimensions including numbers and kinds of cores, several instruction sets, attached to several kinds of buses, etc.
If you look at any of the linux on a chip implementations, some Windows Mobile 4 or 5, and other embedded systems where hardware limitations force some optimization for code size or processor time, the basic productivity and communications apps are as responsive as they can be without feeling twitchy.
UI design in the usability sense has also advanced, such that we understand that for most users, some non-reversible or potentially dangerous actions should have built-in delays and soft cancels so that users can abort even after they've selected something by accident/reflex (on well designed systems, clickables know the difference between intentional and unintentional clicks). In other areas, our eyes and brains need time to comprehend state changes such that eliminating the 0.2 second window/menu/toolbar display/minimization animation (it might be a flash or shrink or fade or whatever) would cause a longer period of confusion about the new arrangement of the interface. Look at ATMs for examples of UIs where, even though Windows 2000 on ~1 GHz x86 has replaced 16-bit OS/2, human wall time has not decreased in decades. You'll also note that the wall time it took to type a business letter in WordStar is roughly the same as the time it took to do the same in WP 5.1 as it was in Word 95 as it is in swriter today, and that no hardware development short of a USB brain tap is likely to speed up the rate-limiting step.
Also, look at bus speed matches, where in the 1990s, real HDD and expansion bus speeds were in the several 1-10 MB/s, while memory and CPU were capable of several 100 MB/s. Throughout the current decade, real HDD transfer speeds average 10-100 MB/s while everything else is capable of several 1000-10000 MB/s. It's all exponential growth, but the uber fast hardware now spends comparatively more bandwidth waiting for the hard disk (application launch, caching, etc.) which gives the appearance of overall slowness.
OpenVPN default settings on UDP work reasonably well on the cheap birds if latency isn't a deakbreaker. For best results, be prepared to spend for your own time, or at least find out how the provider mangles/fakes layer 3 going up and down and adjust your packets accordingly. Also try to originate close to the uplink to save 50-200ms each way on the ground.
Bandwidth gets really expensive if you don't design your solution correctly. (Hint: Most remote desktop tech support is performed incorrectly. Consider what information the helpdesk actually needs to model and solve the problem before sending lots of pretty pictures with low information density around the world.) If you must do remote desktops, NX may or may not help with TCO vs putting a terminal server on site, and using it smartly. Even if you're supporting Windows boxes, it's also worthwhile to look into some of the commercial X implementations that optimize for poor bandwidth conditions.
The unfavoured momentum only exists due to a sufficient mass of passive unknowing supporters. I look forward to reading TPBs' book(s) and possibly attending the lecture series next year.
> If you want to actually monetize email stamps, which is a completely different issue, you just need to add a "refund" button in email so that people can refund the cost of ther stamp to people who aren't spammers.
Good luck with updating the 10^9 installed e-mail clients and their various associated private/non-IP/etc. networks/protocols to do that. Even without the monetizing mechanism, ISPs and other eyeball network operators would have to upgrade their 10^6 user/authentication databases to track individuals' stamp usage in order for this to be useful for enforcement.
Until last year, my MBP was up for 30 days at a time between reboots until Apple pointed out that such usage had some negative effects on the life of the battery, which were in evidence. Now, I can't leave 20 tabs in Firefox 3 running for more than 24 hours without either it or the JVM or Flash consuming all the physical memory, requiring me to reboot and restart the degradation process. If the browser is to become the OS, web browsers in general need to be designed with proper management in mind, or revert to the Firefox 2 style of integration, extensibility and, most of all, stability.
Poor standard of education - also better than 3/4 of the world. The top 20% of US students are the best in the world, according to the Ted talk Bill Gates recently gave.
Let's ignore that India and China each have more genius-level children than the U.S. has children. Ask why only the top 20% of U.S. students are the best in the world.
To claim that we are in a third world state (or even close to it) is an insult to people who actually live in third-world countries.
You're right. Parts of the third-world would never stand for the conditions we have in the west.
I just spent a week with a family in los Alcarrizos outside Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic where the residents routinely experience such hardships as: * complaints about wait times rising to two hours to get seen by a doctor in a bed at the local hospital * hiring a private taxi for a day for 500 Dominican pesos (US$15) * almost door to door public transport between any two points in a 25 km-wide city for $0.80 in 30 minutes * 24 hour* medical clinics within a 300 m walk from any residence (*the doctor living inside will wake up if you ring their cell phone) * fresh produce and meat vendors within 50 m of any residence, with door to door service, at around US$1.50 per pound * Free K-8 education within 150 m of any residence, free 9-11 education slightly further away. Their post-secondary fees are only 50% subsidized by the government, unlike Canada which pays for 67%. * collaborative communities where doors are not only unlocked, but wide open during daylight and welcoming to all visitors * easily extensible and reusable structures built around open standards (cinder blocks, rebar and cement) that grow with the community * streets around schools that are closed to car traffic during the day
The down side: * probabilistic electricity means sometimes all there is to do is talk to friends and neighbours, or fire up the generator for the sound system at the community building for a spontaneous block party * probabilistic mains water and potable water by truck means that you have to plan and pay attention to resource usage, and that you have to understand sanitation and cooking * the need for a guard tower at the U.S.-style supermarket which charges U.S. prices for articles of inferior flavor and nutritional value * toddlers and pets get fed at the neighbours without your knowledge until after the fact * the need for mosquito netting around the bed at night * life expectancy 10% less than in Canada * structural inability to participate in global recession
Overall, the place and lifestyle reminded me of growing up in the slums here in a Canadian city of over 1 million people, except that S.D. feels safer and civic services are more accessible.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks to the fixer.
Authors deserve whatever financial compensation the markets will provide, but there are other (possibly greater) motives for writing and publishing such as the desire to share ideas, knowledge, spirituality, etc. I say this having co-/authored a number of books for which my effective book-based compensation was approximately $2/hr with no benefits, and having compared notes with "best-selling" authors (thousands of copies) who get slightly better deals at effectively $3.5/hr.
For most individual authors, selling a pirated copy is about as profitable as selling a remaindered copy, in that the cost of tracking it exceeds the monetary value of doing so, but someone has hopefully been enlightened by the knowledge or story. (If my goal is to share a story or get social buy-in for some idea/knowledge, I might even place a higher value on easily spreading the pirated digital copy to as many eyeballs as possible, since publishing and distribution eats most of the income anyway.)
To be clear, my argument is not that authors should not receive any compensation for their work. It is that absent a compelling collective reason such as preserving/spreading endangered culture, enhancing public safety, education, etc. for producing particular classes of works, there should be no expectation that state or society guarantee the profitability of the book authorship vocation or activity, just as we do not make any special attempt to ensure that DHTML authors are profitable.
Outside of the successful authors (functionally more like editors and producers) of serialized books, I would estimate that successful, full-time (living or dead) authors are in the low dozens, and even then their incomes have to be supplemented by other professional activities in publishing, speaking, teaching or professional activities in other fields.
Also applications: decompression on PMPs and other ASIC/SoC embedded devices, advances in lossy stream compression that make pirated movies watchable, network and distributed data/computing applications, use of compression for spam and other detection purposes, new considerations for use with encryption, compression of three dimensional objects...
If people are bothering to pirate this book that means that it is still relevant.
If this book is being pirated, that likely means that it is still in "500 vaguely related computer e-books DVD ISO.rar.torrent".
Just because he hasn't updated it lately does not give people the right to rip it off. He invested his time and energy into writing it and most works do not pay for themselves instantly, but over time.
Book authorship has been non-viable as a primary source of income for the vast majority of authors for far longer than e-books have been around.
And then what? What would the average non-technical user, the average corporation, the average web application developer gain by having a different most popular browser than the current one?
If the web browser is assumed to be moving up the stack in being more than just a protocol interpreter like FTP clients, to becoming a rich desktop or application environment where differentiators in the environment and not the protocol help determine market share and value, I would want each of perhaps four dominant browsers to attempt to specialize in their own areas of strength (like real operating systems do), while retaining a shared set of basic functionality required to operate as a browser.
Otherwise, the argument for diversity in browser choice risks degenerating into one in favour of additional commodity offerings for the sake of more _apparent_ choice alone (if every browser performed equally for the majority of purposes, time cost becomes the only differentiator; and if IE, Safari, Firefox are already installed, most people are already satisfied while the specialists who have niche needs can deal with it just as in every other market), or into one in which the right to be exclusionary rests mostly on labels.
And so Microsoft has thereby survived further scrutiny that downgraded other bonds, showing that Microsoft bonds are worth investing in.
They could do many acquisitions without the bond, but borrowing with the bond probably costs less in interest paid on the bond, than they would lose on interest received were they to withdraw it from their cash-equivalent holdings. For example, their bonds might pay out at 3 per cent, but if their GICs (or cash equivalents) were invested at a larger rate, like 5 per cent, it makes more sense to borrow against their holdings than to convert their holdings to cash (percentages and holding types are made up). Saving two per cent on $billions is worth enough Zunes for this move to be worthwhile.
Yes, but B5 already did a good job at that final story arc. The show was still above good after 1996, but stopped being Star Trek when it all but abandoned the moral/ethical/humanity dimensions of our choices and became WWII in space.
> How do you know they didn't have several million people living underground on that planet?
The Spocks lamented near the end of the movie that the surviving population of Vulcans was approximately 10,000. That would not preclude millions of individuals from other species from being on the ice planet.
Zeroing the MBR doesn't remove the primary or secondary GUID partition tables, which is important for EFI systems. (It's real fun when the three major fdisks disagree about what kinds of partitions exist.)
Having worked with related requirements before, I've encountered some awful "remembering" implementations where timers, network and other things that go weird if they don't regularly interact. Such implementations cn force really bad things to happen with dirty pages and apparent and actual memory usage. With all the embedded javascript-based DHTML, Flash, Java and other fun plugins and add-ons that walk all over memory and/or assume statefulness in the browser, the developers would almost need to do virtualisation of browser document instances in order to not frequently break pages when resuming, and/or risk relying on some ugly stuff to deal with cohesion.
Tabs in separate processes would reduce the active memory footprint and would be a good way to let the OS decide how to use multiple "cores" and memory, but individual tabs would be more liable to be paged out and back in under a significant number of the common installation/use scenarios.
Given Firefox routinely consumes 4-20 MB for every 1% of CPU it uses (on well memoried and processored systems; per page memory usage has increased steadily for 10 years now in FireFox, even on static pages), I'm confident that the faster/elegant implementation options will lose to portability, but I don't yet know how they'll manage to make it go sideways.
I like this idea a lot, but I also fear that somehow, the developers will find a way to increase memory usage to compensate, perhaps by having to remember the entire memory state of each paused tab or some such. I like and use Firefox, I just don't appreciate the condition that an otherwise naked v3 install with Adblock somehow chews up 4% of a 2 GHz CPU per static page open in a tab, even when the entire browser is in the background.
> They'll wonder how anybody ever got pregnant around the turn of the millennium.
Easy. Historians will find that They need to do way instain mother> who kill thier babbys. becuse these babby cant frigth back.
On a serious note, how would we archive enough social context for this comment to make sense in even 10 years?
> USB has a 5m restriction for the same reason.
I'm glad that that has become the issue with USB runs now. For several years, the combination of commonly available host controllers with undocumented behaviour, cables with higher than expected internal resistance, poor connector alloys, and devices that didn't report correct power requirements conspired to defeat standards-compliant topologies at much less than 5m.
On many OSes on the x86 side...
The proportion of the installed software (applications, libraries, system) which is useful to the vast majority of users (server, desktop, other) has decreased as total capabilities increased. Part of this is due to the increasing diversity of the userbase which can demand increasingly niche features. Another part is due to a decade of pumping out CS grads who grew up programming without running hardware resource limitations. At the same time, many programs started teaching code legibility and code optimization as opposites and mutually exclusive, when in fact the ability to do both resulted in secure and beautiful code.
Having all but exiled, in the name of portability, the practice of producing hand-tuned machine code and assembly separately optimised for perhaps four truly different but wide spread hardware platforms (16/32 bit, VLB/ISA/PCI), we're now reliant on massive constellations of bloated but sparsely used libraries on top of non-optimised lower level *stuff* which is expected to run on processors which qualitatively vary in several dimensions including numbers and kinds of cores, several instruction sets, attached to several kinds of buses, etc.
If you look at any of the linux on a chip implementations, some Windows Mobile 4 or 5, and other embedded systems where hardware limitations force some optimization for code size or processor time, the basic productivity and communications apps are as responsive as they can be without feeling twitchy.
UI design in the usability sense has also advanced, such that we understand that for most users, some non-reversible or potentially dangerous actions should have built-in delays and soft cancels so that users can abort even after they've selected something by accident/reflex (on well designed systems, clickables know the difference between intentional and unintentional clicks). In other areas, our eyes and brains need time to comprehend state changes such that eliminating the 0.2 second window/menu/toolbar display/minimization animation (it might be a flash or shrink or fade or whatever) would cause a longer period of confusion about the new arrangement of the interface. Look at ATMs for examples of UIs where, even though Windows 2000 on ~1 GHz x86 has replaced 16-bit OS/2, human wall time has not decreased in decades. You'll also note that the wall time it took to type a business letter in WordStar is roughly the same as the time it took to do the same in WP 5.1 as it was in Word 95 as it is in swriter today, and that no hardware development short of a USB brain tap is likely to speed up the rate-limiting step.
Also, look at bus speed matches, where in the 1990s, real HDD and expansion bus speeds were in the several 1-10 MB/s, while memory and CPU were capable of several 100 MB/s. Throughout the current decade, real HDD transfer speeds average 10-100 MB/s while everything else is capable of several 1000-10000 MB/s. It's all exponential growth, but the uber fast hardware now spends comparatively more bandwidth waiting for the hard disk (application launch, caching, etc.) which gives the appearance of overall slowness.
Internet Junkbuster since 1996.
All your Google are belong to Google?
-AD 2001
> First Amendment ... prohibits the government from abridging...
I don't yet consider Gmail a government.
High performance and inexpensive.
4x quad core Operons on Tyans from the last product cycle is doable for ~$200 per core.
Low power and high performance.
ARM, POWER, and potentially GPGPUs etc.
Different poster, but...
OpenVPN default settings on UDP work reasonably well on the cheap birds if latency isn't a deakbreaker. For best results, be prepared to spend for your own time, or at least find out how the provider mangles/fakes layer 3 going up and down and adjust your packets accordingly. Also try to originate close to the uplink to save 50-200ms each way on the ground.
Bandwidth gets really expensive if you don't design your solution correctly. (Hint: Most remote desktop tech support is performed incorrectly. Consider what information the helpdesk actually needs to model and solve the problem before sending lots of pretty pictures with low information density around the world.) If you must do remote desktops, NX may or may not help with TCO vs putting a terminal server on site, and using it smartly. Even if you're supporting Windows boxes, it's also worthwhile to look into some of the commercial X implementations that optimize for poor bandwidth conditions.
The unfavoured momentum only exists due to a sufficient mass of passive unknowing supporters. I look forward to reading TPBs' book(s) and possibly attending the lecture series next year.
> If you want to actually monetize email stamps, which is a completely different issue, you just need to add a "refund" button in email so that people can refund the cost of ther stamp to people who aren't spammers.
Good luck with updating the 10^9 installed e-mail clients and their various associated private/non-IP/etc. networks/protocols to do that. Even without the monetizing mechanism, ISPs and other eyeball network operators would have to upgrade their 10^6 user/authentication databases to track individuals' stamp usage in order for this to be useful for enforcement.
Are you sure it wasn't the FAT32 4GB individual file size limit?
Until last year, my MBP was up for 30 days at a time between reboots until Apple pointed out that such usage had some negative effects on the life of the battery, which were in evidence. Now, I can't leave 20 tabs in Firefox 3 running for more than 24 hours without either it or the JVM or Flash consuming all the physical memory, requiring me to reboot and restart the degradation process. If the browser is to become the OS, web browsers in general need to be designed with proper management in mind, or revert to the Firefox 2 style of integration, extensibility and, most of all, stability.
Poor standard of education - also better than 3/4 of the world. The top 20% of US students are the best in the world, according to the Ted talk Bill Gates recently gave.
Let's ignore that India and China each have more genius-level children than the U.S. has children. Ask why only the top 20% of U.S. students are the best in the world.
To claim that we are in a third world state (or even close to it) is an insult to people who actually live in third-world countries.
You're right. Parts of the third-world would never stand for the conditions we have in the west.
I just spent a week with a family in los Alcarrizos outside Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic where the residents routinely experience such hardships as:
* complaints about wait times rising to two hours to get seen by a doctor in a bed at the local hospital
* hiring a private taxi for a day for 500 Dominican pesos (US$15)
* almost door to door public transport between any two points in a 25 km-wide city for $0.80 in 30 minutes
* 24 hour* medical clinics within a 300 m walk from any residence (*the doctor living inside will wake up if you ring their cell phone)
* fresh produce and meat vendors within 50 m of any residence, with door to door service, at around US$1.50 per pound
* Free K-8 education within 150 m of any residence, free 9-11 education slightly further away. Their post-secondary fees are only 50% subsidized by the government, unlike Canada which pays for 67%.
* collaborative communities where doors are not only unlocked, but wide open during daylight and welcoming to all visitors
* easily extensible and reusable structures built around open standards (cinder blocks, rebar and cement) that grow with the community
* streets around schools that are closed to car traffic during the day
The down side:
* probabilistic electricity means sometimes all there is to do is talk to friends and neighbours, or fire up the generator for the sound system at the community building for a spontaneous block party
* probabilistic mains water and potable water by truck means that you have to plan and pay attention to resource usage, and that you have to understand sanitation and cooking
* the need for a guard tower at the U.S.-style supermarket which charges U.S. prices for articles of inferior flavor and nutritional value
* toddlers and pets get fed at the neighbours without your knowledge until after the fact
* the need for mosquito netting around the bed at night
* life expectancy 10% less than in Canada
* structural inability to participate in global recession
Overall, the place and lifestyle reminded me of growing up in the slums here in a Canadian city of over 1 million people, except that S.D. feels safer and civic services are more accessible.