The music market and the book markets may not be directly comparable, but Baen Publishing's experience with non-DRM'd open format ebooks (including some given away as free samples) show that (a) given a fair price, most people will pay for a product (even if they could get it "free" with a bit of hassle) and (b) free ebooks boost the sales of the paper copies.
Authors who have books with both Baen and other publishers, or who have compared notes with authors published by other publishers, note that their ebook royalties (at $2.50-$5.00 retail per book) are much better, both in $ and absolute number terms, than similar ebooks (same/similar authors & genre) at publishers that charge $15+ with all kinds of format restrictions. (Big surprise, eh?) They also not e that their books stay in print and selling longer if free e-versions are available (see Baen Free Library for more details, although I think some of the above data is from one of Eric Flint's editorials in the Baen's Universe zine.)
So, your "My money is that the DRM-free version makes a lot more money, simply because of its ease-of-use." is correct at least as far as ebooks go. I'm sure it'd be true for music and video, too.
Yep, haven't seen the need for cable or satellite in about ten years now. Rarely watch any OTA TV either, for that matter. Any TV series worth the time to watch are worth buying the season DVD set a year (or so) after it airs, and over the course of a 20 episode season you'll save yourself five or more hours by not having the commercials.
Somehow an unknown executable ended up in your temp folder. You have no idea how it did. Some application is trying to run that unknown executable every few seconds. You dont know which application is doing that. You dont know what else that application is doing to your system.
You just described the normal everyday experience of 99% of people running any application on Windows. They don't know from "temp folder", and they sure as hell don't know what else that application -- whether it's Office or IE or Outlook, or some non MS software -- is doing to their system.
People use non free OSes these days because they honestly dont know how things work, and wont spend the time to. Its the same reason why anyone can build a car, but noone really does.
No.
People don't build their own cars for the same reason they don't write their own OS from scratch: it's too much work, and they don't need to.
People use free OSes for the same reason they don't buy cars with the hoods welded shut. The difference is that there's no auto manufacturer with sufficient monopoly that that they'd ever sell any cars with the hood welded shut.
Yes, companies can order PCs with whatever they want on them from the big vendors. The problem is with the small business and home users that go to Best Buy or CompUSA or the like. The only XP machines they have left are old stock, and that's mostly gone.
And if I get the chance I'll metamod whoever modded that as troll as "unfair".
Parent post was: Either you drink the kool-aid or die of dehydration.
That's exactly the dilemma most people/companies with a Microsoft dependency find themselves in. Try buying a new (non-Mac) PC without Vista on it, for example.
Web site security is a mix of good administration and secure code.
If you're talking about the website code and not the server code, it won't do a damn thing to help you if there's a buffer overflow in the server itself.
Choice of OS has surprisingly little to do with it.
Until somebody finds an exploit in your server code, and then it can make all the difference in the world.
BTW, do you think that hackers who are after e.g. financial information are going to do something so silly as to announce that you were owned?
2020: robotics will be much further along. Probes and robots are better and cheaper than humans and the case only gets stronger with time.
The only people who really give a rats ass about making the solar system safe for robots is the few scientists whose experiments are flying, and their fanboys. The data those robots return is of interest to most people only in so far as it might be useful for manned (peopled, crewed, staffed, whatever) expeditions someday.
To paraphrase a line from "The Right Stuff": no Buck Rogers, no bucks.
Yes, there are plenty of other things to do in space too, not all involving the Moon. We should do them all. In general, anything that helps make one cheaper/easier will help the others.
Even under the most dire/optimistic scenarios a lunar facility isn't gonna be much of a viable 'lifeboat' for generations yet.
All the more reason to get started sooner rather than later, then, eh? "Okay everyone, lifeboat drill in 2025!"
Except a lunar facility is going to be markedly different then anything space-based. Significant gravity, a surface, 2 week bright/dark cycles, huge dust & debris issues; except for lack of atmosphere they're almost entirely different problem sets. A space station is certainly the better R&D environment for spacefaring development.
Right. We wouldn't go anywhere in space where there's gravity, surfaces, or dust and debris, or extremes of bright or dark. Hello? Asteroids? Mercury? Mars? The outer moons?
And while you mentioned vacuum, you left out radiation (space station orbits below the Van Allen belts), and resupply issues (space station can be abandoned on short notice if necessary).
As to Martian R&D Earth as good, and substantially cheaper/more-amenable venue then the moon offers.
Looks like you've drunk Zubrin and the Mars mafia's koolade. Camping out in the Utah desert or the Canadian arctic tells you zero about living on Mars, no matter what Zubrin and his space campers say. Hey, I've been to the Space Camp in Huntsville. Sure, it was fun, but it taught me as much about flying in Shuttle as camping on Earth tells you about Mars. Low gravity, almost no atmosphere and what there is is toxic, radiation, 20 minutes (at best) ping times, temperatures cold enough to freeze CO2, a year to resupply or evacuate, and a year in zero gee just to get there, etc, etc.
Because the moon is the only possible frontier? I said "A frontier". It happens to be the closest where there's any "there" there.
Not our oceans, deserts, mountain ranges, arctic & antarctic regions?
Perhaps you don't understand the definition of "frontier"? People already live all of those places, and routinely exploit them. Any tourist willing with a few tens of thousands to spend, tops, can go visit without being particularly uncomfortable, and return home with photos and souvenirs. True frontiers are not for tourists, they're for pioneers. You know, the guys (and gals) who find new and unusual ways to die.
As for "abstract frontiers", well, pffft. Any society -- hell, any organism -- that embraces internal frontiers while ignoring external ones is already doomed.
I wonder if a roll of duct tape might be prudent as well.
Absolutely. Duct tape was essential to saving Apollo 13, when they had to rig an adapter for the square CM lithium hydroxide canisters to the circular LM canister ports. (CM and LM were built by different contractors, each with their own design for lithium hydroxide (part of the CO2 scrubbing system) canisters.)
Also comes in handy for keeping stuff from drifting around if there's no Velcro handy. Standard equipment on every Shuttle mission.
There's doing research and rehearsals for manned exploration further out. I certainly wouldn't want to venture to Mars or the asteroids without technology tested a little closer to home first.
Raw materials -- He3 (as fusion fuel) is one possibility. As a source for raw materials (silicon, aluminum, etc) for building solar powersats is another.
Astronomical research -- lunar farside is the best place in the solar system for radio telescopes, it's shielded from Earth's noise. It's also a pretty good place for telescopes at all other wavelengths, especially if there's a manned base to swap out instruments, repair cameras, etc.
A frontier. People need one, even if only a few actually pioneer it. Earth will go crazy even faster without one.
Whole books have been written on "why", a Slashdot comment isn't going to do it justice.
True enough, but there's plenty of research to do on the lunar surface.
Some directly related to habitation of the Moon and exploration of Mars -- long duration life support, techniques for harvesting lunar resources, etc, -- and some of the more "pure research" category. Lunar farside is probably one of the most radio-quiet places in the solar system, with 2000 miles of rock shielding it from Earth, so it'd be great for radiotelescopes, for example.
Also a good place for doing large scale experiments that might have, uh, adverse environmental impact if something goes wrong.
The dinosaurs that evolved into modern birds split off from the main dinosaur line fifty to a hundred million years before the killer asteroid. The dinos that were still dinos when it hit left no descendants.
By definition, an extinction event doesn't keep genetic lines intact.
(That small burrowing mammals like prairie dogs and meerkats might survive a nearby supernova event or a dinosaur killer is small consolation to us, eh?)
I think we definitely need to be working on space, but when we haven't even begun there it's impossible to know what it would cost to send out a successful extra solar colony ship.
True enough. Once we are living and working in space on a large scale, though, then a generation ship isn't much more than a space colony (O'Neill cylinder, Bernal sphere, what-have-you) with a propulsion system and a power supply (solar power not working too well in interstellar space).
Heck, there may be enough in the way of Kuiper Belt Objects, Oort cloud bodies, and rogue planets that we could leapfrog to other stars in much smaller steps than we currently think. We just need suitable power sources.
Sorry, that faulty assumption breaks your whole logic chain. (And yeah, you were probably trying to be funny.)
Try again when interplanetary craft (not the barely-gets-out-of-the-atmosphere stuff we have now) are as commonplace as seafaring craft are today. Think Polynesian islanders settling the Pacific, not Ugg the beachdweller paddling a log out to the surf line.
Most likely, an asteroid the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs won't hit us for a million years or more.
And you base that estimate on what, exactly? Besides, even if you're correct on the odds, it's still a probability calculation -- one could hit us next week, we haven't tracked any but a fraction of a percent of the big rocks out there. But big rocks hitting the Earth aren't the only problem: a nearby gamma ray burster could do sufficient damage, and Eta Carinae (for one) is going to go "real soon now". Then there are the home-grown hazards -- runaway greenhouse, global thermonuclear war, the whole doomsday scenario litany. Perhaps none of them likely, but none of them in the "we don't need to worry about it for a million years" category either.
You really think we won't be able to do anything about it?
Not with attitudes like yours, we won't. We'll keep on figuring that it's some future generation's problem, or that there'll be plenty of warning. No doubt the occupants of Pompeii and Herculaneum felt the same way.
The speed of light is a real and unbreakable rule as a result nothing more than 4 or 5 light years away is reachable.
The Fermi Paradox assumes the light-speed limit.
There are an awful lot of hidden assumptions in your bald statement that the speed of light automatically limits travel to a range of 4 or 5 ly. Why not 3, or 6, or 10? It doesn't take much to allow for hops from one star to the next, and if you've got the tech to build starships, you've got the tech to colonize a star system that doesn't have Earthlike planets. (Ie space colonies, not terraforming - although the latter may also be possible.)
I think civ's do okay, never get off the planet the started on, and eventually die out from lack of resources,
Quite likely a civilization that never gets off its home planet will eventually run out of resources. But there are resources aplenty for those that take that first step. That's why people talk about He3 mining, solar powersats, mining asteroids, etc. Remember O'Neill's question: "Is the surface of a planet the right place for an expanding industrial civilization?" The answer is "no".
"Remain on Earth" and "become extinct" are not distinct choices. As Heinlein and numerous others have put it, the Earth is too small and fragile a basket for humanity to keep all its eggs in.
It's not so much a matter of "if" but of "when". Ask the dinosaurs.
One of them is to look at history- written history, archaeology, and geology. There are no written accounts, as far as I know, of a meteorite causing significant numbers of human casualties, either through an impact or through a tsunami induced by impact.
Well, the dinosaurs would have left written accounts, but they were all dead.
More seriously, we do have historical record of even minor meteor showers causing casualties, the biggest reportedly in Chiing-yang, China in 1490, in an apparent Tunguska-like event, killing a possible "tens of thousands". Mostly its onesies and twosies, though. Tunguska itself, detonating in the middle of nowhere, Sibera, injured the 20 people who were within 50 km of the blast, and killed two. Thousands of reindeer were killed.
Should Apophis (or something that size) hit Earth, the energy release would be about 10 to 20 times that of the Tunguska or Arizona impacts (those were in the 10-20 megaton range), and about 2 or 3 times that of the Krakatoa explosion. Since 3/4 of the planet is water-covered, odds are that most large impacts hit water and cause damage through the result tsunamis. (And yes, we get a few in the several-kiloton range each year - mostly in the middle of nowhere - as has been documented by surveillance satellites.)
Sure, Apophis is no Dinosaur Killer, but it could cause quite a mess depending on if and where it hits.
Yes, it is. Forget once and your doc becomes incompatible. That's lousy human interface design, but great if you're trying to encourage expensive upgrades.
Slashdot Mirror
The music market and the book markets may not be directly comparable, but Baen Publishing's experience with non-DRM'd open format ebooks (including some given away as free samples) show that (a) given a fair price, most people will pay for a product (even if they could get it "free" with a bit of hassle) and (b) free ebooks boost the sales of the paper copies.
Authors who have books with both Baen and other publishers, or who have compared notes with authors published by other publishers, note that their ebook royalties (at $2.50-$5.00 retail per book) are much better, both in $ and absolute number terms, than similar ebooks (same/similar authors & genre) at publishers that charge $15+ with all kinds of format restrictions. (Big surprise, eh?) They also not e that their books stay in print and selling longer if free e-versions are available (see Baen Free Library for more details, although I think some of the above data is from one of Eric Flint's editorials in the Baen's Universe zine.)
So, your "My money is that the DRM-free version makes a lot more money, simply because of its ease-of-use." is correct at least as far as ebooks go. I'm sure it'd be true for music and video, too.
Yep, haven't seen the need for cable or satellite in about ten years now. Rarely watch any OTA TV either, for that matter. Any TV series worth the time to watch are worth buying the season DVD set a year (or so) after it airs, and over the course of a 20 episode season you'll save yourself five or more hours by not having the commercials.
Somehow an unknown executable ended up in your temp folder. You have no idea how it did. Some application is trying to run that unknown executable every few seconds. You dont know which application is doing that. You dont know what else that application is doing to your system.
You just described the normal everyday experience of 99% of people running any application on Windows. They don't know from "temp folder", and they sure as hell don't know what else that application -- whether it's Office or IE or Outlook, or some non MS software -- is doing to their system.
People use non free OSes these days because they honestly dont know how things work, and wont spend the time to. Its the same reason why anyone can build a car, but noone really does.
No.
People don't build their own cars for the same reason they don't write their own OS from scratch: it's too much work, and they don't need to.
People use free OSes for the same reason they don't buy cars with the hoods welded shut. The difference is that there's no auto manufacturer with sufficient monopoly that that they'd ever sell any cars with the hood welded shut.
Yes, companies can order PCs with whatever they want on them from the big vendors. The problem is with the small business and home users that go to Best Buy or CompUSA or the like. The only XP machines they have left are old stock, and that's mostly gone.
The VAST majority of ebay is Windows. Solaris is only used for Oracle on the very back end.
Thanks for the inside info.
+1 insightful.
And if I get the chance I'll metamod whoever modded that as troll as "unfair".
Parent post was: Either you drink the kool-aid or die of dehydration.
That's exactly the dilemma most people/companies with a Microsoft dependency find themselves in. Try buying a new (non-Mac) PC without Vista on it, for example.
Funny how MS gets criticism on /. even though eBay has run on Java and Solaris since 2005.
Go to ebay.com's main page. Check out some of the links like "register" or "pay". See that "eBayISAPI.dll" in the cgi URL?
They use Microsoft too, unless someone with a bizarre sense of humor has a file named eBayISAPI.dll on Solaris...
Web site security is a mix of good administration and secure code.
If you're talking about the website code and not the server code, it won't do a damn thing to help you if there's a buffer overflow in the server itself.
Choice of OS has surprisingly little to do with it.
Until somebody finds an exploit in your server code, and then it can make all the difference in the world.
BTW, do you think that hackers who are after e.g. financial information are going to do something so silly as to announce that you were owned?
seeing how far I can spit in low grav.
Probably about as far as the inside surface of your space helmet. Ewww.
2020: robotics will be much further along. Probes and robots are better and cheaper than humans and the case only gets stronger with time.
The only people who really give a rats ass about making the solar system safe for robots is the few scientists whose experiments are flying, and their fanboys. The data those robots return is of interest to most people only in so far as it might be useful for manned (peopled, crewed, staffed, whatever) expeditions someday.
To paraphrase a line from "The Right Stuff": no Buck Rogers, no bucks.
Yes, there are plenty of other things to do in space too, not all involving the Moon. We should do them all. In general, anything that helps make one cheaper/easier will help the others.
Even under the most dire/optimistic scenarios a lunar facility isn't gonna be much of a viable 'lifeboat' for generations yet.
All the more reason to get started sooner rather than later, then, eh? "Okay everyone, lifeboat drill in 2025!"
Except a lunar facility is going to be markedly different then anything space-based. Significant gravity, a surface, 2 week bright/dark cycles, huge dust & debris issues; except for lack of atmosphere they're almost entirely different problem sets. A space station is certainly the better R&D environment for spacefaring development.
Right. We wouldn't go anywhere in space where there's gravity, surfaces, or dust and debris, or extremes of bright or dark. Hello? Asteroids? Mercury? Mars? The outer moons?
And while you mentioned vacuum, you left out radiation (space station orbits below the Van Allen belts), and resupply issues (space station can be abandoned on short notice if necessary).
As to Martian R&D Earth as good, and substantially cheaper/more-amenable venue then the moon offers.
Looks like you've drunk Zubrin and the Mars mafia's koolade. Camping out in the Utah desert or the Canadian arctic tells you zero about living on Mars, no matter what Zubrin and his space campers say. Hey, I've been to the Space Camp in Huntsville. Sure, it was fun, but it taught me as much about flying in Shuttle as camping on Earth tells you about Mars. Low gravity, almost no atmosphere and what there is is toxic, radiation, 20 minutes (at best) ping times, temperatures cold enough to freeze CO2, a year to resupply or evacuate, and a year in zero gee just to get there, etc, etc.
Because the moon is the only possible frontier? I said "A frontier". It happens to be the closest where there's any "there" there.
Not our oceans, deserts, mountain ranges, arctic & antarctic regions?
Perhaps you don't understand the definition of "frontier"? People already live all of those places, and routinely exploit them. Any tourist willing with a few tens of thousands to spend, tops, can go visit without being particularly uncomfortable, and return home with photos and souvenirs. True frontiers are not for tourists, they're for pioneers. You know, the guys (and gals) who find new and unusual ways to die.
As for "abstract frontiers", well, pffft. Any society -- hell, any organism -- that embraces internal frontiers while ignoring external ones is already doomed.
I wonder if a roll of duct tape might be prudent as well.
Absolutely. Duct tape was essential to saving Apollo 13, when they had to rig an adapter for the square CM lithium hydroxide canisters to the circular LM canister ports. (CM and LM were built by different contractors, each with their own design for lithium hydroxide (part of the CO2 scrubbing system) canisters.)
Also comes in handy for keeping stuff from drifting around if there's no Velcro handy. Standard equipment on every Shuttle mission.
Lol. Many, many reasons.
Yes, there's the lifeboat argument.
There's doing research and rehearsals for manned exploration further out. I certainly wouldn't want to venture to Mars or the asteroids without technology tested a little closer to home first.
Raw materials -- He3 (as fusion fuel) is one possibility. As a source for raw materials (silicon, aluminum, etc) for building solar powersats is another.
Astronomical research -- lunar farside is the best place in the solar system for radio telescopes, it's shielded from Earth's noise. It's also a pretty good place for telescopes at all other wavelengths, especially if there's a manned base to swap out instruments, repair cameras, etc.
A frontier. People need one, even if only a few actually pioneer it. Earth will go crazy even faster without one.
Whole books have been written on "why", a Slashdot comment isn't going to do it justice.
True enough, but there's plenty of research to do on the lunar surface.
Some directly related to habitation of the Moon and exploration of Mars -- long duration life support, techniques for harvesting lunar resources, etc, -- and some of the more "pure research" category. Lunar farside is probably one of the most radio-quiet places in the solar system, with 2000 miles of rock shielding it from Earth, so it'd be great for radiotelescopes, for example.
Also a good place for doing large scale experiments that might have, uh, adverse environmental impact if something goes wrong.
Yes.
The dinosaurs that evolved into modern birds split off from the main dinosaur line fifty to a hundred million years before the killer asteroid. The dinos that were still dinos when it hit left no descendants.
By definition, an extinction event doesn't keep genetic lines intact.
(That small burrowing mammals like prairie dogs and meerkats might survive a nearby supernova event or a dinosaur killer is small consolation to us, eh?)
I think we definitely need to be working on space, but when we haven't even begun there it's impossible to know what it would cost to send out a successful extra solar colony ship.
True enough. Once we are living and working in space on a large scale, though, then a generation ship isn't much more than a space colony (O'Neill cylinder, Bernal sphere, what-have-you) with a propulsion system and a power supply (solar power not working too well in interstellar space).
Heck, there may be enough in the way of Kuiper Belt Objects, Oort cloud bodies, and rogue planets that we could leapfrog to other stars in much smaller steps than we currently think. We just need suitable power sources.
No, no typo. I did indeed mean bald, as in lacking detail to support the assertion.
Cheers.
Earth is a spacefaring civilization.
Sorry, that faulty assumption breaks your whole logic chain. (And yeah, you were probably trying to be funny.)
Try again when interplanetary craft (not the barely-gets-out-of-the-atmosphere stuff we have now) are as commonplace as seafaring craft are today. Think Polynesian islanders settling the Pacific, not Ugg the beachdweller paddling a log out to the surf line.
The dinosaurs didn't have technology.
Which is why they're not around any more.
Most likely, an asteroid the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs won't hit us for a million years or more.
And you base that estimate on what, exactly? Besides, even if you're correct on the odds, it's still a probability calculation -- one could hit us next week, we haven't tracked any but a fraction of a percent of the big rocks out there. But big rocks hitting the Earth aren't the only problem: a nearby gamma ray burster could do sufficient damage, and Eta Carinae (for one) is going to go "real soon now". Then there are the home-grown hazards -- runaway greenhouse, global thermonuclear war, the whole doomsday scenario litany. Perhaps none of them likely, but none of them in the "we don't need to worry about it for a million years" category either.
You really think we won't be able to do anything about it?
Not with attitudes like yours, we won't. We'll keep on figuring that it's some future generation's problem, or that there'll be plenty of warning. No doubt the occupants of Pompeii and Herculaneum felt the same way.
The speed of light is a real and unbreakable rule as a result nothing more than 4 or 5 light years away is reachable.
The Fermi Paradox assumes the light-speed limit.
There are an awful lot of hidden assumptions in your bald statement that the speed of light automatically limits travel to a range of 4 or 5 ly. Why not 3, or 6, or 10? It doesn't take much to allow for hops from one star to the next, and if you've got the tech to build starships, you've got the tech to colonize a star system that doesn't have Earthlike planets. (Ie space colonies, not terraforming - although the latter may also be possible.)
I think civ's do okay, never get off the planet the started on, and eventually die out from lack of resources,
Quite likely a civilization that never gets off its home planet will eventually run out of resources. But there are resources aplenty for those that take that first step. That's why people talk about He3 mining, solar powersats, mining asteroids, etc. Remember O'Neill's question: "Is the surface of a planet the right place for an expanding industrial civilization?" The answer is "no".
"Remain on Earth" and "become extinct" are not distinct choices. As Heinlein and numerous others have put it, the Earth is too small and fragile a basket for humanity to keep all its eggs in.
It's not so much a matter of "if" but of "when". Ask the dinosaurs.
One of them is to look at history- written history, archaeology, and geology. There are no written accounts, as far as I know, of a meteorite causing significant numbers of human casualties, either through an impact or through a tsunami induced by impact.
Well, the dinosaurs would have left written accounts, but they were all dead.
More seriously, we do have historical record of even minor meteor showers causing casualties, the biggest reportedly in Chiing-yang, China in 1490, in an apparent Tunguska-like event, killing a possible "tens of thousands". Mostly its onesies and twosies, though. Tunguska itself, detonating in the middle of nowhere, Sibera, injured the 20 people who were within 50 km of the blast, and killed two. Thousands of reindeer were killed.
Should Apophis (or something that size) hit Earth, the energy release would be about 10 to 20 times that of the Tunguska or Arizona impacts (those were in the 10-20 megaton range), and about 2 or 3 times that of the Krakatoa explosion. Since 3/4 of the planet is water-covered, odds are that most large impacts hit water and cause damage through the result tsunamis. (And yes, we get a few in the several-kiloton range each year - mostly in the middle of nowhere - as has been documented by surveillance satellites.)
Sure, Apophis is no Dinosaur Killer, but it could cause quite a mess depending on if and where it hits.
I suppose it is quite an inconvenience.
Yes, it is. Forget once and your doc becomes incompatible. That's lousy human interface design, but great if you're trying to encourage expensive upgrades.