Not the pilot episode, but the feature film that introduced the concept, the sub, and most of the major characters who would later appear in the TV series.
Interestingly, the film appeared in 1961, which was before the test cited in TFA. And more interesting still, the "fix" in the film was exploding a nuclear device (launched on a missile from the Seaview) to "blow out" the fire in the belts. I'm guessing that there had been some discussion of the test in years prior, and Irwin Allen spun a script around it.
I was only nine at the time, but I remember thinking that the whole concept of the Van Allen belts "catching fire" was absurd because I knew that the belts were outside the atmosphere, and fire requires oxygen. It was the first time I can recall thinking that the science in SF movies was BS. It wasn't the last.
Taubes does not present a diet in his book. He presents a fairly measured discussion of the science and the history that bear on the whole issue of what a healthy diet actually is, right down to a very good layman's explanation of the metabolism of the various chemical components of food. I lost the weight in question before I ever heard of his book. The book was valuable because it explained why I lost that weight.
Good Calories, Bad Calories contains 118 pages of citations and bibliography from peer-reviewed journals and medical researchers in all parts of the medical science field, including (but not limited to) nutritionists. Even if I were a nutritionist, in the face of such a wall of references, I'd be hard pressed to call him a "quack."
Please read the book Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes, for the backstory on the carb wars, as well as abundant research citations about the hazards of eating what I call "habitual carbs." I stopped eating carbs (sugar particularly) and lost 20 pounds, while feeling more energetic and alert than I have in some time. This effect may be age-related (I'm in my mid-50s) and certainly sensitive to individual genetic differences, but the science is not settled (hey, I'm a carb denier!) and the forces that bear on the issue are a lot more complex than most people think.
Publishing != printing. Publishers, when doing their jobs well, see a hair past what the author submits to what the book could be with a little polish. (They pay people such as copy editors and developmental editors to add that polish.) I get stuff thrown at me when I say so, but publishers also act as quality gatekeepers, if for no better reason than they have some money on the line. Now, with ebook publishing, that initial investment in paper and ink is reduced to almost nothing, and it's mostly the publisher's reputation that drives quality.
Given their overwhelming dominance of online book sales, Amazon has the power to completely change the business. We don't know what publishers will have to do--or, more important on my side, pay--to get books into their online store. We don't know who will impose the DRM: Amazon or the publishers. (I will not impose DRM on the titles I publish.) We don't know with any clarity how useful the device will be for reading local files, or how many formats it will support. (For $400, it should damned well be all of them.)
I'm guessing that they priced it high and will reduce the price significantly once they realize nobody's biting. Nobody seems to learn anything in this business.
But hoo-boy, what this thing could do to the publishing world at $99 a unit!
I think most people understand that almost nobody has ever really made big money writing--and of those who do, even fewer make it for very long. I've done much better than a lot of writers, but except for a few years in the late 1990s, I could not have considered my writing income a "living." (Fortunately, I had a good day job and didn't have to.) What I find fascinating is that I am now making about as much money writing as I did back in the late 1970s and all through the late 1980s (until my books became popular) but the shape of the money has changed. I have a blog, and I've posted numerous articles in various hobby areas (mostly retro electronics) all with AdSense ads. I used to get money from publishers in lumps. Now I get it in dribbles, but from Web ads. And over time (and by time I mean eighteen months to two years) I get about as much money from the ads in accumulated dribbles for a given article as I used to get all in one lump for the same kind and size of article. The bad news is that it is not and has never been a lot of money. The good news is that the money keeps coming. If people keep looking for radio circuits to lash up on boards, well, the dribbles will continue, and after five years or so, I expect that the articles will have paid considerably more than I could ever have gotten from the niche magazines, back when there were niche magazines. An article in a print magazine is seen for a few weeks and then vanishes from sight. Web articles are always there, and anyone who really wants to find them can.
Add to that the fact that research is now hugely easier than it used to be, well, the Internet is a big win for writers who keep up with the online culture and do it as it needs to be done. Ironically, the key is patience. Write stuff that some small audience wants, and it will slowly generate money for years, with no additional work. I'm good with that.
Bookstores will actually be anxious to have these things in the basement or in the back room, simply to reduce the costs of carrying inventory. What we'll see over time is a sort of "replenish on demand" bookstore, in which single copies of books are present on the shelves for customers to flip through and purchase--and when that single copy is sold, the cash registers will send an order downstairs to start manufacturing another. Periodically, the newly-printed copies will be carried back upstairs and reshelved for the next customer to find.
What a system like this obviates is the need to manage warehouses full of fragile inventory (which one fire or flood can render worthless) and truck it around, often across hundreds or thousands of miles. A publisher will send repro files (at this stage in history, print PDFs) to the retailer's servers, from which the book machines can draw. The retailer will then pay the publisher for each copy printed. No returns, no warehouses. Bookstores limit their risk to a single copy of each title shelved, rather than hundreds or thousands as is now the case. Publishers limit their risk to content creation costs (acquisition, editing, and layout, plus promotion) and do not have to deal with the patholigical accounting caused by retailer returns.
Most modern book retailing is done by two large chains and a few small ones, plus debris. The larger chains have more than enough money to buy these machines and implement the systems, though it will take some time. Needless to say, Amazon will be hot to implement such a system as well.
BTW, machines like this have existed for some time, and it's a little unclear to me why Espresso is special. The real idea here is putting them in libraries to print out take-home-and-keep copies of out-of-copyright books, and that may be less compelling than many people think. Mostly it makes it faster to get your own copy of Moby Dick than ordering one online.
On the other hand, if the libraries ever decide to cut deals with publishers and sell first-run titles at steep discounts, well, that would change book retailing utterly, and incite a war unlike any bookselling has ever seen.
It's not just POD--it's publishing in general
on
Books in Beta Form
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not just that POD sucks. This is actually a *lousy* time to be writing technical books for publication on paper. I've written a raft of them in the past 20 years and have seen some rich and lean times, but these are the worst. The major book chains are relentlessly reducing the sizes of their computer book sections, meaning that they will buy fewer copies of fewer titles, which means that publishers will be choosing fewer titles from fewer authors, and will give less money to the authors they choose--who will tend *not* to be first-timers.
Basically, the computer book industry is moving from the anomaly of the 1990s, when anybody could get a computer book published (talent optional) to the place where SF and most other categories are now: You'd better have a major reputation forged elsewhere (magazines, online forums, university research, successful startup, etc.) that spills over into computer books, or nobody's going to return your phone calls. The walls between book categories are high: Even though I've sold a quarter million computer books, I can't get anybody to even look at my SF novel.
It's relatively easy to establish your own press based on POD technology, and it will get easier in the future. If you know how to reach your audience, you can sell direct and make money on relatively few books, perhaps more money than you could make as a new author with a conventional publisher. There's research and work involved but others have done it, and if your topic is narrow enough it may be the only route to take near-term. (2-5 years.)
Good luck and don't give up.
--73--
--Jeff Duntemann
Why small business doesn't hire Ivy Leagers either
on
Who Needs Harvard?
·
· Score: 1
I was a co-founder and VP of Coriolis Group Books (a small publishing company) from 1990 to early 2002. I had occasion to interview dozens of hopeful college grads for editorial and marketing positions. I interviewed only a small handful of Ivy Leagers (from Harvard and Princeton if I recall) and they gave the impression of near-comical arrogance, and complete confidence that they deserved and should get the job. When asked hard questions about what I considered important issues to small presses (things like, How would you organize a book-length tutorial on a technical topic?) they invariable tried to change the subject rather than admit that they had no clue.
I haven't investigated why this should be so, but there was so little willingness among these kids to learn anything useful that I waved them on their way, and hired people from local state schools. There is such a thing as being a little hungry when you're starting out, and the Ivies don't cater to nor graduate anybody who might be "hungry" in the sense that makes them ambitious self-starters.
If I were to be hiring for a publishing company again, I would choose well-spoken grads from state universities, especially those who had shown some interest in publishing, perhaps by working in a bookstore as an undergrad, or typesetting a novel they had written for that annual November write-a-novel-in-a-month contest. What they might do to show their interest is much less important to me than the simple fact that they got off their lead asses and did something.
I hope somebody at Harvard gets a copy of this, since I have no other way to reach them: To me, a Harvard diploma is poison. Period.
As I understand it, "mooks" fall somewhere between the book and magazine business model. (I'm curious where Borders will shelve them!) Print magazines are supported almost entirely by advertising revenue, and thus advertisers have almost literally the power of life and death over them. (I have edited several tech magazines in my career, and lordy, do I understand this or what?) Subscribers have been trained not to pay for print magazines by ridiculous "six free issues!" pitches, so in truth, subscriber revenue can't cover but a fraction of what the magazine costs.
My guess is that Make will come out twice a year and be much thicker than a typical print magazine. It will probably be a thinnish book, and may cost as much as $12 or $15.
As for advertisers, figure the people who sell the raw materials for tinkering: Radio Shack, mail order electronics parts houses, tech book publishers like Lindsay Books, and so on. The revenue from advertisers will bring the retail cover price down below what you'd expect for a tech book.
These are guesses on my part; I have no inside information. But if I were to go back into magazine publishing again, this is how I would do it.
I wish Tim the best of luck, and perhaps I'll be able to contribute articles.
Methane does not stink; it's completely odorless. Natural gas is in fact methane, but what makes natural gas (as burned in your stove) smelly is a substance named ethyl mercaptan, which is added specifically so that when gas gets out of the stove or the pipes, you can tell before the whole place goes up.
Meccano was invented in England in 1906 or so, and then when the Liverpool plant closed in the 70s, the subsidiary plant in France became the sole producer. In the 80's and 90's Meccano/France licensed the old American Erector trademark from whoever owned it, and Meccano sets were sold in the US under the Erector trademark. These were nothing like the old Gilbert Erector sets of the 1950s.
I don't think lawyers had anything to do with Meccano's eclipse, in America or anywhere else. Lego was always better at marketing, and because Lego is plastic, is much cheaper to make. I'm not exaggerating when I estimate that there are thousands of dollars of parts in those two mechanical computers. It's not a cheap hobby, heh.
Interestingly, Meccano Ltd. abandoned the red and green color scheme in 1964, so the parts used in this chap's difference engine are either very old, or manufactured by the third-party Meccano compatible parts vendors, the largest of which (called Exacto; no relation to the hobby knives) is in Argentina. It's really a "world system" tho most Meccano hobbyists are in Europe. I haven't bought any Meccano parts since 1997 or so, and the guy I used to buy them from has left the business. You may have to order them from Europe or South America.
Google around on the Web; you can order sets and parts from various places, and they turn up regularly on eBay. What you're unlikely to find these days are full sets sold in hobby shops. That's OK; to do anything ambitious or interesting you have to order tons of spare parts anyway. It's not cheap, but it's a lot of fun.
WASTE, while brilliant, depends on every participant trusting every other participant not to "turn" and open the network to a third party--like the RIAA. If something like that ever becomes popular, you can bet there will be bounties and "rat-out" lines for WASTE-concept encrypted networks.
Heh. WAY back in 1986, I was over at Michael Abrash's house in Mountain View and he showed me his IBM PS/2 model 50. He pulled it apart almost like Legos. It was by far the most easily field-stripped machine I've ever seen.
So I guess it's been tried, and had the feature been seen as valuable by more people, it might have survived in later products. Much later, in the fall of 1993, I flew down to Boca to see IBM's impending (but never released) PowerPC boxes, which were quite small, and had several PCMCIA slots instead of conventional bus slots. We can't blame the market on that failure, but it was a gorgeously designed piece of hardware and I wish they had just done an Intel-based box that way.
What I'd really like to see is for the Saintsong guys (or whoever it is that actually designed the Cappuccino PC and its cousins) create a stackable box design that would let you start with a Cappuccino PC, and then pop off the bottom and snap it atop a similarly sized bay containing a ZIP 250 or an additional hard drive or whatever you might in fact need. The Cappuccino has nearly all of what ordinary people need, and the few extraordinary people who bought it could then add what it lacks.
That's the way the SFF business needs to be going.
--73--
--Jeff Duntemann
Scottsdale, Arizona
jeff at duntemann dot com
Sorry it didn't float your boat. People seem to either love my book or hate it, but it's been in print for 13 years and my mail pile seems to think it succeeds for way more people than it fails.
A lot of people forget that this book has a gimmick: It's assembly for people who have never programmed before and know *nothing* about programming with *any* language. My experience tells me that people who learn the underlying machine before they get too caught up in data structures do better when they have to battle two hundred diverse APIs in the same project, which is the way things have gone in Windows and are headed in Linux.
People who know something about programming and about the fundamental nature of computing should skip the first couple of chapters.
The next time I rewrite it (and that's going to be awhile still, maybe another year) I'm dropping DOS entirely, and will rewrite it for Linux from one end to the other. I will also teach people how to make kernel calls and not apologize for it. If all you do with assembly is call clib, you might as well use gcc. Assembly really is its own language, with its own culture and assumptions and ways of going about things. It is *not* C, and thank God for that much.
I may also drop the foobies thing in the next edition. The mail's been mixed on that--though I'm still trying to think of a good way to teach hex to those for whom number bases other than 10 are a serious mental roadblock.
Thanks, by the way, for the mention here on Slashdot. The book's been around for quite a few years and doesn't get much press anymore, even though it continues to sell well.
--73--
--Jeff Duntemann
Scottsdale, Arizona
(jeff at duntemann dot com)
A Surfeit of Options, and the Primacy of Me
on
Browsing Alone
·
· Score: 1
BOWLING ALONE is an excellent book. Everybody with more than a passing interest in modern society should read it. I fault the author slightly for not guessing enough--he lays out reams of research and then becomes very timid when it comes time to explore the Big Why.
Although Putnam lays a little blame on TV (as he should) he misses something so big as to be obvious: We today have a surfeit of options in terms of what to do with our time. This is nowhere so clear as in the lives of parents with teen or preteen children: Two sports and three musical instruments each (with maybe dance lessons or martial arts thrown in), creating a combinatorial explosion of appointments and committments that makes spontaneous use of time impossible.
Apart perhaps from going to church on Sunday, when does anyone schedule time to spend interacting with other people? Social time as Putnam describes in times past was basically the time that was left over after work and family committments were met. Today, we have multiplied personal (as opposed to social) committments so hugely that there is nothing left to "spend" on social interaction.
Although I'm convinced that this is the biggie, I'm also sure that there's more to it. PC has made it difficult to discuss controversial issues in groups larger than two; the list of things one simply cannot discuss has grown to include most everything worth discussing. It only takes one or two "opinion cops" to kill anything like an interesting discussion at a party, when you have parties at all. ("How can you even suggest that taxes should be cut when children are starving!") Such unpleasantness is completely toxic to social coherence, and I've heard of many civic and religious groups that collapsed because of a couple of screamers who refused to listen, much less compromise.
Too many options, too much Me. The Net is only one factor. Let's not be too quick to dump on it.
By the way, this was the best Katz piece since the Columbine things. Good show, Jon.
Slashdot Mirror
Not the pilot episode, but the feature film that introduced the concept, the sub, and most of the major characters who would later appear in the TV series.
Interestingly, the film appeared in 1961, which was before the test cited in TFA. And more interesting still, the "fix" in the film was exploding a nuclear device (launched on a missile from the Seaview) to "blow out" the fire in the belts. I'm guessing that there had been some discussion of the test in years prior, and Irwin Allen spun a script around it.
I was only nine at the time, but I remember thinking that the whole concept of the Van Allen belts "catching fire" was absurd because I knew that the belts were outside the atmosphere, and fire requires oxygen. It was the first time I can recall thinking that the science in SF movies was BS. It wasn't the last.
Taubes does not present a diet in his book. He presents a fairly measured discussion of the science and the history that bear on the whole issue of what a healthy diet actually is, right down to a very good layman's explanation of the metabolism of the various chemical components of food. I lost the weight in question before I ever heard of his book. The book was valuable because it explained why I lost that weight.
Good Calories, Bad Calories contains 118 pages of citations and bibliography from peer-reviewed journals and medical researchers in all parts of the medical science field, including (but not limited to) nutritionists. Even if I were a nutritionist, in the face of such a wall of references, I'd be hard pressed to call him a "quack."
Please read the book Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes, for the backstory on the carb wars, as well as abundant research citations about the hazards of eating what I call "habitual carbs." I stopped eating carbs (sugar particularly) and lost 20 pounds, while feeling more energetic and alert than I have in some time. This effect may be age-related (I'm in my mid-50s) and certainly sensitive to individual genetic differences, but the science is not settled (hey, I'm a carb denier!) and the forces that bear on the issue are a lot more complex than most people think.
Publishing != printing. Publishers, when doing their jobs well, see a hair past what the author submits to what the book could be with a little polish. (They pay people such as copy editors and developmental editors to add that polish.) I get stuff thrown at me when I say so, but publishers also act as quality gatekeepers, if for no better reason than they have some money on the line. Now, with ebook publishing, that initial investment in paper and ink is reduced to almost nothing, and it's mostly the publisher's reputation that drives quality.
Given their overwhelming dominance of online book sales, Amazon has the power to completely change the business. We don't know what publishers will have to do--or, more important on my side, pay--to get books into their online store. We don't know who will impose the DRM: Amazon or the publishers. (I will not impose DRM on the titles I publish.) We don't know with any clarity how useful the device will be for reading local files, or how many formats it will support. (For $400, it should damned well be all of them.)
I'm guessing that they priced it high and will reduce the price significantly once they realize nobody's biting. Nobody seems to learn anything in this business.
But hoo-boy, what this thing could do to the publishing world at $99 a unit!
I think most people understand that almost nobody has ever really made big money writing--and of those who do, even fewer make it for very long. I've done much better than a lot of writers, but except for a few years in the late 1990s, I could not have considered my writing income a "living." (Fortunately, I had a good day job and didn't have to.) What I find fascinating is that I am now making about as much money writing as I did back in the late 1970s and all through the late 1980s (until my books became popular) but the shape of the money has changed. I have a blog, and I've posted numerous articles in various hobby areas (mostly retro electronics) all with AdSense ads. I used to get money from publishers in lumps. Now I get it in dribbles, but from Web ads. And over time (and by time I mean eighteen months to two years) I get about as much money from the ads in accumulated dribbles for a given article as I used to get all in one lump for the same kind and size of article. The bad news is that it is not and has never been a lot of money. The good news is that the money keeps coming. If people keep looking for radio circuits to lash up on boards, well, the dribbles will continue, and after five years or so, I expect that the articles will have paid considerably more than I could ever have gotten from the niche magazines, back when there were niche magazines. An article in a print magazine is seen for a few weeks and then vanishes from sight. Web articles are always there, and anyone who really wants to find them can.
Add to that the fact that research is now hugely easier than it used to be, well, the Internet is a big win for writers who keep up with the online culture and do it as it needs to be done. Ironically, the key is patience. Write stuff that some small audience wants, and it will slowly generate money for years, with no additional work. I'm good with that.
Bookstores will actually be anxious to have these things in the basement or in the back room, simply to reduce the costs of carrying inventory. What we'll see over time is a sort of "replenish on demand" bookstore, in which single copies of books are present on the shelves for customers to flip through and purchase--and when that single copy is sold, the cash registers will send an order downstairs to start manufacturing another. Periodically, the newly-printed copies will be carried back upstairs and reshelved for the next customer to find.
0 6
What a system like this obviates is the need to manage warehouses full of fragile inventory (which one fire or flood can render worthless) and truck it around, often across hundreds or thousands of miles. A publisher will send repro files (at this stage in history, print PDFs) to the retailer's servers, from which the book machines can draw. The retailer will then pay the publisher for each copy printed. No returns, no warehouses. Bookstores limit their risk to a single copy of each title shelved, rather than hundreds or thousands as is now the case. Publishers limit their risk to content creation costs (acquisition, editing, and layout, plus promotion) and do not have to deal with the patholigical accounting caused by retailer returns.
Most modern book retailing is done by two large chains and a few small ones, plus debris. The larger chains have more than enough money to buy these machines and implement the systems, though it will take some time. Needless to say, Amazon will be hot to implement such a system as well.
I blogged about this back in October. See http://www.duntemann.com/october2006.htm#10-16-20
BTW, machines like this have existed for some time, and it's a little unclear to me why Espresso is special. The real idea here is putting them in libraries to print out take-home-and-keep copies of out-of-copyright books, and that may be less compelling than many people think. Mostly it makes it faster to get your own copy of Moby Dick than ordering one online.
On the other hand, if the libraries ever decide to cut deals with publishers and sell first-run titles at steep discounts, well, that would change book retailing utterly, and incite a war unlike any bookselling has ever seen.
It's not just that POD sucks. This is actually a *lousy* time to be writing technical books for publication on paper. I've written a raft of them in the past 20 years and have seen some rich and lean times, but these are the worst. The major book chains are relentlessly reducing the sizes of their computer book sections, meaning that they will buy fewer copies of fewer titles, which means that publishers will be choosing fewer titles from fewer authors, and will give less money to the authors they choose--who will tend *not* to be first-timers.
Basically, the computer book industry is moving from the anomaly of the 1990s, when anybody could get a computer book published (talent optional) to the place where SF and most other categories are now: You'd better have a major reputation forged elsewhere (magazines, online forums, university research, successful startup, etc.) that spills over into computer books, or nobody's going to return your phone calls. The walls between book categories are high: Even though I've sold a quarter million computer books, I can't get anybody to even look at my SF novel.
It's relatively easy to establish your own press based on POD technology, and it will get easier in the future. If you know how to reach your audience, you can sell direct and make money on relatively few books, perhaps more money than you could make as a new author with a conventional publisher. There's research and work involved but others have done it, and if your topic is narrow enough it may be the only route to take near-term. (2-5 years.)
Good luck and don't give up.
--73--
--Jeff Duntemann
I was a co-founder and VP of Coriolis Group Books (a small publishing company) from 1990 to early 2002. I had occasion to interview dozens of hopeful college grads for editorial and marketing positions. I interviewed only a small handful of Ivy Leagers (from Harvard and Princeton if I recall) and they gave the impression of near-comical arrogance, and complete confidence that they deserved and should get the job. When asked hard questions about what I considered important issues to small presses (things like, How would you organize a book-length tutorial on a technical topic?) they invariable tried to change the subject rather than admit that they had no clue.
I haven't investigated why this should be so, but there was so little willingness among these kids to learn anything useful that I waved them on their way, and hired people from local state schools. There is such a thing as being a little hungry when you're starting out, and the Ivies don't cater to nor graduate anybody who might be "hungry" in the sense that makes them ambitious self-starters.
If I were to be hiring for a publishing company again, I would choose well-spoken grads from state universities, especially those who had shown some interest in publishing, perhaps by working in a bookstore as an undergrad, or typesetting a novel they had written for that annual November write-a-novel-in-a-month contest. What they might do to show their interest is much less important to me than the simple fact that they got off their lead asses and did something.
I hope somebody at Harvard gets a copy of this, since I have no other way to reach them: To me, a Harvard diploma is poison. Period.
--73--
--Jeff Duntemann
Colorado Springs, Coloradao
As I understand it, "mooks" fall somewhere between the book and magazine business model. (I'm curious where Borders will shelve them!) Print magazines are supported almost entirely by advertising revenue, and thus advertisers have almost literally the power of life and death over them. (I have edited several tech magazines in my career, and lordy, do I understand this or what?) Subscribers have been trained not to pay for print magazines by ridiculous "six free issues!" pitches, so in truth, subscriber revenue can't cover but a fraction of what the magazine costs.
My guess is that Make will come out twice a year and be much thicker than a typical print magazine. It will probably be a thinnish book, and may cost as much as $12 or $15.
As for advertisers, figure the people who sell the raw materials for tinkering: Radio Shack, mail order electronics parts houses, tech book publishers like Lindsay Books, and so on. The revenue from advertisers will bring the retail cover price down below what you'd expect for a tech book.
These are guesses on my part; I have no inside information. But if I were to go back into magazine publishing again, this is how I would do it.
I wish Tim the best of luck, and perhaps I'll be able to contribute articles.
--73--
--Jeff Duntemann K7JPD
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Methane does not stink; it's completely odorless. Natural gas is in fact methane, but what makes natural gas (as burned in your stove) smelly is a substance named ethyl mercaptan, which is added specifically so that when gas gets out of the stove or the pipes, you can tell before the whole place goes up.
--73--
--JD--
Meccano was invented in England in 1906 or so, and then when the Liverpool plant closed in the 70s, the subsidiary plant in France became the sole producer. In the 80's and 90's Meccano/France licensed the old American Erector trademark from whoever owned it, and Meccano sets were sold in the US under the Erector trademark. These were nothing like the old Gilbert Erector sets of the 1950s.
I don't think lawyers had anything to do with Meccano's eclipse, in America or anywhere else. Lego was always better at marketing, and because Lego is plastic, is much cheaper to make. I'm not exaggerating when I estimate that there are thousands of dollars of parts in those two mechanical computers. It's not a cheap hobby, heh.
Interestingly, Meccano Ltd. abandoned the red and green color scheme in 1964, so the parts used in this chap's difference engine are either very old, or manufactured by the third-party Meccano compatible parts vendors, the largest of which (called Exacto; no relation to the hobby knives) is in Argentina. It's really a "world system" tho most Meccano hobbyists are in Europe. I haven't bought any Meccano parts since 1997 or so, and the guy I used to buy them from has left the business. You may have to order them from Europe or South America.
Google around on the Web; you can order sets and parts from various places, and they turn up regularly on eBay. What you're unlikely to find these days are full sets sold in hobby shops. That's OK; to do anything ambitious or interesting you have to order tons of spare parts anyway. It's not cheap, but it's a lot of fun.
--73--
--Jeff Duntemann
Colorado Springs, Colorado
WASTE, while brilliant, depends on every participant trusting every other participant not to "turn" and open the network to a third party--like the RIAA. If something like that ever becomes popular, you can bet there will be bounties and "rat-out" lines for WASTE-concept encrypted networks.
--73--
--JD--
Heh. WAY back in 1986, I was over at Michael Abrash's house in Mountain View and he showed me his IBM PS/2 model 50. He pulled it apart almost like Legos. It was by far the most easily field-stripped machine I've ever seen.
So I guess it's been tried, and had the feature been seen as valuable by more people, it might have survived in later products. Much later, in the fall of 1993, I flew down to Boca to see IBM's impending (but never released) PowerPC boxes, which were quite small, and had several PCMCIA slots instead of conventional bus slots. We can't blame the market on that failure, but it was a gorgeously designed piece of hardware and I wish they had just done an Intel-based box that way.
What I'd really like to see is for the Saintsong guys (or whoever it is that actually designed the Cappuccino PC and its cousins) create a stackable box design that would let you start with a Cappuccino PC, and then pop off the bottom and snap it atop a similarly sized bay containing a ZIP 250 or an additional hard drive or whatever you might in fact need. The Cappuccino has nearly all of what ordinary people need, and the few extraordinary people who bought it could then add what it lacks.
That's the way the SFF business needs to be going.
--73--
--Jeff Duntemann
Scottsdale, Arizona
jeff at duntemann dot com
Sorry it didn't float your boat. People seem to either love my book or hate it, but it's been in print for 13 years and my mail pile seems to think it succeeds for way more people than it fails.
A lot of people forget that this book has a gimmick: It's assembly for people who have never programmed before and know *nothing* about programming with *any* language. My experience tells me that people who learn the underlying machine before they get too caught up in data structures do better when they have to battle two hundred diverse APIs in the same project, which is the way things have gone in Windows and are headed in Linux.
People who know something about programming and about the fundamental nature of computing should skip the first couple of chapters.
The next time I rewrite it (and that's going to be awhile still, maybe another year) I'm dropping DOS entirely, and will rewrite it for Linux from one end to the other. I will also teach people how to make kernel calls and not apologize for it. If all you do with assembly is call clib, you might as well use gcc. Assembly really is its own language, with its own culture and assumptions and ways of going about things. It is *not* C, and thank God for that much.
I may also drop the foobies thing in the next edition. The mail's been mixed on that--though I'm still trying to think of a good way to teach hex to those for whom number bases other than 10 are a serious mental roadblock.
Thanks, by the way, for the mention here on Slashdot. The book's been around for quite a few years and doesn't get much press anymore, even though it continues to sell well.
--73--
--Jeff Duntemann
Scottsdale, Arizona
(jeff at duntemann dot com)
BOWLING ALONE is an excellent book. Everybody with more than a passing interest in modern society should read it. I fault the author slightly for not guessing enough--he lays out reams of research and then becomes very timid when it comes time to explore the Big Why.
Although Putnam lays a little blame on TV (as he should) he misses something so big as to be obvious: We today have a surfeit of options in terms of what to do with our time. This is nowhere so clear as in the lives of parents with teen or preteen children: Two sports and three musical instruments each (with maybe dance lessons or martial arts thrown in), creating a combinatorial explosion of appointments and committments that makes spontaneous use of time impossible.
Apart perhaps from going to church on Sunday, when does anyone schedule time to spend interacting with other people? Social time as Putnam describes in times past was basically the time that was left over after work and family committments were met. Today, we have multiplied personal (as opposed to social) committments so hugely that there is nothing left to "spend" on social interaction.
Although I'm convinced that this is the biggie, I'm also sure that there's more to it. PC has made it difficult to discuss controversial issues in groups larger than two; the list of things one simply cannot discuss has grown to include most everything worth discussing. It only takes one or two "opinion cops" to kill anything like an interesting discussion at a party, when you have parties at all. ("How can you even suggest that taxes should be cut when children are starving!") Such unpleasantness is completely toxic to social coherence, and I've heard of many civic and religious groups that collapsed because of a couple of screamers who refused to listen, much less compromise.
Too many options, too much Me. The Net is only one factor. Let's not be too quick to dump on it.
By the way, this was the best Katz piece since the Columbine things. Good show, Jon.
--73--
--Jeff Duntemann
Scottsdale, Arizona