HOWEVER: I imagine doing the online route will make it far harder to get published.
Yes. You'll have to find a sympathetic publisher, and while some do exist in the field of fiction publishing (Baen and Tor are two that spring to mind, both having published books while giving away free downloads of them, but I think there are others too) and others in references works (ISTR that a lot of the Coriolis open-source titles were distributed like this, and I've seen some of the Addison Wesley Professional titles with text distributed on their authors' own web sites too, e.g. xUnit Test Patterns), I don't know of any in academic publishing. But, that said, the fact that the model has been successfully used in other fields might convince a publisher who hasn't done it yet to try it.
The important thing, though, is to talk to publishers before releasing your text. A publisher is much more likely to want to get involved if they at least feel like they're in control of the release. Publishers rarely touch works that have been released to the public before they get hold of them. The few exceptions are almost universally extremely popular books (e.g. Tom Clancy's first novel which was originally published by a specialist military publisher before being picked up by a mainstream press), and you don't want to count on your book being that popular.
Perhaps the new model could be something like what Cory Doctorow has done, in that textbook authors publish at physical book and, at the same time, release a free digital download of the textbook.
I've seen this applied to reference works as well, and see no reason it couldn't work with textbooks too. The lesson to learn from how Cory does it, though, is one that isn't at first obvious: talk to the big publishers first, and tell them exactly what you want to do. Your book is likely to see a lot more circulation with the reputation (and marketing budget) of a big name publisher behind it than if, say, you decided to print & distribute it yourself via lulu. There's a reason the world hasn't gone entirely self-published and that is that the publisher's reputation is important in the decisions people make to buy books.
Why the hell do you need to give servers or any physical asset in a company names!!, it's not like they will come to you when you call out.
Jules@minerva$ ping ocypete PING ocypete.meridiandigital.net (192.168.1.105): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 192.168.1.105: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=46 ms
There are plenty of uses for machine names in a corporate setting. They are much easier to remember than numbers, and being able to remember the names of machines that are important to your work helps you speed up that work. When I just wanted to check whether one of my co-worker's machines was connected to the network correctly, I only had to remember what the name of the machine was, not look it up in a database by hand to find its IP address. If I couldn't remember, I could have asked him, and he would have known without having to get out of his chair and peer at the box under his desk to find the serial number.
...but I'm a big fan of giving machines actual names
Agreed. Apart from anything else, it's useful if users can remember the name of their PC without having to look it up. Makes stuff faster when dealing with them.
Over here, we're using the greek pantheon for workstations. There's quite some room for expansion, plus there are whole new pantheons to open into if the need arises (e.g. if we expand into two locations we could have the second location using the roman pantheon). Then there's our server naming scheme:
vengeance retribution malice justice
At home, I use names of computers from SF film and TV (I've had hal, zen, orac, sal, and mother so far), but I don't think this is expandable enough for corporate use.
(it's now widely known that the first movie's plot was actually stolen from another author, Sophia Stewart)
Other people have corrected you on this, but it's worth pointing out the limits of the similarities between the Matrix and Stewart's story:
- It's set following an apocalyptic war - It featured a character who was subject to a prophecy that he would right all the wrongs in the world - This character was repeatedly called "the One" - It portrays black people positively (she actually called this out as a similarity, and tried to convince us all that no white script author would do this) - It has a black character known as "the Oracle" who makes prophecies
And, err, that's just about it. The actual plot, it appears, is somewhat different (although the self-published book is apparently no longer available to buy, so it's hard to be certain of this).
It also features time travel and a character sent to protect "the One"'s mother from some kind of attack or other before he is born, leading her to also accuse The Terminator of being ripped off from her story. Obviously this is just as much total bullshit as the Matrix claim, particularly seeing as most of the elements that she claims were ripped of from her were actually ripped of from a Harlan Ellison TV script, written and produced nearly 20 years before Stewart wrote her book.
What makes you say that it's not scifi? The fact that it's a chick flick, too, doesn't make it not science fiction
Probably related to the fact that the writer says that she "never thought of it as science fiction, even though it has a science-fiction premise" (source).
Requirement 1: Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data
Err.. quite tricky when your machine is a virtual host that you're accessing over the Internet. Whatever firewall you set up, _you_ need to have a way around it. Very few people bother with VPNs or the like; most virtual hosting packages I've seen have FTP and other services open to all. This seriously compromises its security.
Requirement 4: Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks
Most web development companies I've worked with always want to transfer data around over unencrypted FTP, often including database backup files. The chances are, if you have a subcontractor handling your e-commerce web site, they're violating this requirement on a regular basis.
Requirement 5: Use and regularly update anti-virus software
Oh, yeah. Everyone has antivirus installed on their web servers. Wait... you mean they don't? What's this Linux thing?
Requirement 6: Develop and maintain secure systems and applications
Ha!
Requirement 9: Restrict physical access to cardholder data
Somewhat difficult when you're not hosting the system yourself, so this requirement can only be met by less than 1% of e-commerce retailers out there.
Requirement 11: Regularly test security systems and processes
When was the last time you performed a penetration test on your network?
Somewhat off topic but think about this. How can District 9 which is such a great movie with some of the best unique effects Ive seen in a recent Sci Fi movie cost 30 Million and yet Transformers 2 cost $228 million, GI Joe Movie $170 million etc. All icing and no cake.
It's called Hollywood accounting. The quoted cost of producing a film that's expected to do well typically actually includes costs of earlier films that didn't do so well when they were released. By doing this, they reduce royalty payouts on the successful movie (as Hollywood typically pays royalties to writers, IP holders, etc. as a percentage of profit rather than percentage of net takings as most other IP-related industries do).
Someone explain capitalism to me. If I ran my own business and I made 1 million dollars last year, and only $900,000 this year....well I just pocketed $900,000.
If a big company does the same, they go bankrupt.
Explain.
A venture capitalist or bank lender looking at this will extrapolate a trend, and assume the next game will earn $800,000 or less. The amount they are prepared to lend wioll therefore go down, perhaps to the point that producing the game becomes uneconimcal. A company raising funds via an IPO rather than VC will face a similar issue.
It all depends on your workload, really. I'm running two similarly specced quad core machines here, one a Phenom 9550, the other a Q6600, so admittedly we're not talking latest-generation stuff, but the difference in the two is quite startling: the Phenom is, I'd say, about 30% faster at handling large vector floating-point tasks (specifically, neural network training is what I'm running on it). The Q6600 is a similar amount faster at more traditional tasks (specifically, I notice this in using a MySQL server under heavy load).
I doubt he can be profitable on just 200 registered players.
Even though this is 200 players per server, I'd just like to say that a single-developer indie MMO could be profitable with 200 players:
200 players * $10 per month subscription * 12 months = $24000 cost of server capable of hosting a 200 player MMO for one year = $240 legal costs, banking costs, etc. = ~$1000 marketing costs = ~$2000
This leaves around $20000 to pay the dev's salary, which is reasonable enough if we assume he's only doing it part time. There's plenty of people who'd work full time for that.
If the servers are limited to 200 registered players averaging 50-70 online most of the time (as stated in TFA), I wouldn't call it an MMO.
Agreed. It's a persistent-world multiplayer game. Although I'd love to know how he expects 200 players to average 50 online most of the time. Is he expecting people to play 6 hours a day?
well, what can they do? I know they shut down 12:00 to 13:00 in GMT+1, and when that does their whole server goes offline. This can't be helped.
Yes, it can. Two possibilities to consider:
* I've played plenty of MMOs that have less than 1 hour of downtime per _week_. Why does EVE need 1 hour per day? Improving their back end systems should be able to bring them up to the standards of others. * They could shift the time so it's at different times on different days. Thus, maybe Australians find playing on Tuesdays and Thursdays inconvenient, while Europeans have trouble if they try to play on Wednesdays or Fridays, Americans on Mondays and Saturdays, etc. Everyone gets 5 clear days a week (at least) where the time is convenient for them.
There is no way that children in Britain think blue is the colour of the sky.
You missed the point of the question. It's usually asked when the kid gets to about 5 or 6 years old, looks up at the sky one day and finds that it's a different colour to what it usually is. It's normally asked with a hint of fear (similarly, perhaps, to "why is the plane's wing on fire?"), and quite frequently during a foreign holiday.
If a material absorbs so much CO2 over it's lifespan, it significantly alters the chemical composition and therefore strength.
Yep. Of course, all cement absorbs CO2 -- during its lifespan it gradually changes back from calcium hydroxid back to calcium carbonate. The process is one of the most common failure modes of reinforced concrete structures (although on non-reinforced structures it isn't usually a problem).
How can there be people yet that confuse the terms? Repeat with me: GPL license is commercial-friendly, GPL license is commercial-friendly, GPL license is commercial-friendly. (I can sell the software, sell services... in the end, commercial revenue). Didn't you want to say "proprietary" instead?
From the point of view of the ISV, the two equate to the same thing. It's very hard to profit from selling software if you can't make that software proprietary, because otherwise your potential customers will just copy it from each other.
Re:This isn't sensationalist, it's the truth
on
Leaving the GPL Behind
·
· Score: 3, Funny
One could only imagine how Linux would have turned out with a BSD or Apache license; we might have ended up with a situation where Windows, OS-X and Linux apps were all compatible or atleast much easier to port.
"Under GPL, "you've got to give it away for free, and you've got to give the source code away for free as well," says analyst Kiewe."
False; RMS himself used to charge $150 for tapes of the GNU system.
OK, so the sentence was badly phrased. What he should have said is "you've got to let other people give it away for free, and you've got to give other people the source code so they can give it away for free as well." It makes no practical difference.
When you added up the man-time required to move everything to Postgres, did it come to more or less than the cost of buying a commercial licence for the MySQL JDBC drivers?
MySQL don't appear to publish the prices of their commercial licenses, telling you instead to "contact sales". My experience has generally been that when this happens, the answer is "more expensive than you can afford."
In a well engineered system, the cost of changing the database should be less than a man week of work (likely cost, around $2,000). In a particularly-well-engineered system, it should be less than a man day (around $400). I'd be surprised to find the cost of licensing MySQL's drivers for any realistic number of installations comes to less than $10,000.
Slashdot Mirror
HOWEVER: I imagine doing the online route will make it far harder to get published.
Yes. You'll have to find a sympathetic publisher, and while some do exist in the field of fiction publishing (Baen and Tor are two that spring to mind, both having published books while giving away free downloads of them, but I think there are others too) and others in references works (ISTR that a lot of the Coriolis open-source titles were distributed like this, and I've seen some of the Addison Wesley Professional titles with text distributed on their authors' own web sites too, e.g. xUnit Test Patterns), I don't know of any in academic publishing. But, that said, the fact that the model has been successfully used in other fields might convince a publisher who hasn't done it yet to try it.
The important thing, though, is to talk to publishers before releasing your text. A publisher is much more likely to want to get involved if they at least feel like they're in control of the release. Publishers rarely touch works that have been released to the public before they get hold of them. The few exceptions are almost universally extremely popular books (e.g. Tom Clancy's first novel which was originally published by a specialist military publisher before being picked up by a mainstream press), and you don't want to count on your book being that popular.
Perhaps the new model could be something like what Cory Doctorow has done, in that textbook authors publish at physical book and, at the same time, release a free digital download of the textbook.
I've seen this applied to reference works as well, and see no reason it couldn't work with textbooks too. The lesson to learn from how Cory does it, though, is one that isn't at first obvious: talk to the big publishers first, and tell them exactly what you want to do. Your book is likely to see a lot more circulation with the reputation (and marketing budget) of a big name publisher behind it than if, say, you decided to print & distribute it yourself via lulu. There's a reason the world hasn't gone entirely self-published and that is that the publisher's reputation is important in the decisions people make to buy books.
Why the hell do you need to give servers or any physical asset in a company names!!, it's not like they will come to you when you call out.
Jules@minerva$ ping ocypete
PING ocypete.meridiandigital.net (192.168.1.105): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.105: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=46 ms
There are plenty of uses for machine names in a corporate setting. They are much easier to remember than numbers, and being able to remember the names of machines that are important to your work helps you speed up that work. When I just wanted to check whether one of my co-worker's machines was connected to the network correctly, I only had to remember what the name of the machine was, not look it up in a database by hand to find its IP address. If I couldn't remember, I could have asked him, and he would have known without having to get out of his chair and peer at the box under his desk to find the serial number.
...but I'm a big fan of giving machines actual names
Agreed. Apart from anything else, it's useful if users can remember the name of their PC without having to look it up. Makes stuff faster when dealing with them.
Over here, we're using the greek pantheon for workstations. There's quite some room for expansion, plus there are whole new pantheons to open into if the need arises (e.g. if we expand into two locations we could have the second location using the roman pantheon). Then there's our server naming scheme:
vengeance
retribution
malice
justice
At home, I use names of computers from SF film and TV (I've had hal, zen, orac, sal, and mother so far), but I don't think this is expandable enough for corporate use.
Some things are tied to machine name, (some software licenses, etc)
What software are you using that ties licenses to machine names? That has to be the worst DRM idea I've ever heard.
(it's now widely known that the first movie's plot was actually stolen from another author, Sophia Stewart)
Other people have corrected you on this, but it's worth pointing out the limits of the similarities between the Matrix and Stewart's story:
- It's set following an apocalyptic war
- It featured a character who was subject to a prophecy that he would right all the wrongs in the world
- This character was repeatedly called "the One"
- It portrays black people positively (she actually called this out as a similarity, and tried to convince us all that no white script author would do this)
- It has a black character known as "the Oracle" who makes prophecies
And, err, that's just about it. The actual plot, it appears, is somewhat different (although the self-published book is apparently no longer available to buy, so it's hard to be certain of this).
It also features time travel and a character sent to protect "the One"'s mother from some kind of attack or other before he is born, leading her to also accuse The Terminator of being ripped off from her story. Obviously this is just as much total bullshit as the Matrix claim, particularly seeing as most of the elements that she claims were ripped of from her were actually ripped of from a Harlan Ellison TV script, written and produced nearly 20 years before Stewart wrote her book.
What makes you say that it's not scifi? The fact that it's a chick flick, too, doesn't make it not science fiction
Probably related to the fact that the writer says that she "never thought of it as science fiction, even though it has a science-fiction premise" (source).
Requirement 1: Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data
Err.. quite tricky when your machine is a virtual host that you're accessing over the Internet. Whatever firewall you set up, _you_ need to have a way around it. Very few people bother with VPNs or the like; most virtual hosting packages I've seen have FTP and other services open to all. This seriously compromises its security.
Requirement 4: Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks
Most web development companies I've worked with always want to transfer data around over unencrypted FTP, often including database backup files. The chances are, if you have a subcontractor handling your e-commerce web site, they're violating this requirement on a regular basis.
Requirement 5: Use and regularly update anti-virus software
Oh, yeah. Everyone has antivirus installed on their web servers. Wait... you mean they don't? What's this Linux thing?
Requirement 6: Develop and maintain secure systems and applications
Ha!
Requirement 9: Restrict physical access to cardholder data
Somewhat difficult when you're not hosting the system yourself, so this requirement can only be met by less than 1% of e-commerce retailers out there.
Requirement 11: Regularly test security systems and processes
When was the last time you performed a penetration test on your network?
Somewhat off topic but think about this. How can District 9 which is such a great movie with some of the best unique effects Ive seen in a recent Sci Fi movie cost 30 Million and yet Transformers 2 cost $228 million, GI Joe Movie $170 million etc. All icing and no cake.
It's called Hollywood accounting. The quoted cost of producing a film that's expected to do well typically actually includes costs of earlier films that didn't do so well when they were released. By doing this, they reduce royalty payouts on the successful movie (as Hollywood typically pays royalties to writers, IP holders, etc. as a percentage of profit rather than percentage of net takings as most other IP-related industries do).
Someone explain capitalism to me. If I ran my own business and I made 1 million dollars last year, and only $900,000 this year....well I just pocketed $900,000.
If a big company does the same, they go bankrupt.
Explain.
A venture capitalist or bank lender looking at this will extrapolate a trend, and assume the next game will earn $800,000 or less. The amount they are prepared to lend wioll therefore go down, perhaps to the point that producing the game becomes uneconimcal. A company raising funds via an IPO rather than VC will face a similar issue.
With a cap that low you're a rarity in the market
Not here in the UK he isn't. Most UK ISPs have a 10GB or so monthly cap on their basic service.
It all depends on your workload, really. I'm running two similarly specced quad core machines here, one a Phenom 9550, the other a Q6600, so admittedly we're not talking latest-generation stuff, but the difference in the two is quite startling: the Phenom is, I'd say, about 30% faster at handling large vector floating-point tasks (specifically, neural network training is what I'm running on it). The Q6600 is a similar amount faster at more traditional tasks (specifically, I notice this in using a MySQL server under heavy load).
Played by Pete Townshend? More like destroyed by.
I heard a story, not sure how true it is, that he switched to Les Pauls because they were easier to repair than his previous favourite model.
This has been done by Eve for as long as I have known about it. How is this suddenly news?
RTFA. It's news because the devs have released data about how well it's working.
I doubt he can be profitable on just 200 registered players.
Even though this is 200 players per server, I'd just like to say that a single-developer indie MMO could be profitable with 200 players:
200 players * $10 per month subscription * 12 months = $24000
cost of server capable of hosting a 200 player MMO for one year = $240
legal costs, banking costs, etc. = ~$1000
marketing costs = ~$2000
This leaves around $20000 to pay the dev's salary, which is reasonable enough if we assume he's only doing it part time. There's plenty of people who'd work full time for that.
Would WoW have been more or less likely to fail with 10% of the budget they had?
risk = probability of failure * amount lost in case of failure.
Even if they were 5 times more likely to fail, the risk would have been lower.
If the servers are limited to 200 registered players averaging 50-70 online most of the time (as stated in TFA), I wouldn't call it an MMO.
Agreed. It's a persistent-world multiplayer game. Although I'd love to know how he expects 200 players to average 50 online most of the time. Is he expecting people to play 6 hours a day?
well, what can they do? I know they shut down 12:00 to 13:00 in GMT+1, and when that does their whole server goes offline. This can't be helped.
Yes, it can. Two possibilities to consider:
* I've played plenty of MMOs that have less than 1 hour of downtime per _week_. Why does EVE need 1 hour per day? Improving their back end systems should be able to bring them up to the standards of others.
* They could shift the time so it's at different times on different days. Thus, maybe Australians find playing on Tuesdays and Thursdays inconvenient, while Europeans have trouble if they try to play on Wednesdays or Fridays, Americans on Mondays and Saturdays, etc. Everyone gets 5 clear days a week (at least) where the time is convenient for them.
There is no way that children in Britain think blue is the colour of the sky.
You missed the point of the question. It's usually asked when the kid gets to about 5 or 6 years old, looks up at the sky one day and finds that it's a different colour to what it usually is. It's normally asked with a hint of fear (similarly, perhaps, to "why is the plane's wing on fire?"), and quite frequently during a foreign holiday.
If a material absorbs so much CO2 over it's lifespan, it significantly alters the chemical composition and therefore strength.
Yep. Of course, all cement absorbs CO2 -- during its lifespan it gradually changes back from calcium hydroxid back to calcium carbonate. The process is one of the most common failure modes of reinforced concrete structures (although on non-reinforced structures it isn't usually a problem).
How can there be people yet that confuse the terms? Repeat with me: GPL license is commercial-friendly, GPL license is commercial-friendly, GPL license is commercial-friendly. (I can sell the software, sell services... in the end, commercial revenue). Didn't you want to say "proprietary" instead?
From the point of view of the ISV, the two equate to the same thing. It's very hard to profit from selling software if you can't make that software proprietary, because otherwise your potential customers will just copy it from each other.
One could only imagine how Linux would have turned out with a BSD or Apache license; we might have ended up with a situation where Windows, OS-X and Linux apps were all compatible or atleast much easier to port.
Or maybe we'd all be running GNU Hurd by now.
However there are proprietary ripoffs of Apache and that is the problem that the GPL tries to defeat.
I fail to see how this is a problem. I can still go and download Apache and use it however I want.
"Under GPL, "you've got to give it away for free, and you've got to give the source code away for free as well," says analyst Kiewe."
False; RMS himself used to charge $150 for tapes of the GNU system.
OK, so the sentence was badly phrased. What he should have said is "you've got to let other people give it away for free, and you've got to give other people the source code so they can give it away for free as well." It makes no practical difference.
When you added up the man-time required to move everything to Postgres, did it come to more or less than the cost of buying a commercial licence for the MySQL JDBC drivers?
MySQL don't appear to publish the prices of their commercial licenses, telling you instead to "contact sales". My experience has generally been that when this happens, the answer is "more expensive than you can afford."
In a well engineered system, the cost of changing the database should be less than a man week of work (likely cost, around $2,000). In a particularly-well-engineered system, it should be less than a man day (around $400). I'd be surprised to find the cost of licensing MySQL's drivers for any realistic number of installations comes to less than $10,000.