It depends on the game mechanics, I think. I've played several educational games that sucked and thus didn't focus on the gameplay or the knowledge component.
On the other hand, I once played a game about filtering in the kidneys that actually had a fun arkanoid/pong sort of mechanic that was both fun to play and made me focus on the chemistry involved.
Similarly, I had a chance to use a factory layout design suite that included a simulation component. Despite it not being intended as a game, I had lots of fun treating it as a sandbox game and seeing what weird results I could get by stressing the simulation's rules.
Number of towers or people/area are both red herrings. Really, it is just area by itself and the main problem is installation and transit. You can have lots of towers in a small region and not need as much digging and cables as the same size network over a whole state.
What the cell networks need is a way to get power to widely spread towers without cable. If all those towers in the middle of nowhere could have rectennas for power and then use directed wireless or optical methods to connect between towers instead of cable, costs would be much lower.
Just try taking notes on a free body diagram or a server/client state flowchart with your laptop. Unless you've got a Wacom or something, it just can't be done.
Or you could just take a picture of it... I could usually get a decent pic with my cellphone and bluetooth it over.
And from the nosebleed seats, if I could stabilize my arm on the seat in front of me, I frequently got a better look with the optical zoom than with my eyes.
T20 will swap atoms when mixed with H20 until much of it is HTO. Actually, it is really hard to even get mostly pure T20, much like making 100% alcohol.
I imagine you have a better feel for the growth of the industry than I do, but I'm not sure if I'd call 200% growth "arithmetic" unless sales 2 years ago were effectively $0 and you think next years will be $27 million. Perhaps geometric?
Looking at the page you gave, 2.26% appears to be out of books of every kind, including Scholarly($57.1m), Higher ed($197.1m), highschool($136.9m). Almost half the book market is education, and I rather doubt half the ebook market is also educational. Compared to the rest of the market, it is more like 4%. Higher, if you just look at Adult, non-fiction, mass-market, and children's. I think that is fairly respectable for something that was practically non-existent a decade ago.
Anecdotes aren't data, but I live in a reddish state and was rather surprised recently when I saw someone using a cell to take photos of covers at a bookstore and, when asked why, was told she planned to get them on her Nook when she got home. When people I know who's VCRs still flash 12:00 spend more on e-books than paper books, I assume that the rest of the country can't be more than a decade behind.
Again, perhaps my perception is skewed, as I buy 100+ books a year and only buy paper when I can't buy electronic, which is usually because they are foreign. Most ereaders don't seem to handle other languages very well, more's the pity.
I'm sorry, I should have emphasized the word "time". I don't think there was a very large market for ebooks a decade ago in comparison to print books, so doing 5 or 10% of the sales of a print book would be pretty awesome, especially if the print version covered costs by itself.
I still don't think the ebook market is anywhere near as large as the print market(I think 5/10% is only "reasonable" now), but I also think that it has passed the "inevitable future" mark and will proceed to displace paperback sales in the same manner that paperback sales displace hardback sales. It won't eliminate it, anymore than the market for handbound books were eliminated by mechanically bound hardbacks, but it will squeeze it.
After the next big price drop in hardware, I could see book clubs and magazines providing the hardware with a subscription. I still don't see newspapers changing their formats until the hardware commoditizes, despite what everyone says about ereaders saving them from the depressing ad market.
How about "it is really hard to find information in them". Thus the creation of the "index", which is a poor substitute for searching, but "search engines" back then were called "grad students" and weren't terrible sober.
My office is almost entirely paperless, having eliminated several printers. In another year or two, the only paper we use will be for packing slips and box labels. And I'm hoping to eliminate the box labels by printing directly on the boxes.
Google wants a compulsory license, like they have in Canada for orphan works, but they can't do that in the court system, the decision only applies to them. To get the same rights for everyone, the government has to actually make a law.
On the other hand, they do want everybody to have to do the scanning work for themselves instead of sharing, so they are a little naughty.
What google really wants is for books to have the equivalent of "mechanical licensing" that other IP works have.
However, they can't create it by negotiating with a million people, they can only create it by being sued and having the decision go their way and the lawmakers finding this intolerably vague and deciding put it on paper.
Same thing happened with radio royalties, rebroadcasting OTA on cable, and ring tones; and is currently happening with drug patents in poorer countries.
If the companies buying the assets of the failed company do their work, it transfers. Otherwise it falls into limbo and no-one can legally do anything with it until copyright expires.
Meanwhile, a hurricane hit his house while he was away and all his old paper books were completely ruined. Thousands of dollars in damage, some irreplaceable because they never sold enough to have a used market. Fortunately, after replacing his salt-damaged kindle, he was able to redownload all the ebooks he had bought, for no additional charge, as well as his most prized paper books that he had the foresight to scan.
An ereader is only expensive compared to the cost of replacing a few books. I lost many books to water damage and have yet to replace all my favorites because I can't find them on the used book market, nor as the bookwarez, because they were too old or had too small a print run. Now that publishers don't need to keep their backlist in print to sell them, I hope I won't have this problem again. But until they get everything switched over, I scan.
e-readers have their place. I'd say it would be for viewing more dynamic docs or quick reference over a networked feed for tech docs. Paper books, for me, are not replaceable. You don't have to worry so much about a paperback. I can smack my son (allegedly) with it when he acts like a kook. I can throw it off a twenty story building and it still works. I can treat my book like the $6.00 price it cost.
When an e-reader costs $10, what will prevent you from using them? Besides (allegedly) dying of old age first:)
As much as I like having shelves and shelves of books, I'm really paying for the data, not the storage. If an ebook is the cheapest, I buy it unless it is on a very short list of authors I like in hardback.
If, for some idiotic reason, the ebook costs more than cutting down a tree, pulping it, and printing words on the dried remains, then I buy the paperback and warez the ebook(or drop it in the hopper of the industrial scanner at work).
And I imagine the publisher doesn't make as much the second way.
And if anyone ever wonder what, say a 90 year old brain looked like, instead of comparing with a healthy brain, here you go.
Although, technically, it isn't an entirely healthy 90 YO. That white bulge in the bottom left is swelling from whacking against a freshly waxed floor.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on the game mechanics, I think. I've played several educational games that sucked and thus didn't focus on the gameplay or the knowledge component.
On the other hand, I once played a game about filtering in the kidneys that actually had a fun arkanoid/pong sort of mechanic that was both fun to play and made me focus on the chemistry involved.
Similarly, I had a chance to use a factory layout design suite that included a simulation component. Despite it not being intended as a game, I had lots of fun treating it as a sandbox game and seeing what weird results I could get by stressing the simulation's rules.
Number of towers or people/area are both red herrings. Really, it is just area by itself and the main problem is installation and transit. You can have lots of towers in a small region and not need as much digging and cables as the same size network over a whole state.
What the cell networks need is a way to get power to widely spread towers without cable. If all those towers in the middle of nowhere could have rectennas for power and then use directed wireless or optical methods to connect between towers instead of cable, costs would be much lower.
20 years. I hope they had bathroom breaks...
Taliban suspected of stockpiling 12,000 tons of poppies?
I have glasses, but I have yet to find the zoom control and google hasn't been any help.
That'll teach me not to throw out the manual:)
Tell me about it, last week I got a No Income, No Job/Assets mortgage offer in the mail from Fifth Third.
I can't believe they can be back to their old idiocy before the economy is even out of the mess such mortgages helped cause.
Or you could just take a picture of it... I could usually get a decent pic with my cellphone and bluetooth it over.
And from the nosebleed seats, if I could stabilize my arm on the seat in front of me, I frequently got a better look with the optical zoom than with my eyes.
/. had an article about regrowing teeth in rodents. Alas, that is like 10 years off.
I want glow-in-the dark teeth:)
T20 will swap atoms when mixed with H20 until much of it is HTO. Actually, it is really hard to even get mostly pure T20, much like making 100% alcohol.
I think airborne cows would have a good shot at wiping out humanity. Or at least making them move.
Eww, can you imagine the mess: cow patties denting the roof of your car and herds flying into buildings or, worse, windmills?
I imagine you have a better feel for the growth of the industry than I do, but I'm not sure if I'd call 200% growth "arithmetic" unless sales 2 years ago were effectively $0 and you think next years will be $27 million. Perhaps geometric?
Looking at the page you gave, 2.26% appears to be out of books of every kind, including Scholarly($57.1m), Higher ed($197.1m), highschool($136.9m). Almost half the book market is education, and I rather doubt half the ebook market is also educational. Compared to the rest of the market, it is more like 4%. Higher, if you just look at Adult, non-fiction, mass-market, and children's. I think that is fairly respectable for something that was practically non-existent a decade ago.
Anecdotes aren't data, but I live in a reddish state and was rather surprised recently when I saw someone using a cell to take photos of covers at a bookstore and, when asked why, was told she planned to get them on her Nook when she got home. When people I know who's VCRs still flash 12:00 spend more on e-books than paper books, I assume that the rest of the country can't be more than a decade behind.
Again, perhaps my perception is skewed, as I buy 100+ books a year and only buy paper when I can't buy electronic, which is usually because they are foreign. Most ereaders don't seem to handle other languages very well, more's the pity.
I'm sorry, I should have emphasized the word "time". I don't think there was a very large market for ebooks a decade ago in comparison to print books, so doing 5 or 10% of the sales of a print book would be pretty awesome, especially if the print version covered costs by itself.
I still don't think the ebook market is anywhere near as large as the print market(I think 5/10% is only "reasonable" now), but I also think that it has passed the "inevitable future" mark and will proceed to displace paperback sales in the same manner that paperback sales displace hardback sales. It won't eliminate it, anymore than the market for handbound books were eliminated by mechanically bound hardbacks, but it will squeeze it.
After the next big price drop in hardware, I could see book clubs and magazines providing the hardware with a subscription. I still don't see newspapers changing their formats until the hardware commoditizes, despite what everyone says about ereaders saving them from the depressing ad market.
Um, most print books only sell a few hundred copies a year. The average print book maybe 5000 copies over its lifetime.
Your book was a niche genre for a niche market and did pretty well for its time and potential.
How about "it is really hard to find information in them". Thus the creation of the "index", which is a poor substitute for searching, but "search engines" back then were called "grad students" and weren't terrible sober.
My office is almost entirely paperless, having eliminated several printers. In another year or two, the only paper we use will be for packing slips and box labels. And I'm hoping to eliminate the box labels by printing directly on the boxes.
Google wants a compulsory license, like they have in Canada for orphan works, but they can't do that in the court system, the decision only applies to them. To get the same rights for everyone, the government has to actually make a law.
On the other hand, they do want everybody to have to do the scanning work for themselves instead of sharing, so they are a little naughty.
Most libraries have copy machines. Some will even do the copying for you, as long as you don't ask for the whole book at the same time.
What google really wants is for books to have the equivalent of "mechanical licensing" that other IP works have.
However, they can't create it by negotiating with a million people, they can only create it by being sued and having the decision go their way and the lawmakers finding this intolerably vague and deciding put it on paper.
Same thing happened with radio royalties, rebroadcasting OTA on cable, and ring tones; and is currently happening with drug patents in poorer countries.
If the companies buying the assets of the failed company do their work, it transfers. Otherwise it falls into limbo and no-one can legally do anything with it until copyright expires.
Meanwhile, a hurricane hit his house while he was away and all his old paper books were completely ruined. Thousands of dollars in damage, some irreplaceable because they never sold enough to have a used market. Fortunately, after replacing his salt-damaged kindle, he was able to redownload all the ebooks he had bought, for no additional charge, as well as his most prized paper books that he had the foresight to scan.
An ereader is only expensive compared to the cost of replacing a few books. I lost many books to water damage and have yet to replace all my favorites because I can't find them on the used book market, nor as the bookwarez, because they were too old or had too small a print run. Now that publishers don't need to keep their backlist in print to sell them, I hope I won't have this problem again. But until they get everything switched over, I scan.
When an e-reader costs $10, what will prevent you from using them? Besides (allegedly) dying of old age first:)
As much as I like having shelves and shelves of books, I'm really paying for the data, not the storage. If an ebook is the cheapest, I buy it unless it is on a very short list of authors I like in hardback.
If, for some idiotic reason, the ebook costs more than cutting down a tree, pulping it, and printing words on the dried remains, then I buy the paperback and warez the ebook(or drop it in the hopper of the industrial scanner at work).
And I imagine the publisher doesn't make as much the second way.
I imagine since Mars has lost its atmosphere, it must have had pretty loose hold on it to be so easily stripped away.
And if anyone ever wonder what, say a 90 year old brain looked like, instead of comparing with a healthy brain, here you go.
Although, technically, it isn't an entirely healthy 90 YO. That white bulge in the bottom left is swelling from whacking against a freshly waxed floor.
Split the funds into dozens of accounts, then sell the ATM cards of those accounts at a highly discounted rate.
You only realize a percentage of your take, but you are trading potential cash and capture for actual cash and time to escape.
It's a lot like making counterfeit money, you shouldn't actually spend it, just sell it to somebody else.
Thanks god books aren't injectable. I wouldn't have any usable veins left.