Uh, people don't destroy customers lives or get arrested for working at CC, so it's a no-brainer after all. You've never been to a Circuit City, have you?
Unfortunately I expect he will go into the history books as a brilliant technologist.
He will go into the history books as a great philanthropist; in a hundred years he'll occupy the same cultural niche as Rockefeller does today. His early business career is likely to be a mere footnote.
(The parallels are actually quite notable -- Rockefeller was attacked for his questionable business practices, convicted of being a monopolist, and then spend the last 40 years of his life in charitable works.)
This means that a new book sells for about 400% to 600% of the cost of manufacturing the book. That extra is what goes to the publishing company and the author, mostly. So over 75% of a book sale is profit, in one form or another.
I have actual first-hand knowledge here. My wife runs a small publishing company, so I know something of the costs involved. Note that the big publishers will be getting a better deal than I mention here, since they can afford to place bigger orders, and play hardball with distributors.
First, your 4-6x the printing cost estimate for the final price is about right, depending on your printer. But, of course, only half the cover price will actually go to the publisher -- the rest is given directly to your distributor. (Of which they only get part; the rest goes to the retail outlet who sells your book.)
Bear in mind that I'm not factoring in other necessary costs to the printing price. No shipping fees (freight is expensive), shrinkwrapping (if your book is... naughty), and creative costs. Shipping (and shrinkwrapping) scales with order size, and adds maybe 15% to the cost. Authorial royalties don't count until their advance has been made back, but then they're a fixed percentage of the cover price. Then there's some unavoidable flat costs - you're going to spend about the same amount on paying your editor and your graphic designer (both of which are essential; trust me) whether you're printing 3,000 or 30,000 books.
This brings us probably closer to a fifth to a quarter of the cover price being the expense.
Now consider that (as a rule-of-thumb) to get a decent per-book cost, you have to order at least 3,000 books. So your small-print-run book has to sell something like 1,500 copies to break even, after the distributor's cut. If it sells less, you've lost money, and have big stacks of worthless paper sitting around.
Selling an ebook has definite advantages here, obviously. You can lose the printing costs and (most of the) distributor costs. Problem is that the market for ebooks is smaller, and the advertising channels aren't as good. Bookstores have a certain mindshare, after all.
McDonalds sells millions upon millions of burgers because they sell what people want: food which is cheap, hot, and tasty.
Yes, you can get better food. But not for the same amount of money, or in the same timeframe. I mean, sure, I can go to a gourmet restaurant, and have a fantastic meal which blows McFood away... but I'll spent more than 10 times what I would at McDonalds, and it'll take a lot longer to eat. Or I could spend about what I would at McDonalds and cook for myself... but that's slow, and there might be other things I want to get done.
* The Y key is horribly inconsistent. If you're in the Inbox, it archives. If you're in a label, it removes the label. If you're in spam or trash, it moves to the Inbox! This is a bad case of modal input.
Actually, this is very consistent. 'Y' always removes the currently viewed label.
It's important to understand that all the special folders in Gmail are just 'magic' labels: 'Inbox', 'Spam', 'Draft', etc... all labels, and displayed as such in the message view and all-mail view.
The only inconsistency, from your account, is that removing 'Spam' or 'Trash' adds the 'Inbox' label. (It's possible that this is just a matter of that label never having been removed, and the 'magic' Inbox also filtering on NOT Spam NOT Trash, I suppose. I can't be bothered to experiment, though.:)
My dad, who is an avid WoW junkie, says that this is his main complaint about WoW. He thinks that people who get to level 60, for the most part, have done so because they enjoy the game up to that point -- the questing, in other words. Which can almost entirely be done solo, apart from the dungeons, and it's really easy to get a pickup group for those.
But at level 60 you can't quest for advancement... the only advancement potential remaining is gear, which you can get from raids or from PvP. PvP gear only reaches the general level of raid gear when you hit the highest ranks, so only a handful of people on a server can actually get it.
So for the majority of endgame players, raiding is THE form of advancement. And it's totally different in character from the entire game leading up to it.
This explains why his pattern seems to be getting a character to 60 then starting a new alt, repeating ad infinitum.
Note that he switched to WoW from EQ, another game where the endgame was all about the raids. He blames Blizzard's hiring of a bunch of EQ guys to design the high-level content.
(My entire family plays WoW. My mum and dad, both my brothers, my wife, me... it's crazy. My wife and I got into it after visiting my family for Christmas this year and being persuaded to give it a try. It's like crack.)
I wonder what happens if you have an employment dispute and wind up needing to sue them. (Okay, I assume that in the contract you agreed to binding arbitration, but still...)
I suspect that manufacturing, possessing, or distributing them would be legal. It's using them that would be iffy. (Like a police radar detector, if you've ever bought one. They're legal to own, but not to use.)
So I'll buy a HDCP pass-through box on EBay or from my local cell-phone-unlocking/x-box-modding/dvd-player-unlo cking store that'll let me put HDCP in one end and DVI will come out the other.
"The market will decide", cliche though that may be.
Well, in Flash we'd have to call it AAAX (Asynchronous Actionscript And XML). Not quite as catchy.
Of course, the AJAX name has bothered me since it was stapled to the technology. I know it's less buzzword-friendly, but I was happy with plain old XMLHTTPRequest.
Decent computer? Hmm, I suppose using MSI or Asus motherboards with Intel or nVidia Chipsets with AMD and Intel CPUs with nVidia Graphics. You don't get more "common" than that. The only off the wall thing I use is Turtle Beach sound cards and those used to be common enough and do have good support for just about anything. Difference is, I don't go updating drivers the day something new comes out. I don't feel that should be necessary. Any problems that I've had in the past couple of years has been caused by copy protection. Previous to that it was rushed to market products.
I agree that your setup is "common", but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's "decent". You may have some cheap and unreliable components in there, even if they are using name-brand components. (Your power supply, for instance, might be awful, which can really affect system stability.)
I say this because I've played a lot of games. Many of them the ones that you're mentioning, and I haven't had crashing problems like that. My system is, like yours, ASUS+Intel+nVidia.
I've been fairly happy with Jessica in Dragon Quest VIII so far. She's smart and sarcastic, which works nicely. She's crap at physical combat in the early game... but I've looked at her skill path, and I think that she could be a good physical attacker by the end if you put the points in. And she's the primary offensive magician, so for raw damage dealing she can be good.
(Of course, she's also this game's example of Boob Physics, whereby the designers get to show off just how much those things can jiggle. But I have come to accept this in videogames, and it only occasionally makes me giggle.)
I'm not commenting on the merits of the Fairtax proposal, because I really don't think that I'm qualified to have an opinion without going and spending the next 6 months intensively studying economics and the current tax system.
But! Tax reform is reeeeeeeally hard to pull off. There's a lot of entrenched interests who have the present system working for them. Corporation and rich people already manipulate their money to pay less tax than they probably should under the spirit of the law, and it may well be that this proposal would result in them paying more than they currently do. Government employee unions would hate it -- it would involve dismantling a very large chunk of the IRS, after all. Accountants would suddenly become much less in demand, and so have a vested interest in the current (complicated) system.
Most porn sites are hosted by big porn-friendly (and porn-specific) hosting companies. They tend to offer package deals -- server space, all the scripts required to accept payment and handle accounts, and sometimes even porn to sell. (Ever wonder why a lot of sites have the same pictures? That's why.)
It's because most hosting companies have some restrictions on "naughty" content in their TOS; or they did, last time I was in the market. So if your business depends on hosting porn, you really want a host who is totally ok with it. (I went with Dreamhost for my vaguely naughty site. It seems to be a good choice.)
So it's possible that the GP was talking about a master porn site, with a whole lot of other sites hosted. It's also possible that it was just a decent sized independent site. I'd imagine that serving large hi-rez pictures and movies isn't something you can do with just a handful of servers for any sort of reasonable customer-base.
It isn't the *hosting* of sharepoint that gives me headaches, it's the *using* of sharepoint.
God yes.
To be fair, though, Sharepoint is decent if it does exactly what you want already. It's when you start wanting to tweak it to meet your needs that it becomes a nightmare.
If the idea of MMORPG social circles seems trivial or unimportant to you, what about something like a seller's account on eBay? In a digital world when all someone has to go on is the reputation of your "unique ID," what happens when that ID changes such that it is no longer recognizable as you?
Good question, bad example.
eBay's feedback system is an attempt to formalize the intangiable reputation-of-names system. It works well; I don't really care who I'm buying from, so long as they have decent positive feedback. If eBay assigned every seller a new random name with every auction, it wouldn't affect my use of the site.
A better example, in my opinion, is your URL. People spent quite a while building identity around their website, and if you have to change that URL then all that effort is lost.
Not from what I've read. The founder, Bart Decrem, was in charge of marketing and business activities for the Mozilla Foundation. (So sayeth his bio, anyway.) But it seems like they're taking advantage of all the work that went into making it easier to rebrand FireFox earlier this year, and just making a totally new and unrelated browser that happens to share the same core technologies.
I've heard colleagues regret putting their work at #1, only to be surprised when their spose says she was leaving tomorrow.
If they were surprised, their spouse was an asshole. Walking out is a somewhat awful first step in communicating that you don't like your significant other's behavior. (Apart from in a few cases, involving serious abuse.)
How about a Congress that's chosen by percentages; write down who you want to be in office at the ballot box, and anyone who's been written in is a member - with votes equal to the number of people who voted him in, and a pay package similarly disseminated; one dollar a year for each vote he got.
I mostly like it, but I think that it would marginalise minority opinions. Anyone getting less than, say, 30,000 votes wouldn't be able to afford to be a full-time congressperson. (Assuming that congressperson was still a full-time job, of course.) Likewise, the celebrity politicians would have immense power -- people who don't care much about the political process would likely just vote for someone well-known, leaving that politician with a vast number of votes and a huge salary. Cycle repeats: with a huge salary I can promote myself more, and probably get more votes.
Plus, I think it would be tremendously unwieldy on a large scale.
It seems like one of those systems that would work beautifully with an involved and politically aware populace... but the same can be said of the current system.
Slashdot Mirror
This you can (almost) get. I mean, it's fanfic, of course. But what are you going to do?
Evidence - Sam Vimes is summoned to Tolkien's Arda at the end of the War of Wrath.
Unfortunately I expect he will go into the history books as a brilliant technologist.
He will go into the history books as a great philanthropist; in a hundred years he'll occupy the same cultural niche as Rockefeller does today. His early business career is likely to be a mere footnote.
(The parallels are actually quite notable -- Rockefeller was attacked for his questionable business practices, convicted of being a monopolist, and then spend the last 40 years of his life in charitable works.)
I have actual first-hand knowledge here. My wife runs a small publishing company, so I know something of the costs involved. Note that the big publishers will be getting a better deal than I mention here, since they can afford to place bigger orders, and play hardball with distributors.
First, your 4-6x the printing cost estimate for the final price is about right, depending on your printer. But, of course, only half the cover price will actually go to the publisher -- the rest is given directly to your distributor. (Of which they only get part; the rest goes to the retail outlet who sells your book.)
Bear in mind that I'm not factoring in other necessary costs to the printing price. No shipping fees (freight is expensive), shrinkwrapping (if your book is... naughty), and creative costs. Shipping (and shrinkwrapping) scales with order size, and adds maybe 15% to the cost. Authorial royalties don't count until their advance has been made back, but then they're a fixed percentage of the cover price. Then there's some unavoidable flat costs - you're going to spend about the same amount on paying your editor and your graphic designer (both of which are essential; trust me) whether you're printing 3,000 or 30,000 books.
This brings us probably closer to a fifth to a quarter of the cover price being the expense.
Now consider that (as a rule-of-thumb) to get a decent per-book cost, you have to order at least 3,000 books. So your small-print-run book has to sell something like 1,500 copies to break even, after the distributor's cut. If it sells less, you've lost money, and have big stacks of worthless paper sitting around.
Selling an ebook has definite advantages here, obviously. You can lose the printing costs and (most of the) distributor costs. Problem is that the market for ebooks is smaller, and the advertising channels aren't as good. Bookstores have a certain mindshare, after all.
LaTeX. For WYSIWYM editing. (That would be: What You See Is What You Mean.)
McDonalds sells millions upon millions of burgers because they sell what people want: food which is cheap, hot, and tasty.
Yes, you can get better food. But not for the same amount of money, or in the same timeframe. I mean, sure, I can go to a gourmet restaurant, and have a fantastic meal which blows McFood away... but I'll spent more than 10 times what I would at McDonalds, and it'll take a lot longer to eat. Or I could spend about what I would at McDonalds and cook for myself... but that's slow, and there might be other things I want to get done.
The iPod and MacOS X?
They're cool. Albeit geeky.
This is exactly why I sign my name as "Batman".
Well, that and because I think it's funny.
Actually, this is very consistent. 'Y' always removes the currently viewed label.
It's important to understand that all the special folders in Gmail are just 'magic' labels: 'Inbox', 'Spam', 'Draft', etc... all labels, and displayed as such in the message view and all-mail view.
The only inconsistency, from your account, is that removing 'Spam' or 'Trash' adds the 'Inbox' label. (It's possible that this is just a matter of that label never having been removed, and the 'magic' Inbox also filtering on NOT Spam NOT Trash, I suppose. I can't be bothered to experiment, though.
My dad, who is an avid WoW junkie, says that this is his main complaint about WoW. He thinks that people who get to level 60, for the most part, have done so because they enjoy the game up to that point -- the questing, in other words. Which can almost entirely be done solo, apart from the dungeons, and it's really easy to get a pickup group for those.
But at level 60 you can't quest for advancement... the only advancement potential remaining is gear, which you can get from raids or from PvP. PvP gear only reaches the general level of raid gear when you hit the highest ranks, so only a handful of people on a server can actually get it.
So for the majority of endgame players, raiding is THE form of advancement. And it's totally different in character from the entire game leading up to it.
This explains why his pattern seems to be getting a character to 60 then starting a new alt, repeating ad infinitum.
Note that he switched to WoW from EQ, another game where the endgame was all about the raids. He blames Blizzard's hiring of a bunch of EQ guys to design the high-level content.
(My entire family plays WoW. My mum and dad, both my brothers, my wife, me... it's crazy. My wife and I got into it after visiting my family for Christmas this year and being persuaded to give it a try. It's like crack.)
I wonder what happens if you have an employment dispute and wind up needing to sue them. (Okay, I assume that in the contract you agreed to binding arbitration, but still...)
I suspect that manufacturing, possessing, or distributing them would be legal. It's using them that would be iffy. (Like a police radar detector, if you've ever bought one. They're legal to own, but not to use.)
o cking store that'll let me put HDCP in one end and DVI will come out the other.
So I'll buy a HDCP pass-through box on EBay or from my local cell-phone-unlocking/x-box-modding/dvd-player-unl
"The market will decide", cliche though that may be.
Well, in Flash we'd have to call it AAAX (Asynchronous Actionscript And XML). Not quite as catchy.
Of course, the AJAX name has bothered me since it was stapled to the technology. I know it's less buzzword-friendly, but I was happy with plain old XMLHTTPRequest.
Don't mind me; I'm old and grouchy.
I agree that your setup is "common", but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's "decent". You may have some cheap and unreliable components in there, even if they are using name-brand components. (Your power supply, for instance, might be awful, which can really affect system stability.)
I say this because I've played a lot of games. Many of them the ones that you're mentioning, and I haven't had crashing problems like that. My system is, like yours, ASUS+Intel+nVidia.
I'm not disputing your point.
But I am suggesting that you may possibly be a biased party.
I've been fairly happy with Jessica in Dragon Quest VIII so far. She's smart and sarcastic, which works nicely. She's crap at physical combat in the early game... but I've looked at her skill path, and I think that she could be a good physical attacker by the end if you put the points in. And she's the primary offensive magician, so for raw damage dealing she can be good.
(Of course, she's also this game's example of Boob Physics, whereby the designers get to show off just how much those things can jiggle. But I have come to accept this in videogames, and it only occasionally makes me giggle.)
The way I look at this is:
If you want to worry about privacy and "big brother", complain about AdSense. This is a simple extension, at most.
I'm not commenting on the merits of the Fairtax proposal, because I really don't think that I'm qualified to have an opinion without going and spending the next 6 months intensively studying economics and the current tax system.
But! Tax reform is reeeeeeeally hard to pull off. There's a lot of entrenched interests who have the present system working for them. Corporation and rich people already manipulate their money to pay less tax than they probably should under the spirit of the law, and it may well be that this proposal would result in them paying more than they currently do. Government employee unions would hate it -- it would involve dismantling a very large chunk of the IRS, after all. Accountants would suddenly become much less in demand, and so have a vested interest in the current (complicated) system.
And so forth.
Most porn sites are hosted by big porn-friendly (and porn-specific) hosting companies. They tend to offer package deals -- server space, all the scripts required to accept payment and handle accounts, and sometimes even porn to sell. (Ever wonder why a lot of sites have the same pictures? That's why.)
It's because most hosting companies have some restrictions on "naughty" content in their TOS; or they did, last time I was in the market. So if your business depends on hosting porn, you really want a host who is totally ok with it. (I went with Dreamhost for my vaguely naughty site. It seems to be a good choice.)
So it's possible that the GP was talking about a master porn site, with a whole lot of other sites hosted. It's also possible that it was just a decent sized independent site. I'd imagine that serving large hi-rez pictures and movies isn't something you can do with just a handful of servers for any sort of reasonable customer-base.
God yes.
To be fair, though, Sharepoint is decent if it does exactly what you want already. It's when you start wanting to tweak it to meet your needs that it becomes a nightmare.
Good question, bad example.
eBay's feedback system is an attempt to formalize the intangiable reputation-of-names system. It works well; I don't really care who I'm buying from, so long as they have decent positive feedback. If eBay assigned every seller a new random name with every auction, it wouldn't affect my use of the site.
A better example, in my opinion, is your URL. People spent quite a while building identity around their website, and if you have to change that URL then all that effort is lost.
Not from what I've read. The founder, Bart Decrem, was in charge of marketing and business activities for the Mozilla Foundation. (So sayeth his bio, anyway.) But it seems like they're taking advantage of all the work that went into making it easier to rebrand FireFox earlier this year, and just making a totally new and unrelated browser that happens to share the same core technologies.
In researching that last paragraph, I came across this blog entry by one of the developers, which has a nice summary of press/blogger reactions to Flock.
They're actually pirating FireFox.
In all seriousness, though, it's a bunch of FireFox developers who're whacking FireFox into a new form.
If they were surprised, their spouse was an asshole. Walking out is a somewhat awful first step in communicating that you don't like your significant other's behavior. (Apart from in a few cases, involving serious abuse.)
I mostly like it, but I think that it would marginalise minority opinions. Anyone getting less than, say, 30,000 votes wouldn't be able to afford to be a full-time congressperson. (Assuming that congressperson was still a full-time job, of course.) Likewise, the celebrity politicians would have immense power -- people who don't care much about the political process would likely just vote for someone well-known, leaving that politician with a vast number of votes and a huge salary. Cycle repeats: with a huge salary I can promote myself more, and probably get more votes.
Plus, I think it would be tremendously unwieldy on a large scale.
It seems like one of those systems that would work beautifully with an involved and politically aware populace... but the same can be said of the current system.