This would be like car manufacturers bitching about rental companies maintaining their own fleet for too long because the regular maintenance keeps the cars from falling apart too fast and keep the rental companies from buying new ones more often.
Wait... don't they do that?
I'm serious, because from what I can tell, rental car fleets cycle pretty often.
Why do you think libraries have a problem with being welcoming public spaces for homeless patrons, or providing Internet services for those to whom it's otherwise unavailable? Christ on a crutch, they're providing valuable public services to underserved populace, we should be increasing the budgets and giving them fucking medals.
You obviously haven't been to the San Francisco main branch library. Homeless people don't just go there to access the Internet, they go there to shower using the men's room sink. Librarians can no longer just be concerned with finding reference materials; now they have to concern themselves with asking mentally ill people not to watch porn on Internet terminals in plain view of other patrons. I once saw someone charge a library security guard swinging a hypodermic needle, shouting to keep away from him because he was HIV+. Certainly our society should provide services for those who have slipped through the cracks, so to speak, but the library is not the place for it.
The future of libraries is in question. If you don't have to go there to borrow books, what are they for?
My local library feels like a combination daycare and video store. I see more people checking out DVDs than books, and it's impossible to study or work there; hardly anyone even bothers to lower their voice.
Part of the problem, I believe, is the overall atmosphere of anti-intellectualism in the United States. If a library is a place for academics and intellectuals and librarians are stuffy old women who care only for books and know nothing about the real world, then libraries instantly leap to the top of the list of things Republicans want to cut funding for. They have to seem like a place for "regular people" -- so Naruto manga and DVDs of Fast Five it is.
That's why you write more than one book a year, every year. Then ten thousand fans will allow you to live pretty well.
Fiction publishers often don't want to publish more than one book per year by any given author, because the market won't sustain it. In some cases, readers will get "burnt out" on an author and won't want to read the same author again so soon, so they won't buy the second book. In other cases, readers seeking an author look for the latest book and so sales of the second book start to cannibalize sales of the first.
As for ongoing sales, sales of most books peak shortly after they are published and taper off precipitously thereafter. Books with the sales longevity you describe are relatively rare. Just because an e-book "exists forever" doesn't mean there will be any market for it. The market for a book has to be created and continuously nurtured, and that's what publishers know how to do.
Then there's the question of how many authors can write more than one book-length work that's worth reading in a single year. I bet there are few.
And then there's the question of how many Harry Potter fans would still be reading the series if there were twenty-three novels already? Probably most would have quit long before they reached the latest book -- in which case, sales of the latest book would amount to but a tiny fraction of the sales of the first one. Revenues of $27,930 per book might be sufficient if you were grinding out two more more per year, but what fraction of $27,930 would an author be willing to accept to keep grinding at that rate?
What we need is a new generation of publishers that do that actual value-added work: editing, formatting, paperwork... maybe marketing, though that could probably be handled by a dedicated marketing firm. In exchange, they take a smaller cut and no claim to the copyright
Actually, fiction writers don't usually sell the copyright to their works. I just grabbed a selection of four novels from my shelf -- some by well-known authors, but at least one was a debut novel -- and all four were copyright by their authors. What a fiction writer does, however, is sign a publishing contract that gives the publisher exclusive use of the work (and often they sign multiple contracts, granting different publishers rights in different regions of the world).
So when we take your copyright comment out of the equation, what we're left with is "publishers should take a smaller cut"... but why, if they're still performing all of the value-added work they have always done? The work you describe is basically what publishers do. Why should they offer authors contracts that don't allow themselves to profit? You seem to be claiming that publishers take an exorbitant share of the profits of the works they publish, but can you prove that?
Except that it doesn't; I've borrowed a book from my library to my Kindle and then just kept the wireless turned off. I got an email that my loan had expired and it showed up again on the library's website as available. Amazon's 'manage my Kindle' page showed it as revoked from my device. But my Kindle kept it and I finished reading it. Only when I turned on the wireless connection several days after the supposed loan expiration date did it get removed from the device.
It's been a while since I've borrowed an e-book from the library, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it works on my Nook (which has had the library-lending capability longer than the Kindle). On the Nook, you must "side load" the e-book onto your device using Adobe Digital Editions software. When the lease expires, the book doesn't magically disappear from the device, but it tells you your lease has expired and you can't read it anymore.
(if I remember correctly, three months is how long Iain Banks said he typically spends on a novel, and he's pretty successful).
As far as I can tell, at least some of Banks's success can be attributed to the fact that he's quite prolific compared to most writers... which leads me to conclude that most writers can't turn out a novel as quickly as he can.
Just out of curiosity, what is so "awful" about it? I use Hostgator and it's always been fine for me -- certainly much better than the last couple of hosting providers I used. Customer service is competent and they've always resolved my issues quickly. I have shell access. All the quotas are essentially unlimited. It's cheap. What's not to like?
1. Performance? If you want that, you'll be talking to a totally different company with a background in semiconductors, either Flash or DRAM, depending on how much money you are made of.
Bang. I think you hit it, right there. Solid-state drives solve all the performance and reliability challenges at once. Where is there room to innovate in traditional hard drive technology? Any kind of hair-splitting R&D will have to get paid for somehow, and nobody is going to buy a spinning disk that costs the same as an SSD. The only thing they can do is clamp down costs even further, and reducing their warranties is one way to do that.
I'd love to see some statistics on who's getting warranty replacements for hard drives as it stands. How often does it really happen? And who does it? (I've never.) Unless you're buying in volume, I wonder whether a warranty on a $90 hard drive is really worth the hassle.
So many companies today with little or no foresight on what the future will bring them or demand of them.
So let's hear it, Kreskin! What will the future bring a consumer electronics company whose business strategy is based around a race to the bottom, perpetually paring away the margins on an underperforming product that is completely undifferentiated from its competitors' products in every way except price?
This summer I needed a portable computer, so I walked into a Best Buy and walked out with a 14" laptop with the latest generation of Intel processor and graphics, 4GB of RAM, a 640GB hard drive, a full-sized keyboard, and the usual bells and whistles, for about $550. I guess I could have saved myself a couple hundred bucks and got a netbook with specs that barely meet the minimum requirements for Windows 7, but honestly, why would I? Battery life? If I turn the screen brightness down a little bit, my laptop's battery will run for almost eight hours. Size might be the only valid reason, but the laptop I ended up with is still small enough to fit into my little canvas shoulder bag, and it weighs just over 4 lbs, so even that is a poor argument.
Simply put, as the cost of traditional laptop form factors has fallen, netbooks seem more and more like a category whose time is past. For consumers, netbooks seem mainly like "disposable" cheap computers with specs so low that they're probably a waste of money, even at $300. For manufacturers, maintaining a netbook product line is just as costly and risky as maintaining a line of traditional laptops, except the margins are far lower. It's a lose-lose.
It seems to me the test is whether it's actually reasonable for the whole job (in this case, all of the documentation) to be done by one person. If that's possible, in a sustained fashion, then it stands to reason that the other people on the staff shouldn't even be there. They're just wasted expenditures and they should never have been hired.
If, on the other hand, it is unreasonable to expect the entire job to be done by a single person -- in my opinion, the far more likely case, and why a team was hired rather than a single individual -- then it's up to every person on the team to act as a team.
In my experience, managers who are so afraid of delegating to their subordinates that they become a bottleneck for every item of work that passes through the department are one of the most insidious and damaging factors in any company.
As for preferring documentation "written by an expert," I think you might be mistaken and not realize it. In my experience, the guy who wrote a complex software system is often the last person you want to try to produce user documentation for it. His in-depth knowledge of the system makes it impossible for him to see the system the way an inexperienced user sees it. The job of a technical writer is to gather information from the developers and assemble it in a way that's comprehensible for users of all experience levels. Those who are truly good at their jobs will be able to produce documentation that's so transparent and comprehensive that you assume it must have been written by programmers, when it was not.
When I was a lad (50's/60's) we had a toy where you'd melt some metal (lead? or something with a low melting point anyway) in a little crucible over a burner and pour the result into a mold. It would cool and form a little metal soldier figure, whereupon you'd take the two sides of the mold apart and out it would fall.
I did this with my grandfather in the early 1980s. The molds were his from when he was young, but I'm pretty sure we went and bought the metal in a hobby shop. It definitely had lead in it, but it was some kind of alloy. This was in England, BTW.
What do you mean "you don't have a trunk". What the hell do you drive that has no trunk of any kind? Even hatchbacks have storage spaces in the rear you could add a false floor to...
I'm guessing it's a pickup truck. So here's one idea: Get one of those lock boxes like construction workers use for their tools.
This seems like a strange question. It seems like the best policy is to assume there's nothing special about your laptop or any other tech gear and just treat it as if it was a woman's purse. What do you do to keep anything from being stolen?
The bottom line is that most petty crimes are crimes of opportunity. "I was just standing there watching videos on my iPhone, not paying any attention to my surroundings, and a guy ran up and grabbed it out of my hand. Can you believe it? What's this country coming to?"
Here's one idea: Use a laptop cable to lock your laptop to the steering wheel (or something else) when you leave the car. The catch: Nobody will expect you to do that, so they'll still smash your car window before they realize the laptop is locked. Works great if you're OK with paying for a smashed window.
Which happens primarily because it's illegal and not taxed, and thus monitored, like every other profession.
OK, so what about basic human dignity? Would you like your sister to be a prostitute? If it were taxed and legal, would you take your sister aside and tell her, "No matter what you do, make sure you fill out the right tax forms?" Is that your only contribution to the discussion -- that the invisible hand of the market will figure everything out, including finger-banging your sister?
You're making yourself look like a fool. International Justice Mission (the people that Google are working with) is a faith-based religious organization whom, it turns out "rescues" people who don't want to be rescued.
The International Justice Mission is one of nine organizations that Google is supporting with this round of donations.
The fact that IJM is a "faith-based religious organization" seems irrelevant, unless you want to compare what "atheism-based secular organizations" have been doing to address the same ills.
When you say people "don't want to be rescued," upon what do you base that opinion? Seriously, because that statement gives me the creeps. Had much experience with that, have you? Conducted many interviews?
As far as the difference between prostitution and human slavery, both exist in San Francisco (where I live) but it only takes someone as blinkered as you -- and not anyone who works in law enforcement -- to tell the difference.
If adult prostitution was legal, every hooker (of age) would gladly turn in the names of the pimps running kids. After all, they are the competition.
Except that's not true. Every stripper knows that some guys like how they look and some guys won't. Everyone is into something different. A child prostitute isn't taking business away from a full-grown woman with tits and hips.
What's more, if adult prostitution is legal but child prostitution is still illegal, then the two businesses simply won't be conducted in the same places. The two groups will never cross paths, except in cases where they're in cahoots with each other.
On the other hand, because prostitution is at least semi-legal in Holland, there is a lot more transparency into what happens in brothels in Amsterdam (no pun intended). Americans can easily think "there isn't any sex trafficking in my city, it doesn't really exist, those stories are all FUD." When someone from Amsterdam tells you that sex trafficking is a problem in Dutch brothels, on the other hand, you should probably believe them, because the Dutch have been running the great experiment of how to integrate vice into society for many years now, and as a result, they're much more willing to discuss such issues dispassionately and with an eye to finding solutions.
That said, we don't separate kids from adults, minor offenders from hard core offenders, in short, or any number of other things to reduce recidivism and promote a prison environment that is both humane and efficient at protecting society from its dregs while actively rehabilitating those it can.
This seems like a pretty glib comment. I'm pretty sure that there are people employed by every Department of Corrections in every county of every state whose sole job is to figure out how to do all of these things.
Unfortunately, the biggest thing working against prison reform in my state (California) is simply the massive, totally unconscionable overcrowding in our prisons today. When you're forced to house hundreds of offenders in triple-high bunks in a gymnasium like it's an army barracks, it's pretty hard to do the kinds of things you suggest. So far, California's solution seems to be to build more prisons -- which seems odd when violent crime has been trending downward throughout the entire United States for decades. The real solution is to stop sending so many people to prison for so long for so many different offenses -- but that's where it becomes a highly politicized issue, and the discussion just fizzles out.
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This would be like car manufacturers bitching about rental companies maintaining their own fleet for too long because the regular maintenance keeps the cars from falling apart too fast and keep the rental companies from buying new ones more often.
Wait... don't they do that?
I'm serious, because from what I can tell, rental car fleets cycle pretty often.
Why do you think libraries have a problem with being welcoming public spaces for homeless patrons, or providing Internet services for those to whom it's otherwise unavailable? Christ on a crutch, they're providing valuable public services to underserved populace, we should be increasing the budgets and giving them fucking medals.
You obviously haven't been to the San Francisco main branch library. Homeless people don't just go there to access the Internet, they go there to shower using the men's room sink. Librarians can no longer just be concerned with finding reference materials; now they have to concern themselves with asking mentally ill people not to watch porn on Internet terminals in plain view of other patrons. I once saw someone charge a library security guard swinging a hypodermic needle, shouting to keep away from him because he was HIV+. Certainly our society should provide services for those who have slipped through the cracks, so to speak, but the library is not the place for it.
The future of libraries is in question. If you don't have to go there to borrow books, what are they for?
My local library feels like a combination daycare and video store. I see more people checking out DVDs than books, and it's impossible to study or work there; hardly anyone even bothers to lower their voice.
Part of the problem, I believe, is the overall atmosphere of anti-intellectualism in the United States. If a library is a place for academics and intellectuals and librarians are stuffy old women who care only for books and know nothing about the real world, then libraries instantly leap to the top of the list of things Republicans want to cut funding for. They have to seem like a place for "regular people" -- so Naruto manga and DVDs of Fast Five it is.
That's why you write more than one book a year, every year. Then ten thousand fans will allow you to live pretty well.
Fiction publishers often don't want to publish more than one book per year by any given author, because the market won't sustain it. In some cases, readers will get "burnt out" on an author and won't want to read the same author again so soon, so they won't buy the second book. In other cases, readers seeking an author look for the latest book and so sales of the second book start to cannibalize sales of the first.
As for ongoing sales, sales of most books peak shortly after they are published and taper off precipitously thereafter. Books with the sales longevity you describe are relatively rare. Just because an e-book "exists forever" doesn't mean there will be any market for it. The market for a book has to be created and continuously nurtured, and that's what publishers know how to do.
Then there's the question of how many authors can write more than one book-length work that's worth reading in a single year. I bet there are few.
And then there's the question of how many Harry Potter fans would still be reading the series if there were twenty-three novels already? Probably most would have quit long before they reached the latest book -- in which case, sales of the latest book would amount to but a tiny fraction of the sales of the first one. Revenues of $27,930 per book might be sufficient if you were grinding out two more more per year, but what fraction of $27,930 would an author be willing to accept to keep grinding at that rate?
What we need is a new generation of publishers that do that actual value-added work: editing, formatting, paperwork... maybe marketing, though that could probably be handled by a dedicated marketing firm. In exchange, they take a smaller cut and no claim to the copyright
Actually, fiction writers don't usually sell the copyright to their works. I just grabbed a selection of four novels from my shelf -- some by well-known authors, but at least one was a debut novel -- and all four were copyright by their authors. What a fiction writer does, however, is sign a publishing contract that gives the publisher exclusive use of the work (and often they sign multiple contracts, granting different publishers rights in different regions of the world).
So when we take your copyright comment out of the equation, what we're left with is "publishers should take a smaller cut" ... but why, if they're still performing all of the value-added work they have always done? The work you describe is basically what publishers do. Why should they offer authors contracts that don't allow themselves to profit? You seem to be claiming that publishers take an exorbitant share of the profits of the works they publish, but can you prove that?
Except that it doesn't; I've borrowed a book from my library to my Kindle and then just kept the wireless turned off. I got an email that my loan had expired and it showed up again on the library's website as available. Amazon's 'manage my Kindle' page showed it as revoked from my device. But my Kindle kept it and I finished reading it. Only when I turned on the wireless connection several days after the supposed loan expiration date did it get removed from the device.
It's been a while since I've borrowed an e-book from the library, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it works on my Nook (which has had the library-lending capability longer than the Kindle). On the Nook, you must "side load" the e-book onto your device using Adobe Digital Editions software. When the lease expires, the book doesn't magically disappear from the device, but it tells you your lease has expired and you can't read it anymore.
(if I remember correctly, three months is how long Iain Banks said he typically spends on a novel, and he's pretty successful).
As far as I can tell, at least some of Banks's success can be attributed to the fact that he's quite prolific compared to most writers ... which leads me to conclude that most writers can't turn out a novel as quickly as he can.
HostGator is awful.
Just out of curiosity, what is so "awful" about it? I use Hostgator and it's always been fine for me -- certainly much better than the last couple of hosting providers I used. Customer service is competent and they've always resolved my issues quickly. I have shell access. All the quotas are essentially unlimited. It's cheap. What's not to like?
I just got it through the update mechanism.
1. Performance? If you want that, you'll be talking to a totally different company with a background in semiconductors, either Flash or DRAM, depending on how much money you are made of.
Bang. I think you hit it, right there. Solid-state drives solve all the performance and reliability challenges at once. Where is there room to innovate in traditional hard drive technology? Any kind of hair-splitting R&D will have to get paid for somehow, and nobody is going to buy a spinning disk that costs the same as an SSD. The only thing they can do is clamp down costs even further, and reducing their warranties is one way to do that.
I'd love to see some statistics on who's getting warranty replacements for hard drives as it stands. How often does it really happen? And who does it? (I've never.) Unless you're buying in volume, I wonder whether a warranty on a $90 hard drive is really worth the hassle.
I honestly don't see why I'd need more than eight hours. I find I seldom bother to bring my AC adapter with me as it is.
First off. Never put a comma in front of and.
There's no such rule.
So many companies today with little or no foresight on what the future will bring them or demand of them.
So let's hear it, Kreskin! What will the future bring a consumer electronics company whose business strategy is based around a race to the bottom, perpetually paring away the margins on an underperforming product that is completely undifferentiated from its competitors' products in every way except price?
This summer I needed a portable computer, so I walked into a Best Buy and walked out with a 14" laptop with the latest generation of Intel processor and graphics, 4GB of RAM, a 640GB hard drive, a full-sized keyboard, and the usual bells and whistles, for about $550. I guess I could have saved myself a couple hundred bucks and got a netbook with specs that barely meet the minimum requirements for Windows 7, but honestly, why would I? Battery life? If I turn the screen brightness down a little bit, my laptop's battery will run for almost eight hours. Size might be the only valid reason, but the laptop I ended up with is still small enough to fit into my little canvas shoulder bag, and it weighs just over 4 lbs, so even that is a poor argument.
Simply put, as the cost of traditional laptop form factors has fallen, netbooks seem more and more like a category whose time is past. For consumers, netbooks seem mainly like "disposable" cheap computers with specs so low that they're probably a waste of money, even at $300. For manufacturers, maintaining a netbook product line is just as costly and risky as maintaining a line of traditional laptops, except the margins are far lower. It's a lose-lose.
It seems to me the test is whether it's actually reasonable for the whole job (in this case, all of the documentation) to be done by one person. If that's possible, in a sustained fashion, then it stands to reason that the other people on the staff shouldn't even be there. They're just wasted expenditures and they should never have been hired.
If, on the other hand, it is unreasonable to expect the entire job to be done by a single person -- in my opinion, the far more likely case, and why a team was hired rather than a single individual -- then it's up to every person on the team to act as a team.
In my experience, managers who are so afraid of delegating to their subordinates that they become a bottleneck for every item of work that passes through the department are one of the most insidious and damaging factors in any company.
As for preferring documentation "written by an expert," I think you might be mistaken and not realize it. In my experience, the guy who wrote a complex software system is often the last person you want to try to produce user documentation for it. His in-depth knowledge of the system makes it impossible for him to see the system the way an inexperienced user sees it. The job of a technical writer is to gather information from the developers and assemble it in a way that's comprehensible for users of all experience levels. Those who are truly good at their jobs will be able to produce documentation that's so transparent and comprehensive that you assume it must have been written by programmers, when it was not.
When I was a lad (50's/60's) we had a toy where you'd melt some metal (lead? or something with a low melting point anyway) in a little crucible over a burner and pour the result into a mold. It would cool and form a little metal soldier figure, whereupon you'd take the two sides of the mold apart and out it would fall.
I did this with my grandfather in the early 1980s. The molds were his from when he was young, but I'm pretty sure we went and bought the metal in a hobby shop. It definitely had lead in it, but it was some kind of alloy. This was in England, BTW.
If your gun is in your car and available to be stolen you done f'd up. Lock it up or bring it with you. Anything less is pure negligence.
So we're right back to the essential pointlessness/cluelessness of the submitter's question.
Yeah, but which would someone rather steal from your car? A laptop or a gun?
What do you mean "you don't have a trunk". What the hell do you drive that has no trunk of any kind? Even hatchbacks have storage spaces in the rear you could add a false floor to...
I'm guessing it's a pickup truck. So here's one idea: Get one of those lock boxes like construction workers use for their tools.
This seems like a strange question. It seems like the best policy is to assume there's nothing special about your laptop or any other tech gear and just treat it as if it was a woman's purse. What do you do to keep anything from being stolen?
The bottom line is that most petty crimes are crimes of opportunity. "I was just standing there watching videos on my iPhone, not paying any attention to my surroundings, and a guy ran up and grabbed it out of my hand. Can you believe it? What's this country coming to?"
Here's one idea: Use a laptop cable to lock your laptop to the steering wheel (or something else) when you leave the car. The catch: Nobody will expect you to do that, so they'll still smash your car window before they realize the laptop is locked. Works great if you're OK with paying for a smashed window.
Which happens primarily because it's illegal and not taxed, and thus monitored, like every other profession.
OK, so what about basic human dignity? Would you like your sister to be a prostitute? If it were taxed and legal, would you take your sister aside and tell her, "No matter what you do, make sure you fill out the right tax forms?" Is that your only contribution to the discussion -- that the invisible hand of the market will figure everything out, including finger-banging your sister?
You're making yourself look like a fool. International Justice Mission (the people that Google are working with) is a faith-based religious organization whom, it turns out "rescues" people who don't want to be rescued.
The International Justice Mission is one of nine organizations that Google is supporting with this round of donations.
The fact that IJM is a "faith-based religious organization" seems irrelevant, unless you want to compare what "atheism-based secular organizations" have been doing to address the same ills.
When you say people "don't want to be rescued," upon what do you base that opinion? Seriously, because that statement gives me the creeps. Had much experience with that, have you? Conducted many interviews?
As far as the difference between prostitution and human slavery, both exist in San Francisco (where I live) but it only takes someone as blinkered as you -- and not anyone who works in law enforcement -- to tell the difference.
If you were either honest or informed about the subject you will know that "prostitution" and "sex slavery" are synonymous to these organizations.
Uhhh... no. They're not. But thanks for the ad hominem anyway.
If adult prostitution was legal, every hooker (of age) would gladly turn in the names of the pimps running kids. After all, they are the competition.
Except that's not true. Every stripper knows that some guys like how they look and some guys won't. Everyone is into something different. A child prostitute isn't taking business away from a full-grown woman with tits and hips.
What's more, if adult prostitution is legal but child prostitution is still illegal, then the two businesses simply won't be conducted in the same places. The two groups will never cross paths, except in cases where they're in cahoots with each other.
On the other hand, because prostitution is at least semi-legal in Holland, there is a lot more transparency into what happens in brothels in Amsterdam (no pun intended). Americans can easily think "there isn't any sex trafficking in my city, it doesn't really exist, those stories are all FUD." When someone from Amsterdam tells you that sex trafficking is a problem in Dutch brothels, on the other hand, you should probably believe them, because the Dutch have been running the great experiment of how to integrate vice into society for many years now, and as a result, they're much more willing to discuss such issues dispassionately and with an eye to finding solutions.
That said, we don't separate kids from adults, minor offenders from hard core offenders, in short, or any number of other things to reduce recidivism and promote a prison environment that is both humane and efficient at protecting society from its dregs while actively rehabilitating those it can.
This seems like a pretty glib comment. I'm pretty sure that there are people employed by every Department of Corrections in every county of every state whose sole job is to figure out how to do all of these things.
Unfortunately, the biggest thing working against prison reform in my state (California) is simply the massive, totally unconscionable overcrowding in our prisons today. When you're forced to house hundreds of offenders in triple-high bunks in a gymnasium like it's an army barracks, it's pretty hard to do the kinds of things you suggest. So far, California's solution seems to be to build more prisons -- which seems odd when violent crime has been trending downward throughout the entire United States for decades. The real solution is to stop sending so many people to prison for so long for so many different offenses -- but that's where it becomes a highly politicized issue, and the discussion just fizzles out.