Hi
I've got a website that discusses a scientific theory of mine. I have NEVER claimed it is anything but a theory, but lately I've been pretty beat up by the new google SEO techniques. Like I'm some kind of carnival barker.
There are four kinds of knowledge in this world. Google's new plan only acknowledges one of them.
1. Fact - Information that is reproducible and verified.
2. Theory - Information that is reproducible, but not yet verified.
3. Failed Theory - Information that has been proven false.
4. Faith - Information that has no mechanism of reproduction.
Problem is Google's new system only considers #1. So everyone else is freaking out. Google's target is #3 and is squashing #2 and #4 as collateral damage.
The experiment failed. Back out Google!
Hate em. I am a sysadmin not a developer, but I always do some light to heavy dev in support of my environment. In my experience if you are really that good you can let the ideas and knowledge flow. Only half of what you say will sink in and that's only if the listener has the conceptual framework to remember the facts in context.
If they hired the right guy (or gal), he may actually be able to keep up. This will be obvious when you are peppered with smart contextual questions. Rejoice! Everybody is different, but there is a good shot you have an ally for life. Build enough of these and everybody will call you first for the interesting stuff.
It does sound like you have a bigger problem. Sounds like your client does not realize what an open ended thing they are asking you to do. If they do, can't hurt to clarify. If they don't get it, ask them what they are willing to pay for. Look at the longevity of training one guy vs improving docs. Consider the training and intelligence of the individual. You may need to spend ALOT of time with him. Consider the medium. Email is more defensible and cheaper than phone help, which is cheaper than in person visists, which is cheaper than full time in person training. Offer some cheap email responses for a period of time. That helps you to keep track of how well or badly this fellow is doing. Also ask them how you proceed if you have difficulty communicating with him.
Once you and your client knows what they actually want from you it won't be uncomfortable, perhaps it will even be fun. You don't really know something until you teach it.
Bottom line: It's either morally OK for a group of you have not met to decide see you naked no matter how you are dressed, or it isn't. If it is we should all get over it. If not, we have to throw a important security tool in the dust bin.
People are way to afraid of these two things. Now they must choose. LOL.
Not that I think people are mature enough to handle this, but that's exactly my point. Can't wait for the first time a security official says about an attack, 'this could have been prevented by the body scanner' and he is right.
LOL bwaaaa haha Moo HA HA. Face your fears pushy jerks!
The only way to keep it fair is to keep it symmetrical. They are either acceptable to use in a public space by anyone, or they are not.
Personally I am fine with these. I don't care who appears naked on the screen, myself included. I won't loose my mind if attractive woman is scanned or if an unattractive man is either. I consider that part of being a grown up.
People are way too uptight about both their sexuality and their 'security.' This is best thing that could happen to American hypocrisy. IMO this IS an effective technique, but how much do you REALLY care. LOL.
Kinda like testing a banking program for buffer overflows by sequentially adding incremental sums. Doesn't reflect real life risk.
Want actual safety? Real simple. Send a bug report in for every single crash. Every crash earns someone a point ticket (or several).
There are no accidents, only errors and oversights. Either equipment failed or somebody overestimated. Ticket! Use bad judgment AND break a rule? Two tickets.
Know yourself and your vehicle, or pay the price.
"Message to dgatwood: The government has plenty to hide. I'm sure that there are plenty of things that some people in our government know that should not be known by many (most, if not all) people outside of some agencies. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there aren't things that should be disclosed, the government is run by people, people seek power, power corrupts and all that, but there are definitely reasons that the government SHOULD have some secrets."
That why it's not just a an anonymous BBS. If someone were to try to post say the blueprint and guard shifts at a nuclear generator, it will be stopped. That is something that has little civic interest but enormous defense interest.
Problem is to many feds try to act like 'defense' is a get out of jail free card for EVERYTHING. Any waste. Any pet project. Any friend in need. How often this happens may never be known, but at least we can keep the scammers looking over their shoulder. If they get too arrogant, they disgust a report and BAM, busted.
This is totally awesome. I am going to run out and join the authors guild immediately. They will protect me from my vicious double dipping fans!!!
NOT.
Creative commons has an interesting problem. How do you allow translation of an open work, without allowing someone to undermine the original text through dubious translation? In other words allow other language translations, but not "modify." It looks like there is a project to set up a consensus on translation. A system by which translations would be performed by the same process from work to work.
So I wonder, isn't an automatically generated audio reading, just another translation? Is spoken language to text or vise versa a translation, or is it literally the same text? How about other languages? Dialects?
If all translations are really just a complex substitution problem that can be performed by the reader, does it benefit society to pay for services they didn't receive for a product they already paid for?
This is first thing in a long time from Microsoft that has truly impressed me. Amazing what you can accomplish with a little fear of competition. If this is truly novel, nice job!
They would lift it out of sympathy and awe for how obviously amazing she was for wielding such a powerful and heavy weapon. One of many properties of the 'customizer' (simply a side effect to it's primary attributes) is increasing the obviously wise genetically bonded symbiote's/typist's charisma ten fold. To help you visualize the simple act of holding the keyboard over her head, picture the pre-fight sequence of a hero on Dragonball Z combined with any scene where Neo flexes the programmed walls surrounding him, finally embellished with numerous shampoo commercials where a breeze comes out of nowhere and blows around her shiny tangle free hair.
Nothing can stop her and they know it. They simply know they must muster the strength to knock themselves out on the off chance she is feeling sinister, and decides to torture them with her perfect keyboard.
You thought I mistyped didn't you? Now you know why that is impossible!!!!!!
I have owned one of these customizers for a couple of years so far and I can say yes. Even a woman of moderate build could fell two or three professional wrestlers with this thing. If they can lift it.
They should have know better than to mess with you when they heard your keystrokes sounding off like machine gun fire in the night. They are very spill resistant too, so you don't have to worry about how bloody they get. You can type a strongly worded letter mere seconds after an attack.
Now if they would just offer one with lit keys so you can see who you are pummeling in the pitch black without the aid of night vision goggles at an additional cost!
I consider it an honor to be read as well. It's a good thing, because I've sold a few dozen books at this point. I think some people here took the 'opportunism' claim of some posts here seriously. It was nice to discuss the book in public but this was really about due diligence for a press release.
On the other hand the Slashdoting resulted in roughly 10,000 new downloads. I would guess based on the way the traffic is changing that maybe a tenth of those people actually intend to read it and half of those have a hope of accomplishing that. We are all busy professionals after all.
My ideal scenario is one, just one Slashdot member, writes a review of the book and submits it, then the busy folks out there might realize that this book is worthwhile. It's tough fighting both the tide of vanity books, and the groupthink that any worthwhile book would have been picked up by now (for some value of 'by now')
I can't explain exactly why I haven't tried that hard to find a publisher, but my gut tells me I shouldn't look that hard yet. Maybe it's as simple as most agents/houses want you to send them a pile of dead trees, and that seems so old fashioned and backward to me that I couldn't be bothered. Especially since even established writers may need to do that fifty times before getting a nibble. It doesn't fit in with the book at all. Not only is it a polished.pdf with a cover by a real artist, but I have the source.tex file on the server too. It's a 1.4 meg file that is ready to go more or less as is. What the hell is wrong with people! I can't just email the URL to you? That's not my world. Like a fish out of water.
I agree about the value of editorial collaboration. The editors, fans, family and even passers by have helped a lot with not only this book, but my ability to continue writing. Open editing improves the story and the writer as a pair. Having someone work over my story without including me seems creepy to me now.
The story was completely mine. It was a posted as a complete manuscript. But many details have been refined, and my ideas for the series have grown a lot. Regardless of what people think of this book, I can tell (16 chapters so far) the next one will be much better!
So far community support for community members becoming writers is great locally and horrific globally. It makes sense with current media distribution. People have gotten used to being told what to read. Most authors know the key to getting read is reviews, reviews, reviews.
There is a guild that believes and pushes the idea that if a publisher of sufficient size doesn't pick you up, the content is crap. They push that idea on others. Any truth to that keeled over with the Internet and the release of licenses like CC. I think the key to getting it moving is getting people you know personally involved.
In addition it's especially important for science fiction writers to work a crowd who is both scientifically literate, and knows your ideas and/or work. Technology just gets more complex over time, and people who claim to know everything are hiding something (probably quite a bit.) No one person can really keep up with all the current tech, much less extrapolate it alone.
As for economic viability (a decent living for sci-fi writers) it needs a sea change. 'Oh good books can be free.' and a popularity boost since commodity info seems to shrink profitability by and order of magnitude 100k book becomes 10k book.
Right now you can post on the net under a CC and POD it, but it seems like you need to keep your day job too.:(
This post is one of the better ones I have read. I may not be brilliant, but I'm smart enough to know no matter what I say there is a grains of truth to this. Except this part.
"I'm not sure what's so notable about the "community-edited" part. It sounds like an attempt to make a false analogy between fiction writing and software development."
It may seem like that, but based on my experience I respectfully disagree. You may have weighed the cost benefit of paying an editor over asking a group of people for help for yourself, but getting other smart people involved with the book has helped me and the book in many ways. Ways I am certain a single editor could not have. They may not be mutually exclusive, but I think the book has come far enough that I don't need that step.
Here are a few examples of what I mean.
I have learned a number of grammatical rules I did not know before. A paid editor would simply have washed them away for me.
I have engaged groups of people knowlagable in the arts and sciences who where also familiar with the book before it went stable. This helped correct errors in this book and gives me ideas for future works.
I got to review every change making it easier to keep continuity in a series.
Because of the period of public transition (peer review) I was able to discuss or even test the science in the book. I think many a slashdoter will agree that the many websites dedicated to really bad science in science fiction are both hilarious and humiliating for the authors.
And this part.
"There's also a massive oversupply of people who think they can write fiction, so it's not exactly exciting news that someone is willing to give me his novel for free."
Don't assume that just because something is gratis that it sucks. An open source nerd should know better. Where am I? Slashdot or the Time Warner boardroom?
Alas no. This is my first book. I am a really an open source enthusiast who thinks he has a new perspective on how nanotech is going to go. I'm a sysadmin in my day job, which I am dodging today, (sorry.) I also founded and run a LUG.
I'm mostly concerned about monoculture, and the horrific wars that break out every other generation or so. Those wars usually correlate roughly to swaths of disruptive technologies as freshly impoverished governments bet they can develop the warfare applications of the new technology faster than their enemies.
The villains are ex-military, moral relativists, gone intellectual property lawyer. That should give you a hint where I am going with the series.
I'd love to see someone dumb enough to force him to take down a torrent of the book based on some 'pirate' claim. They would be served so fast their head would spin.
My cut is $3.30 if it's sold from Lulu, and $.48 cents for books sold from Barnes and Noble. After three two four years of writing, editing, and a month of working the Kinks out of Lulu, I have sold exactly 23 books. Half of those I bought, and mailed to the heavy editors to say thanks. Reviews have been great, so all I can think is people just don't take CC/Lulu authors seriously. Not a good sign for those west coast haters out there.
Since you can download it for free, best I can figure is I really just did this for the Slashdot Karma.:)
As far as I know, this entire book is hard science fiction. It's set only 4-10 years in the future.
Here is a pertinent (and my first) review.
(and my first) review.
On Sat, 14 Jan 2006, Chris Knadle wrote:
Hey, Matt.
Okay -- I love the book. I finished it in three days and I wanted to
finish it earlier.:-) I think the book is "good scifi" in all of the
important ways -- it's got some geeky detail, it's got plot, it's got
character development, and each character has some quirks, just like you'd
find in real life. In all honesty you've got a great book here.
I loved the dedications page. I was happily surprised to even be on it --
that was neat! I'm especially interested to hear who Shotgun Trucker is
now.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
https://themodness.wordpress.com/2015/04/29/the-retail-green-light-saber-for-lazy-linux-gamer/
Hi I've got a website that discusses a scientific theory of mine. I have NEVER claimed it is anything but a theory, but lately I've been pretty beat up by the new google SEO techniques. Like I'm some kind of carnival barker. There are four kinds of knowledge in this world. Google's new plan only acknowledges one of them. 1. Fact - Information that is reproducible and verified. 2. Theory - Information that is reproducible, but not yet verified. 3. Failed Theory - Information that has been proven false. 4. Faith - Information that has no mechanism of reproduction. Problem is Google's new system only considers #1. So everyone else is freaking out. Google's target is #3 and is squashing #2 and #4 as collateral damage. The experiment failed. Back out Google!
Hate em. I am a sysadmin not a developer, but I always do some light to heavy dev in support of my environment. In my experience if you are really that good you can let the ideas and knowledge flow. Only half of what you say will sink in and that's only if the listener has the conceptual framework to remember the facts in context.
If they hired the right guy (or gal), he may actually be able to keep up. This will be obvious when you are peppered with smart contextual questions. Rejoice! Everybody is different, but there is a good shot you have an ally for life. Build enough of these and everybody will call you first for the interesting stuff.
It does sound like you have a bigger problem. Sounds like your client does not realize what an open ended thing they are asking you to do. If they do, can't hurt to clarify. If they don't get it, ask them what they are willing to pay for. Look at the longevity of training one guy vs improving docs. Consider the training and intelligence of the individual. You may need to spend ALOT of time with him. Consider the medium. Email is more defensible and cheaper than phone help, which is cheaper than in person visists, which is cheaper than full time in person training. Offer some cheap email responses for a period of time. That helps you to keep track of how well or badly this fellow is doing. Also ask them how you proceed if you have difficulty communicating with him.
Once you and your client knows what they actually want from you it won't be uncomfortable, perhaps it will even be fun. You don't really know something until you teach it.
Sweeds you will be issued sweat shorts, 'nutrition' bars, and boxed sets of 'The Kardashians' to help indoctrinate you.
There are many rules, too many to read, but the TV 'news' will help guide you as to which ones are actually being enforced.
I've been a LUG president for almost the same time frame and I agree. We've won, and yet, there are new rules and new fights.
Your ability to make technology reflect the needs of people is your best gift. You are a cat herding Jedi master.
Don't worry, sooner or later you'll get an itch and doubtlessly end up scratching it for all of us. :) So thanks and TIA!
Exactly. At least it should be fair. Everybody on the same page. Everyone has a choice, or everyone doesn't.
Bottom line: It's either morally OK for a group of you have not met to decide see you naked no matter how you are dressed, or it isn't. If it is we should all get over it. If not, we have to throw a important security tool in the dust bin.
People are way to afraid of these two things. Now they must choose. LOL.
Not that I think people are mature enough to handle this, but that's exactly my point. Can't wait for the first time a security official says about an attack, 'this could have been prevented by the body scanner' and he is right.
LOL bwaaaa haha Moo HA HA. Face your fears pushy jerks!
Personally I am fine with these. I don't care who appears naked on the screen, myself included. I won't loose my mind if attractive woman is scanned or if an unattractive man is either. I consider that part of being a grown up.
People are way too uptight about both their sexuality and their 'security.' This is best thing that could happen to American hypocrisy. IMO this IS an effective technique, but how much do you REALLY care. LOL.
Kinda like testing a banking program for buffer overflows by sequentially adding incremental sums. Doesn't reflect real life risk. Want actual safety? Real simple. Send a bug report in for every single crash. Every crash earns someone a point ticket (or several). There are no accidents, only errors and oversights. Either equipment failed or somebody overestimated. Ticket! Use bad judgment AND break a rule? Two tickets. Know yourself and your vehicle, or pay the price.
That why it's not just a an anonymous BBS. If someone were to try to post say the blueprint and guard shifts at a nuclear generator, it will be stopped. That is something that has little civic interest but enormous defense interest.
Problem is to many feds try to act like 'defense' is a get out of jail free card for EVERYTHING. Any waste. Any pet project. Any friend in need. How often this happens may never be known, but at least we can keep the scammers looking over their shoulder. If they get too arrogant, they disgust a report and BAM, busted.
What's next after nano materials? Radical shifts in government and society. Comments welcome.
This is totally awesome. I am going to run out and join the authors guild immediately. They will protect me from my vicious double dipping fans!!!
NOT.
Creative commons has an interesting problem. How do you allow translation of an open work, without allowing someone to undermine the original text through dubious translation? In other words allow other language translations, but not "modify." It looks like there is a project to set up a consensus on translation. A system by which translations would be performed by the same process from work to work.
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Translate
So I wonder, isn't an automatically generated audio reading, just another translation? Is spoken language to text or vise versa a translation, or is it literally the same text? How about other languages? Dialects?
If all translations are really just a complex substitution problem that can be performed by the reader, does it benefit society to pay for services they didn't receive for a product they already paid for?
This is first thing in a long time from Microsoft that has truly impressed me. Amazing what you can accomplish with a little fear of competition. If this is truly novel, nice job!
Nothing can stop her and they know it. They simply know they must muster the strength to knock themselves out on the off chance she is feeling sinister, and decides to torture them with her perfect keyboard.
You thought I mistyped didn't you? Now you know why that is impossible!!!!!!
I have owned one of these customizers for a couple of years so far and I can say yes. Even a woman of moderate build could fell two or three professional wrestlers with this thing. If they can lift it.
They should have know better than to mess with you when they heard your keystrokes sounding off like machine gun fire in the night. They are very spill resistant too, so you don't have to worry about how bloody they get. You can type a strongly worded letter mere seconds after an attack.
Now if they would just offer one with lit keys so you can see who you are pummeling in the pitch black without the aid of night vision goggles at an additional cost!
I consider it an honor to be read as well. It's a good thing, because I've sold a few dozen books at this point. I think some people here took the 'opportunism' claim of some posts here seriously. It was nice to discuss the book in public but this was really about due diligence for a press release.
On the other hand the Slashdoting resulted in roughly 10,000 new downloads. I would guess based on the way the traffic is changing that maybe a tenth of those people actually intend to read it and half of those have a hope of accomplishing that. We are all busy professionals after all.
My ideal scenario is one, just one Slashdot member, writes a review of the book and submits it, then the busy folks out there might realize that this book is worthwhile. It's tough fighting both the tide of vanity books, and the groupthink that any worthwhile book would have been picked up by now (for some value of 'by now')
I can't explain exactly why I haven't tried that hard to find a publisher, but my gut tells me I shouldn't look that hard yet. Maybe it's as simple as most agents/houses want you to send them a pile of dead trees, and that seems so old fashioned and backward to me that I couldn't be bothered. Especially since even established writers may need to do that fifty times before getting a nibble. It doesn't fit in with the book at all. Not only is it a polished .pdf with a cover by a real artist, but I have the source .tex file on the server too. It's a 1.4 meg file that is ready to go more or less as is. What the hell is wrong with people! I can't just email the URL to you? That's not my world. Like a fish out of water.
I agree about the value of editorial collaboration. The editors, fans, family and even passers by have helped a lot with not only this book, but my ability to continue writing. Open editing improves the story and the writer as a pair. Having someone work over my story without including me seems creepy to me now.
The story was completely mine. It was a posted as a complete manuscript. But many details have been refined, and my ideas for the series have grown a lot. Regardless of what people think of this book, I can tell (16 chapters so far) the next one will be much better!
BTW I linked to your book on the site. :)
There is a guild that believes and pushes the idea that if a publisher of sufficient size doesn't pick you up, the content is crap. They push that idea on others. Any truth to that keeled over with the Internet and the release of licenses like CC. I think the key to getting it moving is getting people you know personally involved.
In addition it's especially important for science fiction writers to work a crowd who is both scientifically literate, and knows your ideas and/or work. Technology just gets more complex over time, and people who claim to know everything are hiding something (probably quite a bit.) No one person can really keep up with all the current tech, much less extrapolate it alone.
As for economic viability (a decent living for sci-fi writers) it needs a sea change. 'Oh good books can be free.' and a popularity boost since commodity info seems to shrink profitability by and order of magnitude 100k book becomes 10k book.
Right now you can post on the net under a CC and POD it, but it seems like you need to keep your day job too. :(
But WTHDIK? I'm just starting out myself. :)
This post is one of the better ones I have read. I may not be brilliant, but I'm smart enough to know no matter what I say there is a grains of truth to this. Except this part.
"I'm not sure what's so notable about the "community-edited" part. It sounds like an attempt to make a false analogy between fiction writing and software development."
It may seem like that, but based on my experience I respectfully disagree. You may have weighed the cost benefit of paying an editor over asking a group of people for help for yourself, but getting other smart people involved with the book has helped me and the book in many ways. Ways I am certain a single editor could not have. They may not be mutually exclusive, but I think the book has come far enough that I don't need that step.
Here are a few examples of what I mean.
- I have learned a number of grammatical rules I did not know before. A paid editor would simply have washed them away for me.
- I have engaged groups of people knowlagable in the arts and sciences who where also familiar with the book before it went stable. This helped correct errors in this book and gives me ideas for future works.
- I got to review every change making it easier to keep continuity in a series.
- Because of the period of public transition (peer review) I was able to discuss or even test the science in the book. I think many a slashdoter will agree that the many websites dedicated to really bad science in science fiction are both hilarious and humiliating for the authors.
And this part."There's also a massive oversupply of people who think they can write fiction, so it's not exactly exciting news that someone is willing to give me his novel for free."
Don't assume that just because something is gratis that it sucks. An open source nerd should know better. Where am I? Slashdot or the Time Warner boardroom?
Alas no. This is my first book. I am a really an open source enthusiast who thinks he has a new perspective on how nanotech is going to go. I'm a sysadmin in my day job, which I am dodging today, (sorry.) I also founded and run a LUG.
I'm mostly concerned about monoculture, and the horrific wars that break out every other generation or so. Those wars usually correlate roughly to swaths of disruptive technologies as freshly impoverished governments bet they can develop the warfare applications of the new technology faster than their enemies.
The villains are ex-military, moral relativists, gone intellectual property lawyer. That should give you a hint where I am going with the series.
They did. I don't care. I knew four Italian guys named Joe in when I was in high school and one with the last name Vallone. It happens a lot in NY.
It's good to be on the other side of that. :)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/34504/Thicker-Than-Blood
Since you can download it for free, best I can figure is I really just did this for the Slashdot Karma. :)
I glued it together by hand this time around. I'm seriously thinking about using git for the sequel. Mainly for concurrent speed.
Here is a pertinent (and my first) review.
(and my first) review.
On Sat, 14 Jan 2006, Chris Knadle wrote:
Hey, Matt.
Okay -- I love the book. I finished it in three days and I wanted to finish it earlier. :-) I think the book is "good scifi" in all of the
important ways -- it's got some geeky detail, it's got plot, it's got
character development, and each character has some quirks, just like you'd
find in real life. In all honesty you've got a great book here.
I loved the dedications page. I was happily surprised to even be on it --
that was neat! I'm especially interested to hear who Shotgun Trucker is
now. :-)