what has that got to do with publishing on demand? those places have been around for a very long time. i remember a while back when i was looking at my pptions to get something in print. i have no illusions about my skill. i'm not the next king or clancy or even someone less famous. but i thought it would be fun. but everything was so stinking expensive.
then along came lulu-- zero risk, zero barriers to entry. want to take it further and pay for professional editing and help? you can. they'll let you pay. but you dont have to. you are not forced to get a single rejection letter. you just write, format and publish.
i tell everyone i come across who is interested in being an author about it. and some are resistant- they want to keep working at getting in through the establishment so they can be rich. they just aren't realists and nothing will save them from that. (and maybe one of them will prove me wrong) but there are lots of us out there who are realists but still are stoked about this option. and kudos to slashdot for helping to get the word out.
it's not evil - it's awesome. sucky, talentless hacks have every bit as much right to get their work out there. we talk about the move from scarcity to abundance and this is a small example. books used to be rare and extremely valuable and the printing press changed the world. well publishing on demand means that i can write a book, and distribute all over the world, without the huge economic barriers that existed in the past.
sure maybe i can't write for crap and no one will ever read a word. so what? why should that matter? in fact, a lot of junk got published the old way and some gems got missed. now everything can be published and all the gems at least have a chance.
some people will look down on it, just like some people look down on 'popular' authors. i think this is more a reflection of the hubris that is a large part of the human condition as opposed to the worth of those works.
once upon a time it was a big deal to own a book. then it became a big deal to write a book. i look forward to when having written a book is no more a big deal than owning one.
the whole point of publishing on demand is that you are not paying all the costs of book production. the people who buy the books pay that. if no one ever buys the book-- none are ever printed and the author loses nothing but their time and bandwidth used to upload the document. that's it.
there are places out there who will use this technology and try to scam unwary authors into paying to be published.
probably, but they wont be very succesful when someone googles pod and finds out they can publish through a place like lulu with zero up front. this is not the vanity publishing of the past because the user doesn't end up taking out a second and having a garage full of boxes of books.
it just amazes me that the profile of lulu is still so low. vanity press companies have existed for years- squeezing big bucks out of want to be authors. look at how much money gets dumped into the 'be a succesful author' business. along comes lulu and practically drops every economic barrier to entry.
you don't have to worry any more about getting ripped off. write your great american novel, put together your great coffee table book, whatever you want-- and put it out there. lulu keeps on going but i really thought by now it would be much bigger than it is.
hence the use of the term perception. in the business world, i believe ibm did a great job of building the perception that their laptops were more expensive because they were better. i'm not sure that the perception is now as strong.
the same perception has existed for apple, but they couldn't run the same stuff. moving to apple meant moving to a smaller set of options. now it means increasing your options- because you can still run whatever os you want alongside the apple os.
My team lead just replaced his ibm laptop with a mac running parallel. It is nice and he said when it comes time for me to replace my dell, I can get one too. And I think with IBM no longer being IBM, it shifts some of the perception of where high-end notebooks are to be found.
Each time I walk by his desk and see one monitor with the OSX desktop and another with his win desktop up, I wish for the imminent doom of my dell.
Years back this would never have been the case. The only place I ever saw macs before were the graphic design/advertising folks. And they couldn't run the apps we had to run.
Re:Useless to all but theoraticians
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 1
that makes sense. and i think there is a lot of value in becoming an expert on an rdbms. but think of the vast majority of databases, and the people working on them. i haven't run into many that weren't junk. in fact i'd be willing to wager, if there were ever a way to prove or disprove the assertion, that the vast majority of databases in existence are access databases made by people with no education in relational theory and the tables look just like spreadsheets.
i just started a new job this week and i'll be working as a dba on a very large system running oracle. i'm really looking forward to it. it is a huge step up for me and i have a lot to learn. but i have no doubt that i'll also be putting in time on the side on much smaller projects and doing my best to explain to people why i have these 'crazy' rules about how to design a database or how best to get information out of it. many of these people will be developers-- i have no doubt of that.
Re:Useless to all but theoraticians
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There are differences on the different platforms, but there is a standard and standard syntax ought to work in any rdbms. When it doesn't (access is the first example that comes to mind) that is a sign that what you are working with is not as good a system as it should be. One of the things I really like about postgres is that it is very standards compliant.
There is a transact sql book that I use frequently on multiple database systems. A small amount doesn't carry over, due to syntax differences. But the ideas on how to deal with sets of information in sql carry over. It appears that this book does that intentionally. And it should be useful in a very practical way if it is at all like the description.
a 'right to work' state, is simply one that cannot have closed shops. in some states, if a workplace has a union then an employee must join that union to hold their job. in a right to work state, you can work for an employer and choose not to join the union. to my knowledge it has nothing to do with grounds for termination.
i do know that in AZ, which is a right to work state (but like i said i don't think the issues are connected) an employer can terminate someone for pretty much any reason (outside discrimination or something else illegal) but they have to pay part of the persons unemployment unless they can prove that person was fired for some good reason.
i don't understand all the document i linked up at my top post-- but it looks to me like gnaps is not disputing that what they do would generate charges, but that due to it being isp traffic it is exempt for some reason. it also looks like they've tried to get around an arbitration ruling by saying the arbitrator did not have jurisdiction, after going to them for arbitration. i may be missing something and i'm not familiar with exactly what the nxx and vnxx stuff does, but after reading it i'm not so sure that gnaps is in the right.
local calls are. calls out of your area are not. global NAPs had a method that allowed isp customers to make out of area calls without having to pay the charges. verizon basically said that global naps needed to pay those fees, global naps disagreed. this goes back 4 years i think, and the amount owed has grown and finally global naps was shut down as they keep losing in court and not paying.
i'm not sure that is right. it looks like global naps is using these vnxx numbers so that the person doesn't need to pay out of area charges on the call. and verizon is saying that global naps should pay that charge. global naps didn't think they should have to, but so far haven't found an arbitrator or court who agrees with them.
if you are like me, and found that reading the article didn't really help explain the situation, i found that this legal document really helped. i didn't follow every bit of it, but it does present a surprisingly readable history of the case and the issues.
when i lived in chicago, and rode the train it was time i could use. where i live now- there are not really any good mass transit options. where i am going it is the same situation. but that's o.k. because i will have a 10 minute walk to work. (so i'm guessing 5 or so by bike)
i'm moving to a new job next month. one of the primary considerations i put into housing, was to be as close as possible to work. commuting sucks. we are moving into a smaller place but i figure i could get as much as an hour or two a day more in time with my family. (and the smaller housing is forcing us to get rid of a bunch of junk and simplify)
with the price of fuel and maintenance, and time with kids that wont be kids long, it was worth it to really make an effort.
the real reason, right there in the article, has little to do with dress and more to do with the incredible political influence (money) wielded by those who want to keep OSS down. the 'image' of OSS developers is not the problem. it is that the political process has been hijacked from seeking public good to seeking personal good.
there are plenty of suits involved in the OSS movement. but as he says at the end of the article, what got him to drop out of the fight was not the image of OSS but the constant barrage of attacks brought against him by those with the wherewhithal to do so - big business.
well yes, you still have to avoid the distractions, but they've always been there. don't feel sad when you're driving. turn of the mp3 player and ask your wife to talk to you instead of someone else.
i remember when walkmans got big and people would just sit in the middle of social situations with headphones on - not nearly as unobtrusive as ipod headphones- and it's dumb and rude. (still is with the ipod).
my point is not that it isn't a problem if you are going through life paying more attention to things other than people (things being your own inner voice or any other distraction) but rather that this is an age old issue being manifested with new technological forms of distraction. it is a lot like taking everything we've always had and adding an 'e' or 'i' to it and acting like it is brand new.
this has existed since humans had the ability to think about more than one thing at a time. i can be sitting in a room with zero distractions, listening to a presentation and i still drift in and out.
my wife has vivid memories of sitting in church as a child while her dad made to-do lists during the sermon.
it is a valuable skill, being able to give partial attention to multiple inputs. it keeps us alive in many situations. when i worked on a flight deck we called it 'keeping your head on a swivel'. and never getting too locked in to one thing. that was the way to get blown over or some other nastiness.
and i'd be very surprised to find a person who would assert that surfing the web or whatever else they may do at a presentation had no effect on their attention. they know it degrades it, but the point is, most such venues don't warrant the attenders full attention. in the case that it does, they will quickly shift away from the other inputs.
And how do file formats matter to a company like Intel; they shouldn't care what office suite someone's using, as long as it running on their CPUs, yes?
what they care more about - than someone running on their chips, is making money. and if there is a financial incentive for them to care about software, they will be involved.
Slashdot Mirror
what has that got to do with publishing on demand? those places have been around for a very long time. i remember a while back when i was looking at my pptions to get something in print. i have no illusions about my skill. i'm not the next king or clancy or even someone less famous. but i thought it would be fun. but everything was so stinking expensive.
then along came lulu-- zero risk, zero barriers to entry. want to take it further and pay for professional editing and help? you can. they'll let you pay. but you dont have to. you are not forced to get a single rejection letter. you just write, format and publish.
i tell everyone i come across who is interested in being an author about it. and some are resistant- they want to keep working at getting in through the establishment so they can be rich. they just aren't realists and nothing will save them from that. (and maybe one of them will prove me wrong) but there are lots of us out there who are realists but still are stoked about this option. and kudos to slashdot for helping to get the word out.
it's not evil - it's awesome. sucky, talentless hacks have every bit as much right to get their work out there. we talk about the move from scarcity to abundance and this is a small example. books used to be rare and extremely valuable and the printing press changed the world. well publishing on demand means that i can write a book, and distribute all over the world, without the huge economic barriers that existed in the past.
sure maybe i can't write for crap and no one will ever read a word. so what? why should that matter? in fact, a lot of junk got published the old way and some gems got missed. now everything can be published and all the gems at least have a chance.
some people will look down on it, just like some people look down on 'popular' authors. i think this is more a reflection of the hubris that is a large part of the human condition as opposed to the worth of those works.
once upon a time it was a big deal to own a book. then it became a big deal to write a book. i look forward to when having written a book is no more a big deal than owning one.
the whole point of publishing on demand is that you are not paying all the costs of book production. the people who buy the books pay that. if no one ever buys the book-- none are ever printed and the author loses nothing but their time and bandwidth used to upload the document. that's it.
there are places out there who will use this technology and try to scam unwary authors into paying to be published.
probably, but they wont be very succesful when someone googles pod and finds out they can publish through a place like lulu with zero up front. this is not the vanity publishing of the past because the user doesn't end up taking out a second and having a garage full of boxes of books.
it just amazes me that the profile of lulu is still so low. vanity press companies have existed for years- squeezing big bucks out of want to be authors. look at how much money gets dumped into the 'be a succesful author' business. along comes lulu and practically drops every economic barrier to entry.
you don't have to worry any more about getting ripped off. write your great american novel, put together your great coffee table book, whatever you want-- and put it out there. lulu keeps on going but i really thought by now it would be much bigger than it is.
hence the use of the term perception. in the business world, i believe ibm did a great job of building the perception that their laptops were more expensive because they were better. i'm not sure that the perception is now as strong.
the same perception has existed for apple, but they couldn't run the same stuff. moving to apple meant moving to a smaller set of options. now it means increasing your options- because you can still run whatever os you want alongside the apple os.
My team lead just replaced his ibm laptop with a mac running parallel. It is nice and he said when it comes time for me to replace my dell, I can get one too. And I think with IBM no longer being IBM, it shifts some of the perception of where high-end notebooks are to be found.
Each time I walk by his desk and see one monitor with the OSX desktop and another with his win desktop up, I wish for the imminent doom of my dell.
Years back this would never have been the case. The only place I ever saw macs before were the graphic design/advertising folks. And they couldn't run the apps we had to run.
that makes sense. and i think there is a lot of value in becoming an expert on an rdbms. but think of the vast majority of databases, and the people working on them. i haven't run into many that weren't junk. in fact i'd be willing to wager, if there were ever a way to prove or disprove the assertion, that the vast majority of databases in existence are access databases made by people with no education in relational theory and the tables look just like spreadsheets.
i just started a new job this week and i'll be working as a dba on a very large system running oracle. i'm really looking forward to it. it is a huge step up for me and i have a lot to learn. but i have no doubt that i'll also be putting in time on the side on much smaller projects and doing my best to explain to people why i have these 'crazy' rules about how to design a database or how best to get information out of it. many of these people will be developers-- i have no doubt of that.
bookpool has it cheaper than amazon.
There are differences on the different platforms, but there is a standard and standard syntax ought to work in any rdbms. When it doesn't (access is the first example that comes to mind) that is a sign that what you are working with is not as good a system as it should be. One of the things I really like about postgres is that it is very standards compliant.
There is a transact sql book that I use frequently on multiple database systems. A small amount doesn't carry over, due to syntax differences. But the ideas on how to deal with sets of information in sql carry over. It appears that this book does that intentionally. And it should be useful in a very practical way if it is at all like the description.
a 'right to work' state, is simply one that cannot have closed shops. in some states, if a workplace has a union then an employee must join that union to hold their job. in a right to work state, you can work for an employer and choose not to join the union. to my knowledge it has nothing to do with grounds for termination.
i do know that in AZ, which is a right to work state (but like i said i don't think the issues are connected) an employer can terminate someone for pretty much any reason (outside discrimination or something else illegal) but they have to pay part of the persons unemployment unless they can prove that person was fired for some good reason.
i don't understand all the document i linked up at my top post-- but it looks to me like gnaps is not disputing that what they do would generate charges, but that due to it being isp traffic it is exempt for some reason. it also looks like they've tried to get around an arbitration ruling by saying the arbitrator did not have jurisdiction, after going to them for arbitration. i may be missing something and i'm not familiar with exactly what the nxx and vnxx stuff does, but after reading it i'm not so sure that gnaps is in the right.
i don't think this is about taxes at all but rather out of area calling charges from the phone company.
local calls are. calls out of your area are not. global NAPs had a method that allowed isp customers to make out of area calls without having to pay the charges. verizon basically said that global naps needed to pay those fees, global naps disagreed. this goes back 4 years i think, and the amount owed has grown and finally global naps was shut down as they keep losing in court and not paying.
i'm not sure that is right. it looks like global naps is using these vnxx numbers so that the person doesn't need to pay out of area charges on the call. and verizon is saying that global naps should pay that charge. global naps didn't think they should have to, but so far haven't found an arbitrator or court who agrees with them.
if you are like me, and found that reading the article didn't really help explain the situation, i found that this legal document really helped. i didn't follow every bit of it, but it does present a surprisingly readable history of the case and the issues.
when i lived in chicago, and rode the train it was time i could use. where i live now- there are not really any good mass transit options. where i am going it is the same situation. but that's o.k. because i will have a 10 minute walk to work. (so i'm guessing 5 or so by bike)
that's a valuable admonition and i'll tuck it away. thanks.
i'm moving to a new job next month. one of the primary considerations i put into housing, was to be as close as possible to work. commuting sucks. we are moving into a smaller place but i figure i could get as much as an hour or two a day more in time with my family. (and the smaller housing is forcing us to get rid of a bunch of junk and simplify)
with the price of fuel and maintenance, and time with kids that wont be kids long, it was worth it to really make an effort.
the real reason, right there in the article, has little to do with dress and more to do with the incredible political influence (money) wielded by those who want to keep OSS down. the 'image' of OSS developers is not the problem. it is that the political process has been hijacked from seeking public good to seeking personal good.
there are plenty of suits involved in the OSS movement. but as he says at the end of the article, what got him to drop out of the fight was not the image of OSS but the constant barrage of attacks brought against him by those with the wherewhithal to do so - big business.
maybe not the pods. but the original pod people? yes. much, much cooler.
well yes, you still have to avoid the distractions, but they've always been there. don't feel sad when you're driving. turn of the mp3 player and ask your wife to talk to you instead of someone else.
i remember when walkmans got big and people would just sit in the middle of social situations with headphones on - not nearly as unobtrusive as ipod headphones- and it's dumb and rude. (still is with the ipod).
my point is not that it isn't a problem if you are going through life paying more attention to things other than people (things being your own inner voice or any other distraction) but rather that this is an age old issue being manifested with new technological forms of distraction. it is a lot like taking everything we've always had and adding an 'e' or 'i' to it and acting like it is brand new.
this has existed since humans had the ability to think about more than one thing at a time. i can be sitting in a room with zero distractions, listening to a presentation and i still drift in and out.
my wife has vivid memories of sitting in church as a child while her dad made to-do lists during the sermon.
it is a valuable skill, being able to give partial attention to multiple inputs. it keeps us alive in many situations. when i worked on a flight deck we called it 'keeping your head on a swivel'. and never getting too locked in to one thing. that was the way to get blown over or some other nastiness.
and i'd be very surprised to find a person who would assert that surfing the web or whatever else they may do at a presentation had no effect on their attention. they know it degrades it, but the point is, most such venues don't warrant the attenders full attention. in the case that it does, they will quickly shift away from the other inputs.
And how do file formats matter to a company like Intel; they shouldn't care what office suite someone's using, as long as it running on their CPUs, yes?
what they care more about - than someone running on their chips, is making money. and if there is a financial incentive for them to care about software, they will be involved.
luke just hung out on his uncle's farm. if he actually did anything interesting, that would fly in the face of everything he says and does in ep 4.