I've been to Barcade. Really liked the condition of the games, but everybody was just kinda sitting around being ironic. Nobody played for the two hours I was there. Different environment.
Yeah, they'll probably get shut down. And I too look askance at the firm's claims.
On the other hand, FDA's constant ass-dragging (largely a bureaucratic procedure to protect themselves from criticism) means in the future rich people'll be going to China/India for similar treatments, as they already are for certain U.S.-invented cancer treatments that never could get approved here (thinking Onyx-015, but there are dozens of examples).
Patients of this firm should be well-informed of all risks, and allowed to go for it should they so choose; screw your paternalism./And no drug testing beyond Phase II.//I know, I know, FDA halted thalidomide, saving hundreds. And how many hundreds of thousands have died in the extra years it takes for cancer-fighting biologics to hit the market, after such products had shown efficacy?
I can speak to the Chinese real estate bubble. It's--insane.
My wife (from China) and I bought an "apartment" (what we'd call a condo) for her parents five years ago in a suburb just on the outskirts of Shanghai, but on the light rail line. Price was 400,000 yuan (around $60k). Her parents are older, it was a much cleaner location for her father to live, better access to medical care, and so forth. This was 2004.
Cut to today, that apartment is (supposedly) worth 2 million yuan, ($300k, approximately), after 5 years. I've visited the community, it's nice, her father seems happy, mother slightly less so (it's hard for her sisters to make the trip on Shanghai transit), but enjoying running water and good electricity and things--the community lies within, in some ways, a Potemkin village.
Even better, several of the units in the 20-condo building with her parents, that's supposedly soaring in value, are vacant--one basement apartment was being used for storage for what appeared to be a convenience store.
Now, far as I'm concerned, the place is secure and not an investment. We're not going to sell or rent it, and when the inevitable crash comes, won't be a problem--but what I hear is driving sales of residential real estate is overseas Chinese buying up tons of properties on spec, even as real wages for much of China are actually declining.
(We're already in cool story, bra! territory, but 30 years ago my father had a similar experience buying a place for elderly New England relatives to stay in Lawrence, MA--huge spike in value, then prodigious decline, and, sadly, arson, after he'd sold.)
Where are you buying books overseas? Only WH Smith and Waterstones have epub books overseas, neither has more than maybe 12,000 titles, and the collapse of the dollar means that books priced in pounds are far more expensive for readers here.
Your comment is entirely nonsensical. It's almost as though you were a planted commenter for Adobe, the provider of DRM for Sony's openwashed reader.
Funny thing, I just took the train past B'More, and I noticed that they've really spruced up the city beyond the tunnel--area that looked like a post-WWII bombing zone. Lots of new/renovated townhomes, a hospital, etc.
Even had a billboard up, "Welcome To Our New East Side," that only train riders (including wealthy/powerful Acela-people) could see.
... of course, ya go near the tunnels, where the factories were and people are driving faster... it's a different story.
/but yeah, population went from 1 million to 600k, and biggest driver for a lot of neighborhood "revivals" was speculators from DC, not to mention having a mayor under indictment, some zones can be meadowed.
//Mostly I take the $25 bus to NY, but it was Memorial Day weekend, lines were long, and I was very hung-over. Probably 10 years since I'd been on the train.
Yeah, I just looked Beaverton up (wrong coast), sorry. Could have engineers in the family pretty easily, and likely better access to scientific resource than a 12-year-old in, say, Camden, NJ, but the kid is definitely for real, and power to him.
I'll drink beer and watch sports in his honor tonight.
OK, so the countries ahead of the U.S. (HK, Singapore, Australia and Ireland) on your list, have in their combined populations fewer persons than California.... and likely fewer opportunities.
If you're in Dublin--and I love the Emerald Dragon--on a visa, and something goes wrong, you gotta do paperwork to move. If you're in Cal, and something goes wrong, you could try Boston, Research Triangle, DC-Bal-VA, and I'm sure Chicago/Cleveland/Birmingham/Minneapolis/St. Louis, etc.
(Guessing, seems like there's biotech companies/research hospitals from all these areas... but mostly in Cal/Boston, of course.)
Many thought the company was crazy-doomed when that little gadget first launched. (Even the die-hards.) And yeah, the price was criticized.
I agree with a number of posters who say when folks trash Kindle, they're really trashing ebooks in general. What I think Amazon pulled off with Kindle was a way of grabbing mainstream book-buyers--Romance, Scifi and Horror readers have been into ebooks for a while.
I'm not a total fanboy; like my Kindle, hate the case. I'll only add that, when taking the wife to malls, I've gone back to bringing the Sony with me, partly because I'm not finished a couple of Talbot Mundy books, partly because, with its slightly smaller size, the Sony fits into my jacket pocket, while the Kindle doesn't.
Actually, you can download a mobipocket ebook straight to the Kindle with no problem, and, to date, no charge. I think the $.10 was for conversion and storage.
I'm an ebook person, I've been testing a site that'll work on Kindle devices. To date, I've put 30 or 40 books from that site onto my device--works fine. No bills for it have shown up in my Amazon Kindle account. Note this is not to hype the mobile site, I'm soon to replace it with a Joomla version (but probably the guy who does booksonphone will blow me away soon anyway).
Anyway, free content loads flawlessly, I haven't been charged for putting it on my device via Amazon's bandwidth, and the tools are there to generate mobipocket books.
I also have a Sony PRS-500 (the earlier model.) Previously, I've owned the Gemstar-1150, the Franklin Ebookman, and various Palm/Handspring devices I used primarily as ebook readers.
Kindle kicks the ass of any of these devices--maybe an Irex Iliad or the Bookeen device might be similar, but the Kindle takes Mobipocket, no sweat, has, at launch, five times the content available for Sony, I can put free titles wirelessly onto the Kindle from my WAP beta site, (needs a search engine) and unlike the Sony device it formats books flawlessly (justifying the text, giving you six settings for the font size, etc.--just beautiful).
I'm not a huge fan of the Amazon DRM, or indeed of Amazon's terms for publishers, but one of my sites does sell ebooks profitably--nsfw:), and I'll put everything there on Amazon, because they just won.
I had to upgrade one of my PCs eventually anyway, so I went to one of the East Coast Computer Shows. Just looking for something prebuilt with 64-bits that ran XP (I don't do much gaming... and admit now that the PC being replaced was a Celery that I picked up at the Staples by my house in an emergency three years ago... was working on something major for a customer when its predecessor died).
Two things: first, there were a LOT more people at this show than there've been at others I went to (could be because all the CompUSA's in my area have closed.)
Second, several vendors said they were getting many requests for XP-based computers... the only ones pushing Vista were the Dell resellers.
These aren't really geek shows anymore. Swear most of their customers came straight from a soon-to-be-closed CompUSA across the street from the Montgomery County, MD Fairgrounds.
XP and Vista were almost the same price at this show, depending on which version of Vista you wanted (didn't care enough about Vista to see which kinds were being sold).
Common issue for small publishers--you get a purchase order from Amazon for 1 copy of the book, then a week later, 9 copies... then the book goes "out of stock... deliver in 3-4 months," then they order from you again, but if you ship too many copies, Amazon might bill you for stuffing the channel with 12 copies...
A small press is pretty much guaranteed to lose money on Advantage, 'cuz you have to pay for shipping, etc. yourself to Amazon, then give the standard 55% discount, and there's no way of predicting needed quantities.
What most indies do (admittedly, not Duke law professors), is say "screw it" to the Advantage program and sell themselves through marketplace.
In my lifetime I've met one person who was happy with Advantage, but he was a famous man who has since died...
Umm, the Chinese government back in the '50s launched a company, Foreign Languages Press (formerly "China People's Press.") This company, making use of all the laowei who stayed on after the revolution, translated classic texts, as well as political dogma, into English, French and other languages (but mostly English).
Most FLP books (and trust me, I've got a stack of 'em... they're ALL public domain) say "Peking." I don't know the exact date, but it wasn't until after Nixon/UN normalization that everyone started calling the capital of mainland China "Beijing." Cutoff date seems to be '75, but my library of FLP titles is hardly complete.
As an example, this book originally said "Peking"... but Beijing is better known, so that's how we labelled it...
They're launching a new version Merchant Account Paypal to compete with the other folks out there (Authorize, etc.)
Most storeowners I've seen (once who take paypal in addition to their own merch accounts) are extremely leery--too many eggs in one basket, and many will never do that again (though some will no doubt join once an OSCommerce mod comes along).
Yeah, you're absolutely right--that's their stated mission. BUT...
As the "profitability" # -- i.e. a certain number of sales required to keep editors, lawyers, accountants, marketing reps and CEOs employed has risen, a number of these "academic publishers" have started to offer works well outside the traditional scope of academic publishing--I'm thinking University of Nebraska with SciFi; U of Chicago with mysteries, etc. They're offering up genre titles these days and selling into the 10s of thousands, which to a small press (with fewer executives, reps, etc.) is a comparative gold mine.
Could be worse. It's not clear whether, say, Phil Wylie, who wrote the inspirations for Superman, or R. Gulik, who scrawled Judge Dee could be published by the mainstream anymore, but their books are selling, and some of these nonprofits are operating in every sense like a for-profit, save at tax-time.
It may also be that the tiny academic presses, which sell, say, 200 copies a year of a book on squid larvae (at $80 a pop), are terrified at the onset of google print, as it does put into question the reason for their existence, but, hey, in a few years that squid larvae enthusiast will just put his book up on the web free, anyway.
I'd be willing to bet, however, that many of those presses signing up for the queries are firms that offer rare 18th century reprints for $2-300 a copy; but, well, Project Gutenberg's gonna eliminate that business model in short order no matter what google does.
I'm sure I don't have to tell people here that China blocks webpages (like the Voice of America, blogger, etc.). So even though in the big cities the Chinese have killer broadband, it's not as useful as it could be.
Anyway, when VOA, whose TV/radio signals are blocked/jammed on the mainland try to get the feeds out, they'll run broadcasts through other sites, and also make everything available via P2P networks.
Whether you agree with VOA/the U.S. Government is another matter, but they're doing stories on things like the AIDS/blood donations crisis, that China won't even talk about (just back from a party with those filmmakers and some VOA reporters).
Of course, most of what people in China download over p2p is Britney or whatever, but, still, the stuff is out there and there ain't nothing the gubmint can do about it.
For about 130 years, begining with the publication of Kingston's Peter the Whaler, books for guys (15-34ish) made up 25% of the publishing industry's revenues. Tastes changed with the times, so the focus shifted from Nautical works to Dime Novels to Pulp Fiction, Westerns and SciFi.
Somewhere, starting in the '70s, this market was just flat-out abandoned, with the exception of SciFi. The focus became books for girls, as boys were too busy with sports/TV/arcades/cars/drugs to merit the publication of quality content (I mean come on, in the '30s guys were playing stickball, leaving school to work at 14 'cause of the Depression, listening to the radio, and still had time for Doc Savage).
You'll have to look long and hard to find new fiction that is intended for guys without being pandering.
Outside of sports (only reason I have cable), kinda expect TV to go the same way. Only difference being, as folks like John Taylor Gatto point out, in schools you're conditioned to watch TV, whereas literacy is discouraged, so it might take a little longer, but the dropoff in numbers is hardly surprising.
This may not register to a slashdot reader, but Adobe's Read-Aloud function (text to speech) is a major, major selling point for some less-technically knowledgeable folk.
I was able to pay my mortage as well as my dedicated server costs for two years just selling CDs of many, many books on ebay with that function, and I'm pretty sure the PG 2 guys saw that happening. (The PG license allows you to do what I did, and I do give back to the project, and, no, I'm not proud of the listing, but ugly, garish, centered font schemes work on ebay where nothing else really does.)
If PG 2 sounds like a scam... I don't think so; there are 48,500 not-on-PG books that you're paying $8.95 a year to access... this might just be worthwhile.
(And, yeah, PDF sucks, but it's all most people know.)
Slashdot Mirror
I've been to Barcade. Really liked the condition of the games, but everybody was just kinda sitting around being ironic. Nobody played for the two hours I was there. Different environment.
I think the difference is that nobody really reads Salon anymore, whereas every iPad/Android phone can watch YouTube videos.
Oh what the hell, I tried to put a reason behind something TSA did. Never mind, but thanks for the links to Mr. Smith.
Yeah, they'll probably get shut down. And I too look askance at the firm's claims.
On the other hand, FDA's constant ass-dragging (largely a bureaucratic procedure to protect themselves from criticism) means in the future rich people'll be going to China/India for similar treatments, as they already are for certain U.S.-invented cancer treatments that never could get approved here (thinking Onyx-015, but there are dozens of examples).
Patients of this firm should be well-informed of all risks, and allowed to go for it should they so choose; screw your paternalism. /And no drug testing beyond Phase II. //I know, I know, FDA halted thalidomide, saving hundreds. And how many hundreds of thousands have died in the extra years it takes for cancer-fighting biologics to hit the market, after such products had shown efficacy?
I can speak to the Chinese real estate bubble. It's--insane.
My wife (from China) and I bought an "apartment" (what we'd call a condo) for her parents five years ago in a suburb just on the outskirts of Shanghai, but on the light rail line. Price was 400,000 yuan (around $60k). Her parents are older, it was a much cleaner location for her father to live, better access to medical care, and so forth. This was 2004.
Cut to today, that apartment is (supposedly) worth 2 million yuan, ($300k, approximately), after 5 years. I've visited the community, it's nice, her father seems happy, mother slightly less so (it's hard for her sisters to make the trip on Shanghai transit), but enjoying running water and good electricity and things--the community lies within, in some ways, a Potemkin village.
Even better, several of the units in the 20-condo building with her parents, that's supposedly soaring in value, are vacant--one basement apartment was being used for storage for what appeared to be a convenience store.
Now, far as I'm concerned, the place is secure and not an investment. We're not going to sell or rent it, and when the inevitable crash comes, won't be a problem--but what I hear is driving sales of residential real estate is overseas Chinese buying up tons of properties on spec, even as real wages for much of China are actually declining.
(We're already in cool story, bra! territory, but 30 years ago my father had a similar experience buying a place for elderly New England relatives to stay in Lawrence, MA--huge spike in value, then prodigious decline, and, sadly, arson, after he'd sold.)
Gutenberg also gives away Mobipocket-formatted books (which are one of the Kindle's native formats).
But those sites don't have literary fiction in any quantity... come on, the inventory's tiny.
What on earth are you talking about?
Where are you buying books overseas? Only WH Smith and Waterstones have epub books overseas, neither has more than maybe 12,000 titles, and the collapse of the dollar means that books priced in pounds are far more expensive for readers here.
Your comment is entirely nonsensical. It's almost as though you were a planted commenter for Adobe, the provider of DRM for Sony's openwashed reader.
Funny thing, I just took the train past B'More, and I noticed that they've really spruced up the city beyond the tunnel--area that looked like a post-WWII bombing zone. Lots of new/renovated townhomes, a hospital, etc.
Even had a billboard up, "Welcome To Our New East Side," that only train riders (including wealthy/powerful Acela-people) could see.
Yeah, I just looked Beaverton up (wrong coast), sorry. Could have engineers in the family pretty easily, and likely better access to scientific resource than a 12-year-old in, say, Camden, NJ, but the kid is definitely for real, and power to him.
I'll drink beer and watch sports in his honor tonight.
Try a job where you sit in a car for hours, thinking up paranoid scenarios on the public dime.
Try a job where the citizenry and tax-payers are, through your fear, the "enemy."
Try a job where "crimes" are invented to keep you employed...
OK, so the countries ahead of the U.S. (HK, Singapore, Australia and Ireland) on your list, have in their combined populations fewer persons than California.... and likely fewer opportunities.
If you're in Dublin--and I love the Emerald Dragon--on a visa, and something goes wrong, you gotta do paperwork to move. If you're in Cal, and something goes wrong, you could try Boston, Research Triangle, DC-Bal-VA, and I'm sure Chicago/Cleveland/Birmingham/Minneapolis/St. Louis, etc.
(Guessing, seems like there's biotech companies/research hospitals from all these areas... but mostly in Cal/Boston, of course.)
Many thought the company was crazy-doomed when that little gadget first launched. (Even the die-hards.) And yeah, the price was criticized.
I agree with a number of posters who say when folks trash Kindle, they're really trashing ebooks in general. What I think Amazon pulled off with Kindle was a way of grabbing mainstream book-buyers--Romance, Scifi and Horror readers have been into ebooks for a while.
I'm not a total fanboy; like my Kindle, hate the case. I'll only add that, when taking the wife to malls, I've gone back to bringing the Sony with me, partly because I'm not finished a couple of Talbot Mundy books, partly because, with its slightly smaller size, the Sony fits into my jacket pocket, while the Kindle doesn't.
But, as to all Kindle lovers being cultists:
"all criticism is autobiography"
Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray
I'm an ebook person, I've been testing a site that'll work on Kindle devices. To date, I've put 30 or 40 books from that site onto my device--works fine. No bills for it have shown up in my Amazon Kindle account. Note this is not to hype the mobile site, I'm soon to replace it with a Joomla version (but probably the guy who does booksonphone will blow me away soon anyway).
Anyway, free content loads flawlessly, I haven't been charged for putting it on my device via Amazon's bandwidth, and the tools are there to generate mobipocket books.
Project Gutenberg should maybe make a mobile interface as well...
I got Tuesday, no probs.
I also have a Sony PRS-500 (the earlier model.) Previously, I've owned the Gemstar-1150, the Franklin Ebookman, and various Palm/Handspring devices I used primarily as ebook readers.
Kindle kicks the ass of any of these devices--maybe an Irex Iliad or the Bookeen device might be similar, but the Kindle takes Mobipocket, no sweat, has, at launch, five times the content available for Sony, I can put free titles wirelessly onto the Kindle from my WAP beta site, (needs a search engine) and unlike the Sony device it formats books flawlessly (justifying the text, giving you six settings for the font size, etc.--just beautiful).
I'm not a huge fan of the Amazon DRM, or indeed of Amazon's terms for publishers, but one of my sites does sell ebooks profitably--nsfw :), and I'll put everything there on Amazon, because they just won.
Full review here, if I'm not already touting myself too much.
He was dead-on about the death of CD-Roms as a media platform (this was back '94 or so... maybe Mona Lisa Overdrive.)
Haven't read Gibson this century, however.
I had to upgrade one of my PCs eventually anyway, so I went to one of the East Coast Computer Shows. Just looking for something prebuilt with 64-bits that ran XP (I don't do much gaming... and admit now that the PC being replaced was a Celery that I picked up at the Staples by my house in an emergency three years ago... was working on something major for a customer when its predecessor died).
Two things: first, there were a LOT more people at this show than there've been at others I went to (could be because all the CompUSA's in my area have closed.)
Second, several vendors said they were getting many requests for XP-based computers... the only ones pushing Vista were the Dell resellers.
These aren't really geek shows anymore. Swear most of their customers came straight from a soon-to-be-closed CompUSA across the street from the Montgomery County, MD Fairgrounds.
XP and Vista were almost the same price at this show, depending on which version of Vista you wanted (didn't care enough about Vista to see which kinds were being sold).
A small press is pretty much guaranteed to lose money on Advantage, 'cuz you have to pay for shipping, etc. yourself to Amazon, then give the standard 55% discount, and there's no way of predicting needed quantities.
What most indies do (admittedly, not Duke law professors), is say "screw it" to the Advantage program and sell themselves through marketplace.
In my lifetime I've met one person who was happy with Advantage, but he was a famous man who has since died...
Most FLP books (and trust me, I've got a stack of 'em... they're ALL public domain) say "Peking." I don't know the exact date, but it wasn't until after Nixon/UN normalization that everyone started calling the capital of mainland China "Beijing." Cutoff date seems to be '75, but my library of FLP titles is hardly complete.
As an example, this book originally said "Peking"... but Beijing is better known, so that's how we labelled it...
Cool, I'll mention that link. Cheers. /And no, I don't care... mostly I sell porn.
Here's a free ebook version in most accesible formats, compiled from the one here. I don't track downloads.
They're launching a new version Merchant Account Paypal to compete with the other folks out there (Authorize, etc.) Most storeowners I've seen (once who take paypal in addition to their own merch accounts) are extremely leery--too many eggs in one basket, and many will never do that again (though some will no doubt join once an OSCommerce mod comes along).
As the "profitability" # -- i.e. a certain number of sales required to keep editors, lawyers, accountants, marketing reps and CEOs employed has risen, a number of these "academic publishers" have started to offer works well outside the traditional scope of academic publishing--I'm thinking University of Nebraska with SciFi; U of Chicago with mysteries, etc. They're offering up genre titles these days and selling into the 10s of thousands, which to a small press (with fewer executives, reps, etc.) is a comparative gold mine.
Could be worse. It's not clear whether, say, Phil Wylie, who wrote the inspirations for Superman, or R. Gulik, who scrawled Judge Dee could be published by the mainstream anymore, but their books are selling, and some of these nonprofits are operating in every sense like a for-profit, save at tax-time.
It may also be that the tiny academic presses, which sell, say, 200 copies a year of a book on squid larvae (at $80 a pop), are terrified at the onset of google print, as it does put into question the reason for their existence, but, hey, in a few years that squid larvae enthusiast will just put his book up on the web free, anyway.
I'd be willing to bet, however, that many of those presses signing up for the queries are firms that offer rare 18th century reprints for $2-300 a copy; but, well, Project Gutenberg's gonna eliminate that business model in short order no matter what google does.
I'm sure I don't have to tell people here that China blocks webpages (like the Voice of America, blogger, etc.). So even though in the big cities the Chinese have killer broadband, it's not as useful as it could be.
Anyway, when VOA, whose TV/radio signals are blocked/jammed on the mainland try to get the feeds out, they'll run broadcasts through other sites, and also make everything available via P2P networks.
Whether you agree with VOA/the U.S. Government is another matter, but they're doing stories on things like the AIDS/blood donations crisis, that China won't even talk about (just back from a party with those filmmakers and some VOA reporters).
Of course, most of what people in China download over p2p is Britney or whatever, but, still, the stuff is out there and there ain't nothing the gubmint can do about it.
For about 130 years, begining with the publication of Kingston's Peter the Whaler, books for guys (15-34ish) made up 25% of the publishing industry's revenues. Tastes changed with the times, so the focus shifted from Nautical works to Dime Novels to Pulp Fiction, Westerns and SciFi.
Somewhere, starting in the '70s, this market was just flat-out abandoned, with the exception of SciFi. The focus became books for girls, as boys were too busy with sports/TV/arcades/cars/drugs to merit the publication of quality content (I mean come on, in the '30s guys were playing stickball, leaving school to work at 14 'cause of the Depression, listening to the radio, and still had time for Doc Savage).
You'll have to look long and hard to find new fiction that is intended for guys without being pandering.
Outside of sports (only reason I have cable), kinda expect TV to go the same way. Only difference being, as folks like John Taylor Gatto point out, in schools you're conditioned to watch TV, whereas literacy is discouraged, so it might take a little longer, but the dropoff in numbers is hardly surprising.
This may not register to a slashdot reader, but Adobe's Read-Aloud function (text to speech) is a major, major selling point for some less-technically knowledgeable folk.
I was able to pay my mortage as well as my dedicated server costs for two years just selling CDs of many, many books on ebay with that function, and I'm pretty sure the PG 2 guys saw that happening. (The PG license allows you to do what I did, and I do give back to the project, and, no, I'm not proud of the listing, but ugly, garish, centered font schemes work on ebay where nothing else really does.)
If PG 2 sounds like a scam... I don't think so; there are 48,500 not-on-PG books that you're paying $8.95 a year to access... this might just be worthwhile.
(And, yeah, PDF sucks, but it's all most people know.)