I run a small publishing company. Our printing and shipping costs are about 1/4 of our overall production costs. The rest is in paying researchers, editors, and royalties to the authors. None of those costs change if we go to ebooks, in fact there are some added costs in producing an ebook version because there's no elegant way to export charts and tables to EPUB or MOBI from InDesign (where we do our print layout), at least not without a ton of hand tweaking. Code generators suck.
So, you know. It's anecdotal. But that's why our $35 book will probably sell for $28 or so in ebook.
I'll point out that Russell was really paraphrasing W.B. Yeats, who had written 11 years earlier in The Second Coming: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Of course, he hasn't actually started any wars on his watch, unlike, say... every other US President going back to Carter. (No, a handful of drone strikes in Libya and Somalia don't count.) He did end the war in Iraq and is ending the war in Afghanistan. He got Bin Laden with a minimal incursion that didn't become a full-blown invasion.
He's talking tough on Iran, but is showing no signs of actually planning for a military operation there. The budget cuts to the military show that.
Reality conflicts with your fear-mongering and false equivalency.
Can we talk about what candidates would do about Syria, now? Or maybe African genocide? How about finance reform? Hungry for real issues.
I can answer those three questions for you, for each of the 4 candidates: Santorum: Nothing, nothing, and nothing. Romney: Nothing, nothing, and "Hahahahaha!" Gingritch: Nothing, "Hahahaha!", and "Hahahahah!" Ron Paul: "Hahahahaha!", "Hahahaha!", and "after we switch our currency to gold dust, finance problems with naturally blah, blah blah. We're all Austrians now! Millennium hand and shrimp!"
Of course, there's a trade-off to not tipping, such as the astonishingly poor service that Europeans seem to take for granted at anything less than very high-end dining establishments. Now, it doesn't seem to bother you all so you might as keep it the way it is. Americans, on the other hand, seem to place a much higher value on careful and conscientious service, and that's why our pay structure for servers is the way it is--to promote that good service.
The habit is so ingrained in us that it's very difficult to _not_ tip when traveling abroad. It just seems terribly rude. I wish however that Europeans were more willing to adopt to local norms when coming to the US. I have several friends and family members who either do now or or have worked as servers, and when a visiting European declines to conform to local custom and stiffs a server even when he or she received good service... well you've just done the equivalent of taking money out of that server's paycheck for the night.
I realize how strange it is to visitors, but this is just the way our society is. It's a social contract, and it is taken very seriously. If one feels that strongly about it, you should either stick to fast food or buy food from the grocery and prepare it yourself, or better yet, stay home and don't travel to places where the customs bother you so much.
I disagree. The original iPod had excellent battery life compared to equivalent devices. It was also tiny compared to HD-based systems, and had vastly higher capacity compared to the flash systems. The firewire connection ensured that it was quick to charge and load, and let it double as a hot-swappable HD. As far as it being Mac-only... Apple hadn't ever made a Windows device before, and why would they? Nobody really anticipated what a game-changer this would be for the whole industry. The iPod wasn't "developed by an outside company" either. Apple contracted with two different outside companies that had more experience in the consumer electronics area, but that's not the same thing, and much of the work was kept in-house. It's not like when they were just selling Canon printers with an Apple badge on them....as far as succeeding because of "who Apple was", in 2001 they were "that company who's going out of business". Everyone knew it. It was just a matter of time.
Really what you're saying is just a variation on "Apple fans are all deluded fools who buy everything because it's cool." Of course, that kind of ignores history: Apple wasn't the cool brand by any stretch until the last 12 years or so.
The reason that over the years Apple was able to make and retain such intense customer loyalty was because they chose to focus on making sure that every aspect of their products made the user's life a little bit easier. When you see--in a thousand little ways--that someone has gone to the trouble of trying to make it easier for you to do what it is you're trying to get done... intense loyalty is a natural result.
The difference between the Mac OS and Windows (back in the old days at least) was that Windows was designed and engineered to sell to IT buyers and CTOs--not the users, while the vast majority of Macs were bought by the person who would use them. The difference in priority showed.
While I agree in some aspects... I have to disagree in others. For example, while MP3 players existed before the iPod, the market largely didn't: there were three main types of machines out there, big HD-based nomad-type players the size of paperbacks with gigs of storage, CD-MP3 walkmans, and small flash-based players with only 16 or 32mb of storage (only enough for a handful of songs). I only knew one person who actually owned an MP3 player before an iPod, and I was smack-dab in the middle of the target demographic at the time. The reason for this is that all the options had big flaws: - The big Nomad-type players were heavy, fragile, had terrible interfaces, expensive, and could only run off battery for a little while. Even worse, they were all USB 1 based, which meant that transferring music was incredible tedious. - The CD-MP3 devices could hold a lot of music and were cheapish, but they also had terrible interfaces, were as big as a discman, and went through batteries super quickly. They also required a whole additional step of burning off what you wanted onto CDs ahead of time. - The little stylish flash players were neat, portable and had good battery life, but only holding 5 or 10 songs made them a complete joke.
I really think what Jobs' method was, was to look at a class of products and say "OK, here's what exists. Why do they all suck so much?"...and in the process of answering that question, create a new device that gets right to the heart of the problem and addresses it instantly.
Erm, not to be overly pedantic, isn't *all* of the energy consumed by a supercomputer (or any other device) eventually converted into heat? First law of thermodynamics and all that?
Let me clarify. When I said "HTML" I meant "HTML + Javascript".
If we're going to be pedantic, I'll point out that Hypercard didn't have "actual programming language concepts like loops, variables, and ifs", Hypertalk did.:-)
But by the time they actually stopped selling it, it hadn't been updated in many many years. All the people who were really into Hypercard had long since migrated into two different technologies: Supercard, which is still being made I guess (most versions of Myst were built on it), and this little technology called... oh gosh, what was it now... "HTML" or something like that.
Seriously, just about anything you could possibly want to do in Hypercard could be done just as easily in HTML with the advantage of being accessible to the world at large. There were a few exceptions, but those were taken care of at first by plugins and now by HTML5.
Mind you, I say this as someone who ran the Hypercard SIG at one of northern California's largest MUGs.
Increased rates of stomach cancer have nothing to do with the kimchee being spicy, and everything to do with it being fermented. This is well known and well documented. You find exactly the same thing in other Asian cultures that traditionally have high consumption of fermented (pickled) vegetables.
If spicy food caused stomach cancer, northern India would be a hotbed. It isn't.
Part of the reason for that is that 13% of Blackberry developers would fit inside a medium-sized fright elevator. (I kid, that's a little less 6,000 developers, assuming 1 developer per app. Actual number probably much less, considering successful developers often have several apps.)
Considering that the installed base for iOS is around 250 million users and growing, and the installed base for Blackberry is around 50 million users and rapidly shrinking... it's hardly difficult to see why people are choosing to put their efforts towards the best opportunity for future growth.
Seriously, though. A developer making a decision about where to invest time and resources has to look at not only current and former size of the market, but also growth trends. Anyone looking at the Blackberry market right now who isn't forecasting imminent doom simply isn't paying attention. Why put 6 months of time and resources into a platform made by company that looks like it's about to fold?
Similarly, there are more developers on iOS than Android right now simply because although the Android platform is showing excellent growth, the people in that market don't seem to be as willing to actually pay for apps as iOS users. Developers (unless it's just a hobby), tend to gravitate to where the money is.
I use a 600k scoville-rated ghost pepper sauce on a daily basis. I'm a "non-taster" on the old scale, so I require a lot of stimulation in my food to find it enjoyable. The endorphin rush is significant and pleasurable.
In soup for example, I use a few drops, which gives me the effect of adding a ton of some milder hot sauce. The advantage is that I get a tiny fraction of the sodium that I would from Tabasco or something similar--and sodium's something I'm trying very hard to keep a lid on.
The interesting thing is that after a month or two of this, my tolerance level went through the roof. The great thing is that now that the heat has died away somewhat for me, the complex and fruity flavors of the ghost pepper itself really shine through. Delicious stuff.
I think you're somehow assuming those things aren't available on the iPad? The dock connector will allow you to connect to stuff like that and a whole lot more, like HDMI output and composite.
Results of study appear to be conclusive and immensely counter-intuitive? Check. Research is from a former Soviet bloc country? Check. Study size is small? 16 people, so check. No details on methodology? Check. Study is published in popular press, not peer-reviewed journal? Nope, Behavioural Brain Research is peer-reviewed and appears pretty legit.
Well, if this is true and accurate, it could be completely ground-breaking in any number of fields. Fascinating if other teams are able to reproduce the results. Can you even imagine a world with reliable truth-telling machines? It's mind-boggling. The only reason that polygraphs haven't completely revolutionized our society is that they are completely BS, voodoo junk-science.
Well, yeah. People relate to note-taking differently, it's a very personal choice. What does it for me is that usually when I used to take notes, I would then bring them back to my office and transcribe them into whatever format suited: spreadsheet, email, scheduling app etc.(or just searchable note-space) Now, I'm entering my notes directly into where-ever needs them, so I'm skipping a step. I don't take notes quite as quickly, but usually by the time a meeting is done I've already completed what would have taken me an additional 1/2 hour back at my desk, in the past.
I don't doubt that a handheld game market exists... I just wonder how small it's going to be.
I can't speak for everyone, and I know that there exist many/. UIDs with a strong preference for dedicated devices... but for myself and the people I know, it's all about portability and flexibility.
There's an old saying in photography that the best camera to use is the one you have with you. The same thing goes for personal electronics. A few years ago, I used to carry around a backpack with the following in it: - Spiral bound note pad - Paperback book - 10" laptop - hand-held GPS unit - cell phone - portable CD player - CD wallet case - Canon Elph camera - assorted and sundry other stuff - extra batteries and charging cables for the above - (I never got into portable game players, my bag was full--and HEAVY)
Today, I have two options. Either I just carry my iPhone in my pocket, or I include a small bag just big enough for my iPad and an external battery pack which can be used by either device. (if I bring the bag, I also tuck in a bottle of Ghost Pepper sauce--sealed up super tightly--because it's awesome.)
The crazy thing is, I haven't really lost much if any functionality over my previous carry, and at the very worst, it weighs less than 1/4 what it used to. I've also added a ton of functionality: always-on internet access is a big one. Also video recording and conferencing. (And 650k scoville hot sauce, but I digress.)
The absolute last thing I want at this point is to add yet one more device I would have to keep charged and haul around. I don't care if the games are 50 times better, 90% of the time that I play games I'm waiting in line somewhere and don't want a deep gaming experience anyway in the 2 minutes I have.
"The drug works by targeting a type of RNA produced only in cells that have been infected by viruses. “In theory, it should work against all viruses,” says Todd Rider."
So it's not targeting the virus itself, just the cell.
Slashdot Mirror
I run a small publishing company. Our printing and shipping costs are about 1/4 of our overall production costs. The rest is in paying researchers, editors, and royalties to the authors. None of those costs change if we go to ebooks, in fact there are some added costs in producing an ebook version because there's no elegant way to export charts and tables to EPUB or MOBI from InDesign (where we do our print layout), at least not without a ton of hand tweaking. Code generators suck.
So, you know. It's anecdotal. But that's why our $35 book will probably sell for $28 or so in ebook.
I'll point out that Russell was really paraphrasing W.B. Yeats, who had written 11 years earlier in The Second Coming: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Of course, he hasn't actually started any wars on his watch, unlike, say... every other US President going back to Carter. (No, a handful of drone strikes in Libya and Somalia don't count.) He did end the war in Iraq and is ending the war in Afghanistan. He got Bin Laden with a minimal incursion that didn't become a full-blown invasion.
He's talking tough on Iran, but is showing no signs of actually planning for a military operation there. The budget cuts to the military show that.
Reality conflicts with your fear-mongering and false equivalency.
Can we talk about what candidates would do about Syria, now? Or maybe African genocide? How about finance reform? Hungry for real issues.
I can answer those three questions for you, for each of the 4 candidates:
Santorum: Nothing, nothing, and nothing.
Romney: Nothing, nothing, and "Hahahahaha!"
Gingritch: Nothing, "Hahahaha!", and "Hahahahah!"
Ron Paul: "Hahahahaha!", "Hahahaha!", and "after we switch our currency to gold dust, finance problems with naturally blah, blah blah. We're all Austrians now! Millennium hand and shrimp!"
Of course, there's a trade-off to not tipping, such as the astonishingly poor service that Europeans seem to take for granted at anything less than very high-end dining establishments. Now, it doesn't seem to bother you all so you might as keep it the way it is. Americans, on the other hand, seem to place a much higher value on careful and conscientious service, and that's why our pay structure for servers is the way it is--to promote that good service.
The habit is so ingrained in us that it's very difficult to _not_ tip when traveling abroad. It just seems terribly rude. I wish however that Europeans were more willing to adopt to local norms when coming to the US. I have several friends and family members who either do now or or have worked as servers, and when a visiting European declines to conform to local custom and stiffs a server even when he or she received good service... well you've just done the equivalent of taking money out of that server's paycheck for the night.
I realize how strange it is to visitors, but this is just the way our society is. It's a social contract, and it is taken very seriously. If one feels that strongly about it, you should either stick to fast food or buy food from the grocery and prepare it yourself, or better yet, stay home and don't travel to places where the customs bother you so much.
Sorry, but if you can hear the "whoosh" that means they missed. ;-)
Ah, you're closer but no cigar. The original iPod was at first only available as a 5gb, although they eventually bumped it to 10gb. :-)
I disagree. The original iPod had excellent battery life compared to equivalent devices. It was also tiny compared to HD-based systems, and had vastly higher capacity compared to the flash systems. The firewire connection ensured that it was quick to charge and load, and let it double as a hot-swappable HD. As far as it being Mac-only... Apple hadn't ever made a Windows device before, and why would they? Nobody really anticipated what a game-changer this would be for the whole industry. The iPod wasn't "developed by an outside company" either. Apple contracted with two different outside companies that had more experience in the consumer electronics area, but that's not the same thing, and much of the work was kept in-house. It's not like when they were just selling Canon printers with an Apple badge on them. ...as far as succeeding because of "who Apple was", in 2001 they were "that company who's going out of business". Everyone knew it. It was just a matter of time.
Really what you're saying is just a variation on "Apple fans are all deluded fools who buy everything because it's cool." Of course, that kind of ignores history: Apple wasn't the cool brand by any stretch until the last 12 years or so.
The reason that over the years Apple was able to make and retain such intense customer loyalty was because they chose to focus on making sure that every aspect of their products made the user's life a little bit easier. When you see--in a thousand little ways--that someone has gone to the trouble of trying to make it easier for you to do what it is you're trying to get done... intense loyalty is a natural result.
The difference between the Mac OS and Windows (back in the old days at least) was that Windows was designed and engineered to sell to IT buyers and CTOs--not the users, while the vast majority of Macs were bought by the person who would use them. The difference in priority showed.
While I agree in some aspects... I have to disagree in others. For example, while MP3 players existed before the iPod, the market largely didn't: there were three main types of machines out there, big HD-based nomad-type players the size of paperbacks with gigs of storage, CD-MP3 walkmans, and small flash-based players with only 16 or 32mb of storage (only enough for a handful of songs). I only knew one person who actually owned an MP3 player before an iPod, and I was smack-dab in the middle of the target demographic at the time. The reason for this is that all the options had big flaws:
- The big Nomad-type players were heavy, fragile, had terrible interfaces, expensive, and could only run off battery for a little while. Even worse, they were all USB 1 based, which meant that transferring music was incredible tedious.
- The CD-MP3 devices could hold a lot of music and were cheapish, but they also had terrible interfaces, were as big as a discman, and went through batteries super quickly. They also required a whole additional step of burning off what you wanted onto CDs ahead of time.
- The little stylish flash players were neat, portable and had good battery life, but only holding 5 or 10 songs made them a complete joke.
I really think what Jobs' method was, was to look at a class of products and say "OK, here's what exists. Why do they all suck so much?" ...and in the process of answering that question, create a new device that gets right to the heart of the problem and addresses it instantly.
Erm, not to be overly pedantic, isn't *all* of the energy consumed by a supercomputer (or any other device) eventually converted into heat? First law of thermodynamics and all that?
Have you considered switching to a nice, soothing herbal tea? ;-)
Let me clarify. When I said "HTML" I meant "HTML + Javascript".
If we're going to be pedantic, I'll point out that Hypercard didn't have "actual programming language concepts like loops, variables, and ifs", Hypertalk did. :-)
Apple didn't kill Hypercard, the WWW did.
But by the time they actually stopped selling it, it hadn't been updated in many many years. All the people who were really into Hypercard had long since migrated into two different technologies: Supercard, which is still being made I guess (most versions of Myst were built on it), and this little technology called... oh gosh, what was it now... "HTML" or something like that.
Seriously, just about anything you could possibly want to do in Hypercard could be done just as easily in HTML with the advantage of being accessible to the world at large. There were a few exceptions, but those were taken care of at first by plugins and now by HTML5.
Mind you, I say this as someone who ran the Hypercard SIG at one of northern California's largest MUGs.
Increased rates of stomach cancer have nothing to do with the kimchee being spicy, and everything to do with it being fermented. This is well known and well documented. You find exactly the same thing in other Asian cultures that traditionally have high consumption of fermented (pickled) vegetables.
If spicy food caused stomach cancer, northern India would be a hotbed. It isn't.
Sorry if my numbers are off, I tried to Google the most current ones, but getting apples-to-apples is very tricky.
Aside from that, you don't feel that the current upheaval at RIM is honestly worrying?
Part of the reason for that is that 13% of Blackberry developers would fit inside a medium-sized fright elevator. (I kid, that's a little less 6,000 developers, assuming 1 developer per app. Actual number probably much less, considering successful developers often have several apps.)
Considering that the installed base for iOS is around 250 million users and growing, and the installed base for Blackberry is around 50 million users and rapidly shrinking... it's hardly difficult to see why people are choosing to put their efforts towards the best opportunity for future growth.
Seriously, though. A developer making a decision about where to invest time and resources has to look at not only current and former size of the market, but also growth trends. Anyone looking at the Blackberry market right now who isn't forecasting imminent doom simply isn't paying attention. Why put 6 months of time and resources into a platform made by company that looks like it's about to fold?
Similarly, there are more developers on iOS than Android right now simply because although the Android platform is showing excellent growth, the people in that market don't seem to be as willing to actually pay for apps as iOS users. Developers (unless it's just a hobby), tend to gravitate to where the money is.
I use a 600k scoville-rated ghost pepper sauce on a daily basis. I'm a "non-taster" on the old scale, so I require a lot of stimulation in my food to find it enjoyable. The endorphin rush is significant and pleasurable.
In soup for example, I use a few drops, which gives me the effect of adding a ton of some milder hot sauce. The advantage is that I get a tiny fraction of the sodium that I would from Tabasco or something similar--and sodium's something I'm trying very hard to keep a lid on.
The interesting thing is that after a month or two of this, my tolerance level went through the roof. The great thing is that now that the heat has died away somewhat for me, the complex and fruity flavors of the ghost pepper itself really shine through. Delicious stuff.
I think you're somehow assuming those things aren't available on the iPad? The dock connector will allow you to connect to stuff like that and a whole lot more, like HDMI output and composite.
OK, lets add this up.
Results of study appear to be conclusive and immensely counter-intuitive? Check.
Research is from a former Soviet bloc country? Check.
Study size is small? 16 people, so check.
No details on methodology? Check.
Study is published in popular press, not peer-reviewed journal? Nope, Behavioural Brain Research is peer-reviewed and appears pretty legit.
Well, if this is true and accurate, it could be completely ground-breaking in any number of fields. Fascinating if other teams are able to reproduce the results. Can you even imagine a world with reliable truth-telling machines? It's mind-boggling. The only reason that polygraphs haven't completely revolutionized our society is that they are completely BS, voodoo junk-science.
The way I see it, it's more of a way of embracing the inevitable and taking control of a process that you really don't have any control over.
20 years? I've personally been hearing it since the IBM PC was introduced, and that was '81... so 30 years?
Well, yeah. People relate to note-taking differently, it's a very personal choice. What does it for me is that usually when I used to take notes, I would then bring them back to my office and transcribe them into whatever format suited: spreadsheet, email, scheduling app etc.(or just searchable note-space) Now, I'm entering my notes directly into where-ever needs them, so I'm skipping a step. I don't take notes quite as quickly, but usually by the time a meeting is done I've already completed what would have taken me an additional 1/2 hour back at my desk, in the past.
I don't doubt that a handheld game market exists... I just wonder how small it's going to be.
I can't speak for everyone, and I know that there exist many /. UIDs with a strong preference for dedicated devices... but for myself and the people I know, it's all about portability and flexibility.
There's an old saying in photography that the best camera to use is the one you have with you. The same thing goes for personal electronics. A few years ago, I used to carry around a backpack with the following in it:
- Spiral bound note pad
- Paperback book
- 10" laptop
- hand-held GPS unit
- cell phone
- portable CD player
- CD wallet case
- Canon Elph camera
- assorted and sundry other stuff
- extra batteries and charging cables for the above
- (I never got into portable game players, my bag was full--and HEAVY)
Today, I have two options. Either I just carry my iPhone in my pocket, or I include a small bag just big enough for my iPad and an external battery pack which can be used by either device. (if I bring the bag, I also tuck in a bottle of Ghost Pepper sauce--sealed up super tightly--because it's awesome.)
The crazy thing is, I haven't really lost much if any functionality over my previous carry, and at the very worst, it weighs less than 1/4 what it used to. I've also added a ton of functionality: always-on internet access is a big one. Also video recording and conferencing. (And 650k scoville hot sauce, but I digress.)
The absolute last thing I want at this point is to add yet one more device I would have to keep charged and haul around. I don't care if the games are 50 times better, 90% of the time that I play games I'm waiting in line somewhere and don't want a deep gaming experience anyway in the 2 minutes I have.
You're misreading.
"The drug works by targeting a type of RNA produced only in cells that have been infected by viruses. “In theory, it should work against all viruses,” says Todd Rider."
So it's not targeting the virus itself, just the cell.