I think they're just pissed at the world that they have to live there. Guess they feel the need to take it out on someone. I hate that whole region of the state (not that the rest of OR is such a prize).
Some parts of the coast aren't bad, but I'll take Washington any day.
Obviously this does not apply to an Air Marshall who gets drunk and falls asleep on the plane but is the guy on the De Moines to Bend Oregon run going to find as many suspicious people as the guy on the NY to Boston run?
Sorry, but having stayed in both cities, I can categorically state there there is no valid earthly reason to be in either Des Moines, IA or Bend, OR. Obviously there's something truly fishy going on.
Well, yeah. If you go out there 5 days a week and try to be "creative"... Eventually the well runs dry.
It doesn't mean you don't do your best to avoid that situation. You look at the competition, you try to steal only the best ideas. You look at other kinds of art to get inspiriation. You try to do old things in new ways.
Subliminal things.... for me, things like nicely formatted fractions, subtle use of type and color, proper use of hyphen, en- and em-dash, pleasing paragraph spacing, avoiding trapped white space, hand-tuned tracking, lots of little things really.
The difference is that he's not talking about a per-piece charge, but a (hopefully) 1-time lump sum, under the table.
Percentage discounts to major distributors are, well, standard. Mind you, we're not talking shelf space. Distributors are just that, a middleman between the publisher and the store or chain. What it means when a distributor aggressively carries you is that you are able to rapidly increase your volume, at the expense of losing some margin.
Personally, I like to set up direct relationships with stores and chains if at all possible, but they require a lot of individual attention, and if you don't have the staff to treat them well, you're screwed.
Yes, that's a good point. Good editing is key, because frankly, people just can not proof their own work. It's a special kind of blindness I think. Good editors will turn a good project into a great one, and make suggestions that the author never considered.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of editors out there who either way too aggressive ("correcting" non-errors), or too timid (afraid to change anything). It can take a while, but a good editor who really knows the subject is a godsend.
It's all about the benjamins. Publishers have access to the distribution channels > distribution channels charge money to be there > retailer charges money to be on their shelf. Period.
Distributors charge money to be there, eh? That's funny, although I've been in the business for 15 years, I've never experienced that. They want discounts to beef up their profit margins, but what else is new.
It takes a relatively modest investment to get something printed, and getting distribution is a lot easier than it used to be, thanks to Amazon and its ilk. if you actually have something useful and original that people actually want, you'll do just fine, money or not. Time is another matter. Marketing and promotion are extremely time consuming.
Pompous ass.
Mmmmmk. Whatever. Don't blame the rest of the world if you aren't willing to work hard enough to be successful.
It's not as strict a line as it used to be. There are quite a few smaller publishers out there that do quite well in focused market segments. Often they start with someone self-publishing and being very successful at it, from where they go onto publishing other authors.
Mind you, I don't think the fiction market works this way. Many other markets are much less entrenched.
I work for a small publisher that started this way, and I wouldn't call selling 2m+ copies (at $32.95) a "vanity" press.
Like lots of other industries, it's less monolithic than it was 30 years ago.
Just like home DVD templates, and all sorts of stuff like that, it'll be great for Billy and Sunshine to print the grandparents a copy of "Baby's First Shit".
See, the thing that software like this can't compensate for is people who can't recognize and don't understand what makes a project work. What makes it readable. What makes it attractive against all the other competition sitting on the shelf at Borders (or Amazon for that matter).
We're talking about near-subliminal things that create an impression of quality and expertise. Sure, time can be put in creating an amazing template that has some of these qualities, but then what do you have? A bunch of projects that look the same, and lack any soul of their own. Look at most of the template-built blogs out there. Boring.
I've done 4 books this year so far, and I average 8-9/year, so I feel comfortable evaluating this.
It's a numbers game. it seems like for every person working in audio or video production, there are 20 in print and web.
Plus, maybe it's changed from a couple of years ago, but when I was in video production, After Effects seemed to be pretty much the last word in 2D effects work. Photoshop was also very much in evidence, and Illustrator to a lesser degree.
If.1% of all your DNA is clobbered by the radiation from a full-body X-ray or a vacation to Hawai'i or from your CRT monitor while reading slashdot, wouldn't you rather it be the.1% that doesn't matter?
This is more or less akin to leasing every apartment in your building so that if you get.1% broken windows, the likelihood of the broken window being in the apartment you live in is reduced. It doesn't work that way. Most mutations seem to be caused by cosmic radiation and the like. If you have more DNA, you get more mutations. The chance of your apartment window being broken remains the same, no matter who is leasing the other apartments.
By the way, the reason for things like male nipples is pretty straightforward. We have them because our DNA HAS to have them in able for our female descendants to inherit the ability to breast-feed. Remember that male and female genes are almost identical. Only a very few genetic switches are flipped to make the physiological differences.
The argument you're making isn't a new one, but the main piece of evidence against it is pretty compelling. "Genetic drift" is a phenomena where over time, random mutations add up to change areas of DNA. The thing is, if the DNA in an area is used for something that is important to keep the organism alive (or gives some sort of reproductive advantage), it can't take too many changes or the organism will die (or not be able to reproduce, very much the same thing from an evolutionary standpoint). So you get some areas where there are lots of changes, and areas where there are essentially no changes.
Picture it this way, you have a fleet of 500 Geo Metros starting out in Kuwait City, with direction to drive north to Turkey through Iraq. The whole time, guys with AK47's are taking pot shots at them (random mutations). For the ones who get all the way to Turkey, you'll find that none of them have sustained major damage to their engines/coolant systems/drivetrain/tires (because if they had, they wouldn't have made it this far). This is one way of identifying what's important to the functioning of the organism. You can drive without windows or an air conditioner, but without a transmission you're screwed.
Beware the tendency of the uneducated to assume that people who devote their lives to a subject haven't considered the most basic of possibilities. It's simple hubris.
I agree that it's inappropriate, and that it's overreaching.
What I don't (personally) understand is why people put ANY personally identifiable information online AT ALL. Go by an alias, for god's sake, and use an anonymous email. If you would be embarrassed by your grandmother reading it, or your next employer reading it, don't attach your name to it. Jeeze!
It's human nature to pry. That's the way it is. Information is getting easier to find, not harder. Just because you SHOULD be able to do/say whatever you like online without any real-world repercussions, doesn't mean that you CAN. In an ideal world, information that doesn't directly have to do with your work would never be taken into employment decisions. Of course, in an ideal world, people wouldn't have to lock their cars or homes at night, because stealing is wrong.
It just seems incredibly naive to me to rage against this kind of thing when it's so easy not to make yourself a target. Honestly, I don't think the biases are even subliminal. most of the time. They're right out front. Doesn't everyone know this already?
I dated a girl once upon a time who ran background checks for the federal government. There's nothing new here. They've always thrown their weight around to get the information they want, and they almost always get it.
It's actually somewhat more complex a situation that you might think by watching TV.
For one, hurricane/tornado damage is self-selecting. i.e. well-built homes aren't damaged, and don't get shown on TV because who wants to see a bunch of wet houses? Same thing with tornados and trailer parks. That kind of construction takes damage incredibly easily, so it always seems like that's where tornados strike. Nope. It's just where the most damage is donw, so it's what gets on TV.
Secondly, those "toothpick" houses. The majority of that flimsy type of construction was done in the early part of the 20th century. Housing codes were later introduced, and improved upon to a degree which would never allow those types of houses to be built today (unless they are on trailers, but I digress). The local term is crackerbox houses. The thing is, since they were built they were grandfathered in, so they stay up until a big storm coms along and knocks them down.
Last of all, 2x4s, nails and sheetrock. That's not really a complete picture of how modern building techniques work. There's a lot more cross bracing, insulation and heavy reinforcement involved. Where I live, (California), the building codes are extremely strict to compensate for seismic activity. How strict? well, the house that was built across the street from me 5 years ago was hit by a 5-ton garbage truck last month moving at about 15mph, and the truck pretty much bounced off. The flower garden was ruined, and 2 windows were broken, but there was no structural harm.
Believe it or not, but cinder blocks suck for seismic regions. They pretty much just crumble after a few years of micro-shocks, and develop cracking that causes moisture problems. Not sure if they use them in the south, but you can guarantee that new construction has to meet minimum standards.
Why is the phrase "Panem et circenses" coming to mind?
Oh, of course. It's all a big plot by "the man." Gimmie a break. This generation is like any other. Those who really want to accomplish things, change things, will find a way. Those who don't... well, they won't. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Without the freedom to run, change, and redistribute software, "technology" sits locked in the vault of Company X.
Bullshit. The average teenager today has more "technology" sitting in their bedroom than their parents would have believed 20 years ago. Why is the phrase "FUD" coming to mind?
Amazing how well we got along before the "open source movement" even got started. Not that it's a bad idea, all in all. However, it certainly isn't the only (or even the best) way of doing things. The last 30 years proves that.
It was a hobbyist's machine, built for hobbyists by a hobbyist.
I really don't think that Woz would have ever been "just another hacker" if a comparable machine already existed. He would have looked to create something completely new that couldn't be found anywhere else.
Hey, if "openness" is the be-all-end-all, use today's hobbyist os: Linux, BSD or whatever. I don't understand the idea that everything "must" be open. If you don't like it for what it is, for god's sake use something else. There are no shortage of alternatives. Hell, write your own.
Sometimes it seems like today's "hackers" want everything handed to them on a silver platter. Damn kids.:-)
This is revisionist thinking, IMO. When the Apple ][ was introduced, it was very much in the same price range as its competition. The Macintosh was more, but then, it had a lot more invested in it all new hardware, software etc. (1/10th the price of the Lisa, at the time) Only when you got to the era of Jean-Louis Gasee et al were Apple's products seriously overpriced.
When Jobs returned, it was a conscious decision to position the line as a premium product. Even so, the pricing has almost always been near-equivalent, considering what you're buying.
The reason PCs got cheap had nothing to do with Gates. It was a side effect of the brutal race-to-the-bottom that happened in the late-'80s clone market.
Honestly, I don't think either one would have given a damn about this: they would have been too busy creating their own system from scratch. Neither one has ever been content to play in someone else's sandbox, and I can't picture them whining about someone else's system being closed off to them.
FWIW, I believe that both Steves were necessary for the creation of Apple as a world-changing phenomena. Steve W. was (and still is) the prototypical alpha geek, who views a technical challenge as a personal quest, and who doesn't "work" on a problem, he plays with it. Steve J. had the vision of a world where technology was put in the hands of regular people, and knew enough to make seemingly impossible demands from the people who worked with him, and for him. The kinds of demands that once they were met, resulted in a revolution. I've briefly met both men (at different times), and I have deep respect for what each brought to the table in that fateful partnership.
Vision without ability is neutered. Ability without vision is sterile. The one thing both Steves have in common is the refusal to accept the idea that something's impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they're just pissed at the world that they have to live there. Guess they feel the need to take it out on someone. I hate that whole region of the state (not that the rest of OR is such a prize).
Some parts of the coast aren't bad, but I'll take Washington any day.
m-
Obviously this does not apply to an Air Marshall who gets drunk and falls asleep on the plane but is the guy on the De Moines to Bend Oregon run going to find as many suspicious people as the guy on the NY to Boston run?
Sorry, but having stayed in both cities, I can categorically state there there is no valid earthly reason to be in either Des Moines, IA or Bend, OR. Obviously there's something truly fishy going on.
m-
Well, yeah. If you go out there 5 days a week and try to be "creative"... Eventually the well runs dry.
It doesn't mean you don't do your best to avoid that situation. You look at the competition, you try to steal only the best ideas. You look at other kinds of art to get inspiriation. You try to do old things in new ways.
Subliminal things.... for me, things like nicely formatted fractions, subtle use of type and color, proper use of hyphen, en- and em-dash, pleasing paragraph spacing, avoiding trapped white space, hand-tuned tracking, lots of little things really.
m-
The difference is that he's not talking about a per-piece charge, but a (hopefully) 1-time lump sum, under the table.
Percentage discounts to major distributors are, well, standard. Mind you, we're not talking shelf space. Distributors are just that, a middleman between the publisher and the store or chain. What it means when a distributor aggressively carries you is that you are able to rapidly increase your volume, at the expense of losing some margin.
Personally, I like to set up direct relationships with stores and chains if at all possible, but they require a lot of individual attention, and if you don't have the staff to treat them well, you're screwed.
m-
Yes, that's a good point. Good editing is key, because frankly, people just can not proof their own work. It's a special kind of blindness I think. Good editors will turn a good project into a great one, and make suggestions that the author never considered.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of editors out there who either way too aggressive ("correcting" non-errors), or too timid (afraid to change anything). It can take a while, but a good editor who really knows the subject is a godsend.
m-
It's all about the benjamins. Publishers have access to the distribution channels > distribution channels charge money to be there > retailer charges money to be on their shelf. Period.
Distributors charge money to be there, eh? That's funny, although I've been in the business for 15 years, I've never experienced that. They want discounts to beef up their profit margins, but what else is new.
It takes a relatively modest investment to get something printed, and getting distribution is a lot easier than it used to be, thanks to Amazon and its ilk. if you actually have something useful and original that people actually want, you'll do just fine, money or not. Time is another matter. Marketing and promotion are extremely time consuming.
Pompous ass.
Mmmmmk. Whatever. Don't blame the rest of the world if you aren't willing to work hard enough to be successful.
m-
It's not as strict a line as it used to be. There are quite a few smaller publishers out there that do quite well in focused market segments. Often they start with someone self-publishing and being very successful at it, from where they go onto publishing other authors.
Mind you, I don't think the fiction market works this way. Many other markets are much less entrenched.
I work for a small publisher that started this way, and I wouldn't call selling 2m+ copies (at $32.95) a "vanity" press.
Like lots of other industries, it's less monolithic than it was 30 years ago.
m-
...this doesn't worry me. In the slightest.
Just like home DVD templates, and all sorts of stuff like that, it'll be great for Billy and Sunshine to print the grandparents a copy of "Baby's First Shit".
See, the thing that software like this can't compensate for is people who can't recognize and don't understand what makes a project work. What makes it readable. What makes it attractive against all the other competition sitting on the shelf at Borders (or Amazon for that matter).
We're talking about near-subliminal things that create an impression of quality and expertise. Sure, time can be put in creating an amazing template that has some of these qualities, but then what do you have? A bunch of projects that look the same, and lack any soul of their own. Look at most of the template-built blogs out there. Boring.
I've done 4 books this year so far, and I average 8-9/year, so I feel comfortable evaluating this.
m-
It's a numbers game. it seems like for every person working in audio or video production, there are 20 in print and web.
Plus, maybe it's changed from a couple of years ago, but when I was in video production, After Effects seemed to be pretty much the last word in 2D effects work. Photoshop was also very much in evidence, and Illustrator to a lesser degree.
m
P.S. Ooooh, a condescending tone followed by an assumption that I'm uneducated.
Not an assumption, just an observation.
m-
If .1% of all your DNA is clobbered by the radiation from a full-body X-ray or a vacation to Hawai'i or from your CRT monitor while reading slashdot, wouldn't you rather it be the .1% that doesn't matter?
.1% broken windows, the likelihood of the broken window being in the apartment you live in is reduced. It doesn't work that way. Most mutations seem to be caused by cosmic radiation and the like. If you have more DNA, you get more mutations. The chance of your apartment window being broken remains the same, no matter who is leasing the other apartments.
This is more or less akin to leasing every apartment in your building so that if you get
By the way, the reason for things like male nipples is pretty straightforward. We have them because our DNA HAS to have them in able for our female descendants to inherit the ability to breast-feed. Remember that male and female genes are almost identical. Only a very few genetic switches are flipped to make the physiological differences.
m-
The argument you're making isn't a new one, but the main piece of evidence against it is pretty compelling. "Genetic drift" is a phenomena where over time, random mutations add up to change areas of DNA. The thing is, if the DNA in an area is used for something that is important to keep the organism alive (or gives some sort of reproductive advantage), it can't take too many changes or the organism will die (or not be able to reproduce, very much the same thing from an evolutionary standpoint). So you get some areas where there are lots of changes, and areas where there are essentially no changes.
Picture it this way, you have a fleet of 500 Geo Metros starting out in Kuwait City, with direction to drive north to Turkey through Iraq. The whole time, guys with AK47's are taking pot shots at them (random mutations). For the ones who get all the way to Turkey, you'll find that none of them have sustained major damage to their engines/coolant systems/drivetrain/tires (because if they had, they wouldn't have made it this far). This is one way of identifying what's important to the functioning of the organism. You can drive without windows or an air conditioner, but without a transmission you're screwed.
Beware the tendency of the uneducated to assume that people who devote their lives to a subject haven't considered the most basic of possibilities. It's simple hubris.
m-
I agree that it's inappropriate, and that it's overreaching.
What I don't (personally) understand is why people put ANY personally identifiable information online AT ALL. Go by an alias, for god's sake, and use an anonymous email. If you would be embarrassed by your grandmother reading it, or your next employer reading it, don't attach your name to it. Jeeze!
It's human nature to pry. That's the way it is. Information is getting easier to find, not harder. Just because you SHOULD be able to do/say whatever you like online without any real-world repercussions, doesn't mean that you CAN. In an ideal world, information that doesn't directly have to do with your work would never be taken into employment decisions. Of course, in an ideal world, people wouldn't have to lock their cars or homes at night, because stealing is wrong.
It just seems incredibly naive to me to rage against this kind of thing when it's so easy not to make yourself a target. Honestly, I don't think the biases are even subliminal. most of the time. They're right out front. Doesn't everyone know this already?
I dated a girl once upon a time who ran background checks for the federal government. There's nothing new here. They've always thrown their weight around to get the information they want, and they almost always get it.
m-
To drag out the old chestnut,
"If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby."
m-
It's actually somewhat more complex a situation that you might think by watching TV.
For one, hurricane/tornado damage is self-selecting. i.e. well-built homes aren't damaged, and don't get shown on TV because who wants to see a bunch of wet houses? Same thing with tornados and trailer parks. That kind of construction takes damage incredibly easily, so it always seems like that's where tornados strike. Nope. It's just where the most damage is donw, so it's what gets on TV.
Secondly, those "toothpick" houses. The majority of that flimsy type of construction was done in the early part of the 20th century. Housing codes were later introduced, and improved upon to a degree which would never allow those types of houses to be built today (unless they are on trailers, but I digress). The local term is crackerbox houses. The thing is, since they were built they were grandfathered in, so they stay up until a big storm coms along and knocks them down.
Last of all, 2x4s, nails and sheetrock. That's not really a complete picture of how modern building techniques work. There's a lot more cross bracing, insulation and heavy reinforcement involved. Where I live, (California), the building codes are extremely strict to compensate for seismic activity. How strict? well, the house that was built across the street from me 5 years ago was hit by a 5-ton garbage truck last month moving at about 15mph, and the truck pretty much bounced off. The flower garden was ruined, and 2 windows were broken, but there was no structural harm.
Believe it or not, but cinder blocks suck for seismic regions. They pretty much just crumble after a few years of micro-shocks, and develop cracking that causes moisture problems. Not sure if they use them in the south, but you can guarantee that new construction has to meet minimum standards.
m-
I wonder what the cubes represent?
Oh, wait. Qbox. Nevermind.
m-
Heh, i thought it sounded familiar. Haven't seen that one in 5 years or so.
an elephant steps onto a slice of bread, puts a slice of bread on his back, looks in the mirror and sais:
- gosh, that's one big sandwitch!
After hearing that joke, your signature suddenly seems less insightful.
Ironic.
M-
Why is the phrase "Panem et circenses" coming to mind?
Oh, of course. It's all a big plot by "the man." Gimmie a break. This generation is like any other. Those who really want to accomplish things, change things, will find a way. Those who don't... well, they won't. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
m-
But you could also use this as a definition of madness.
There's a fine line between madness and genius, As Dali said, "The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad."
m-
Without the freedom to run, change, and redistribute software, "technology" sits locked in the vault of Company X.
Bullshit. The average teenager today has more "technology" sitting in their bedroom than their parents would have believed 20 years ago. Why is the phrase "FUD" coming to mind?
Amazing how well we got along before the "open source movement" even got started. Not that it's a bad idea, all in all. However, it certainly isn't the only (or even the best) way of doing things. The last 30 years proves that.
m-
It was a hobbyist's machine, built for hobbyists by a hobbyist.
:-)
I really don't think that Woz would have ever been "just another hacker" if a comparable machine already existed. He would have looked to create something completely new that couldn't be found anywhere else.
Hey, if "openness" is the be-all-end-all, use today's hobbyist os: Linux, BSD or whatever. I don't understand the idea that everything "must" be open. If you don't like it for what it is, for god's sake use something else. There are no shortage of alternatives. Hell, write your own.
Sometimes it seems like today's "hackers" want everything handed to them on a silver platter. Damn kids.
m-
This is revisionist thinking, IMO. When the Apple ][ was introduced, it was very much in the same price range as its competition. The Macintosh was more, but then, it had a lot more invested in it all new hardware, software etc. (1/10th the price of the Lisa, at the time) Only when you got to the era of Jean-Louis Gasee et al were Apple's products seriously overpriced.
When Jobs returned, it was a conscious decision to position the line as a premium product. Even so, the pricing has almost always been near-equivalent, considering what you're buying.
The reason PCs got cheap had nothing to do with Gates. It was a side effect of the brutal race-to-the-bottom that happened in the late-'80s clone market.
m-
Honestly, I don't think either one would have given a damn about this: they would have been too busy creating their own system from scratch. Neither one has ever been content to play in someone else's sandbox, and I can't picture them whining about someone else's system being closed off to them.
FWIW, I believe that both Steves were necessary for the creation of Apple as a world-changing phenomena. Steve W. was (and still is) the prototypical alpha geek, who views a technical challenge as a personal quest, and who doesn't "work" on a problem, he plays with it. Steve J. had the vision of a world where technology was put in the hands of regular people, and knew enough to make seemingly impossible demands from the people who worked with him, and for him. The kinds of demands that once they were met, resulted in a revolution. I've briefly met both men (at different times), and I have deep respect for what each brought to the table in that fateful partnership.
Vision without ability is neutered. Ability without vision is sterile. The one thing both Steves have in common is the refusal to accept the idea that something's impossible.
m-
You just need to disclaim all liability in a 1.5pt unreadable font to be absolved of liability haha...
As luck would have it, that's taken care of by slashdot's new layout.
m-