Please, tell me how public transit can get me from my front door on a minor city street with no bus service to my parents' house outside of a small town about 30 miles away.
I live in the capital of Norway, where the public transportation is very good. A car is just a hassle as parking within the city is difficult. If you're going to the boondocks, however, you can't rely on it. But I've also lived in Ecuador, where most people don't have cars. There you can get to even the remotest little mountain village by bus, you might have to wait a couple of hours for a bus going where you want, but the coverage is amazing and *very* cheap. There's no question that it's more efficient WRT resources used.
I wish that nation-wide public transportation were that efficient in Norway, sadly you have to rely on 1,5 tons of steel for transporting usually just one person in most parts of the country.
Adobe Flash Player, specifically. I think that's the last holdout, but for a lot of people it's a deal-breaker.
I recently installed the 64bit version of Mint 12, it seems that flash runs fine (for somewhat low values of "fine", but it runs about as well as on my Win7 work computer). Are there any issues with the 64bit version that I'm not aware off? It's an honest question, I'm not trying to be flippant here:)
I notice that it's not uncommon for indie developers to maintain Windows, Linux and MacOS versions (see the Humble Bundles for examples). Several open source games do the same, for instance Pingus [google.com] will build for all three from the exact same source tree, albeit with some different library dependencies. Building it for Linux, at least, is completely painless. This leads me to believe that portability is not very difficult if you keep it in mind from the start. I realise that you will need more testing for different platforms, but only for a limited subset of the code that might break with different APIs for different platforms, as game logic, for instance, remains the same.
I'm not a coder, but I'd love to hear from someone with experience doing cross-platform development: how much harder is it to target additional platforms nowadays if you plan for it from the start of development?
Sounds like an awesome niche for a techy service provider. Remind me again why we need publishers anymore?
OK. TL;DR: Go ahead and self-publish, but you *need* language assistance and other services, they could come from freelancers. I've summarised it in in this post, replicated below:
No, keep doing this until we can buy directly from the authors all the time. There isn't much need for a middleman with digital goods.
I should mention that I work as a tech guy at an academic publishing company, but I write this post as a reader, albeit one with a better than average insight in the actual creation process of a book.
There is a large amount of vanity-published ebooks available for free or next to nothing (but not marketed, see below). Go on, drink your fill of awkward language and sentences, grammar/spelling errors, story arcs that don't quite work, descriptions and whole chapters which are superfluous, plot inconsistencies, etc etc. All presented in epubs very badly converted from Word with no cover or table of contents. Then, come back and tell us again that publishers are worthless with their editors, copy-editors, proofreaders, graphic artists and layout professionals who all work together as a team. Or, you could ask published authors if they believe that their publisher added any value to their books (or just read some prefaces).
As an author, yes, you can hire all those people yourself if you have enough capital. Seriously, it's an alternative you could look into, if you're good and have a fair bit of luck it could work out for you. No, you or your friends can't do it, no matter how well you did in $language class. If you don't already have an established name, you'll probably need marketing as well, which is nicely substantiated by the fact that you (parent post) obviously haven't seen very many actual results of self-publishing.
I've actually read quite a few of those, mostly science fiction novelas and short stories. The saddest thing is when what could have been a good story is buried beneath heaps of flaws, marring the experience and diminishing the author's initial chance of making it big.
I'm not saying that what you describe couldn't be achieved if we had large pools of good, reliable and readily available freelancers. This will probably happen one day, but we're not there yet, and until then we need publishers for QA. Publishers can and do use freelancers if necessary, but even for them it's quite hard to find good ones.
If an author can't/won't use a publisher, that's fine, but he NEEDS to get professional assistance if he's serious about his work.
On the subject of printing costs, I have forever heard publishers whine about printing (especially setting up a run) and shipping being a significant part of the cost of the book. Now they are claiming that's not the case at all, that those costs are minimal, that it costs nearly just as much to sell an 'e' version of the book as it does to sell a physical copy.
Well, they're right. As printing technology goes forward (digital printing, and better tools for setting offset plates come to mind), printing costs have gone significantly down the last couple of decades. They are no longer a very large part of the cost of a finished paper book. Generally I agree that ebooks shouldn't cost more than a paperback, but ultimately, what decides the price is what the customers will pay. Amazon probably sets the price according to what their algorithms tell them will give most profits, although they may have loss-leaders to push Kindles as well. Some people would rather read ebooks (I'm definitely one of them), and thus Amazon might be justified in setting ebook prices higher than paperback. I'm also a reader who would like cheaper ebooks, I'm just trying to analyse what's going on here:)
As for self-publishing: I've read quite a few stories, and those authors almost invariably ignore editing, copy-editing, formatting, and leave proofreading to Word's spelling check. Saying that they are worse is a gross understatement, most self-published works are downright horrible quality-wise, and a pain to read. As I say in this post I'm all for it with proper QA, but it's sad that so many good stories end up unreadable because the author used a friend who got an A in English in lieu of the whole publishing process. In the end self-publishing might have a very positive effect on ebook pricing and availability.
E-book layout and structure is trivial compared to print if you have even minimal computer skills
I work in a publishing company, and have done the layout for countless [literally, I have no idea how many:) ] paper books, and made a heap of epubs from those Indesign sources. There are some unique challenges with ebooks, making a file that ends in.epub is easy, making a quality ebook is surprisingly hard. In one instance, a book with French grammar examples which was crossreferenced from here to next Sunday, I ended up with about 3200 links. I scripted parts of it, but still...
I would say that print and digital is about the same degree of difficulty, which is "not very difficult" if you take your time and know what you're doing. Digital just requires some additional skills, and better knowledge of the structural tools you have.
I'm curious, which books have you written? I promise not to buy and distribute them:)
Now for the bashing:
And yes, it is a method of ensuring that some stuff doesn't get pirated.
(My emphasis). Smauler is correct, and I don't think you understand the word "ensuring". Copying will always be possible as long as you can read the content, if everything else fails you can just photograph every page and run the result through Finereader. Note that this is not currently necessary as DRM for every ebook format (yes, all of them) is now removable as far as I know. It should be extremely obvious that what you're doing is not even hindering the pirates very much.
I don't like where DRM has gone, although I think that it's reached its most draconian point with video games, but I don't think the intent is wrong.
The intent is not wrong, but the result is horribly misguided, and based on a very poor understanding of how technology works. You're basically flipping off your paying customers, while doing absolutely nothing to "ensure" anything else. What you're up against is pirates delivering a vastly superiour product for free. In reality, most people are honest, and positively want to pay for a book they'd like to read. I work in a publishing company where I amongst other things make and publish DRM-free epub editions, and I have definitely done a bit of thinking about this. I'm also a voracious reader who strips DRM from every book he buys for his personal archive:)
The harsh reality is that you can't really control *all* distribution of digital content anymore. So yeah, I'm essentially telling you to not even bother. This "non-solution" is far better than any DRM scheme you can annoy your remaining fans with. You also state that a pirated version is NEVER better, which is demonstrably and utterly *wrong*. If you do nothing but stripping DRM by a variety of means the content remains identical -- except for the little fact that you can now use it on virtually all readers ever made, and probably most that will be made. Saying that a DRM-free but otherwise identical file is not better is completely ridiculous. Note that as MS Reader is being shut down, those books will become useless in a relatively short time. Microsofts "Playsforsure" (except in their own fucking product, the Zune) is another delightfully ironic example. I would actually go so far as to say that enticing your customers to buy a crippled product and then shutting down the necessary servers is evil, or at best fraud.
Annoyingly, while my reader can read ePub and MobiPocket, it can't read both; you have to flash either ePub firmware or MobiPocket firmware, due to DRM licensing issues with Adobe.
Yes, you are not allowed to have other DRM technologies on an ADE-compatible device. Yet another argument for how incredibly damaging DRM is. I read a lot, and buy the books that are not legal to download, but I invariably strip DRM prior to storing them. This is legal where I live BTW (tested in court). It's also very handy, as it allows me to ignore device constraints and buy books from whichever source. I love my E-Ink ADE-based reader, but haven't even authorised it with ADE. Removing DRM is trivial with the brilliant OSS Calibre and third-party plugins, google "apprentice alf" for all your DRM-liberating needs:)
How is loser pays more fair? It still screws the little guy. If I have a legit case against a huge megacorporation and I decide to sue them and lose because they have the best lawyers money can buy, should I have to pay for their million dollar defense? Hell no. Whereas the big megacorporation will have zero problem paying out for my legal defense if I win. The corporations who have lots and lots of money always have the upper hand.
Here, at least, it's not "loser funds the <megacorp> crack legal dept", but the court will sometimes award a reasonable fee if the case is relatively clear-cut or is seen as "fishing" (don't know the English term). For instance it's common in insurance cases where the company is likely trying to get out of paying a legitimate claim, and it happens all the time. If the little guy loses he will still not be ruined by a ridiculous lawyer recompensation. It actually enables the little guy to go up against <megacorp> without risking his whole life situation.
How on earth is this informative? That is around 82-88C, about the same as Pentium100's homemade coffee, unless you arbitrarily place your temperature zero point for coffee at about 80C. I suspect someone didn't bother to take 10 seconds for basic research about F/C. Discussions about the merits of different units aside, Slashdotters should at least be able to put them through the Google calculator.
As to the merits of the lawsuit and the complaints: fresh homemade coffee can (and often should) have those temperatures if it's made with a quality insulated press pot / percolator, or is instant. I have a severe problem recognizing that 700 adults needed to be told that their hot beverage is... hot, and that it can burn them. What were they thinking, "since this coffee is probably not that hot I can just go ahead and pour it on myself?" Even coffee at 60C might give you lesser degree burns if you do this, one can reasonably expect that coffee-drinkers are (re sig: be?) aware of that. This lawsuit is still occasionally ridiculed in newspapers over here. It's too bad that the poor woman suffered burns, but it was still her own damn fault.
It was amazing "back then" and even today I still think it's highly awesome. All of that in 64k.
Yeah, that's a classic, complete with awful scene poetry and all:)
I have a couple of friends from Andromeda (Hyde and Archmage), they came in second to farbrausch's "debris" at Breakpoint 2007. Archmage simply stated that "losing only to farbrausch is still a victory".
That said, to me Gaia Machine surpasses the.product in technical quality and polish. Also check out some procedural 4k images, the best ones really boggle the mind.
That was exactly my question. If it's not 64K running on bare metal, it's cheating.
Running on bare metal is hardly feasible these days, as hardware is so varied. You need the driver APIs to get anything done. Or you can watch Amiga-demos from the same compo (some incredibly good stuff there as well), but remember that they're also "cheating", employing Denise, Paula and Agnus as they are. For shame, they probably even use the blitter instead of doing it in CPU!
And - did you actually *see* "Gaia Machina"? As there is no way they can pack all that geometry pre-made in 64KB, far less textures, they have to generate it procedurally. The result is, if not photo-realistic, at least very good-looking strawberries, apples, leaves, plants, stones and so on. Same goes for animation and geometry morphing. Yes, they get a lot of 3d functionality from DirectX, but as the starting line is moved, so are the goal posts.
If this is not impressive to you, you're incredibly jaded, or I could give you the benefit of the doubt and say that you probably didn't really consider it. Keep in mind that this is likely the *best 64KB demo in the world* right now. Be sure to let us know when you're the best in the world at something.
Oh! I thought you were talking about Obama/Sarkozy's assisting Al-queda take over Libya.
Citation or it didn't happen.
I was certain he was referring to Reagan/Bush selling missiles to Iran, funding the Contras, paying terrorists to hold Marines hostage, setting up the original Al Qaeda training camps, and so on, and so forth.
What's that? You were just looking for an opportunity to blatantly bash 'liberals,' as if neocons aren't guilty of the same (or worse) crimes?
Well, color me "surprised."
And these people control the most powerful military force on Earth. $deity help us all. I was going to write "God", but He obviously did a poor job advising the U.S. in the past. Do your worst, I have karma to burn.
Turns out a sensor was going bad, and had to get replaced, it would only work after it had sat idle for a while (with the power off to the furnace) Made me feel much better, that there actually was a problem...
I know that the story "Chalk mark: $1, knowing where to put it: $999 (or whatever)" is an urban legend, but never disregard experience. Two friends of mine are an electrician and a plumber, and you wouldn't believe the messes they've had to fix after hobby handymen who tried fixing things themselves (I don't really understand those mistakes, but to electricians and plumbers they are apparently hilarious). They are regularly abused for correcting those people's mistakes, to boot. Your furnace guy has experience with troubleshooting heating sensors or whatever could go wrong with furnaces, you don't. Calling him was a good decision:)
Another friend of mine who is a mechanic told me that "If you have a problem which makes your car not go, you can try to fix it yourself. If you have a problem with the things that should make your car stop (i.e. brakes), call me. *Don't* try to do it yourself". I'll heed his advice if I ever get a car.
Re:If your customers aren't always right...
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IT Calls of Shame
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· Score: 2
This is tangential to your situation, obviously, but I cringe when I read about "IT support" workers telling stories about how clueless their users are, especially in complex corporate settings. I work with IT projects in a setting where most of my co-workers are academics, graphic artists, marketing people and the like. As part of a larger organisation we have a central helpdesk, but as I am also someone who "knows about computers" my colleagues use me as zeroth-level support line. Most of them have no clue about computers, and that's fine, because *that's not their job*. They are employed because they're brilliant editors, language experts or whatever, and their computer is nothing but a tool, albeit an essential one which must just work. I can often help them out in less than a minute, and I can always refer them to helpdesk if I don't have the time, but no-one expects them to be able to handle whichever trifling issue which might occur themselves.
So, to the sniggering nerds who laugh about their co-workers not being able to tell the difference between a "hard disk", a cpu and a computer case: try to rewrite an abstract of an academic article for publication, try to do accounting which requires intimate knowledge of *all* the relevant laws, interview applicants for social services, or perform whatever tasks your "clueless" co-workers are actually *paid* to do. Come back to me when you can do all of their tasks better than they can do yours. Of course help desk anecdotes can be amusing to people who know better, but the manner of superiority with which they are often told leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.
Of course I know the source of this quote, but it reminded me of something: my high school (equivalent) maths teacher, who also had a BS in EE, retold this as a joke he'd heard from his lecturer at the university. According to him this is a problem you could actually run into if you needed to handle output from primitive logic circuits in the early 70's. Some components could output higher voltages than intended which led to such inconsistencies, which you then had to account for in your design. Obviously this was not about the actual numbers 2 and 5, but more of a truism when working with semi-analog circuits. My information is obviously very vague and my terminology is probably wrong (I'm no electronics engineer), and I know this is also a common joke about systems that work with floats internally but only output integers, but I thought maybe someone in the Slashdot community might know if what my teacher joked about could have a basis in the reality of electronics engineering at the time?
Good grief, that's not what the quote means. Richelieu had a team of expert forgers - the six lines were a handwriting sample, that would be used to produce a false confession (generally of dealings with the devil).
That's interesting, I've always wondered about that quote. Do you have a reference? Google yields a lot of noise for me.
On topic: I'm not sure about the legal aspects, but modifying a communication and reusing its content for your own financial gain is in any case a scummy practice, especially if the receiver is not explicitly made aware of this. I would also think that all the HTML in a web page is copyrighted, not only editorial content as presented by the page author, and that you are not allowed to alter and reuse it for financial gain even if you're implicitly allowed to forward it. As TFA states, they'd probably land in hot water if they had subtly redacted complimentary newspapers. I don't really see the difference.
Also, from your earlier post:
They own the hotspot, they can provide whatever they want. They can replace all the images with cats if they really feel the internet would be better if all images were cat pics.
No, not at all. There are lots of content and redactions you could provide that aren't legal anywhere. Where I live you'd also be slapped pretty hard with false advertising if you promoted your hotel as having free Wi-fi without mentioning that all images were replaced with cute kittens. So, where to draw the line? To me it seems reasonable to draw it at "no content altering whatsoever".
As I said, new words are fine. Breaking the basic grammatical rules of a language to accommodate common misspellings is not.
I'm not really taking sides here, but it seems that you and the other posters are talking about different things (normative/prescriptive vs. descriptive linguistics). I have had this discussion a number of times with a buddy who has a PhD in the field. I don't necessarily agree with him, especially when it comes to a few particularly egregious examples, hence the discussions:)
He (and descriptive linguistics in general) states that language/grammar consist of the actual usage of the language by native speakers, not what normative sources say is legitimate. Basically, everything goes as long as it's in use by a significant amount of speakers (speech is more important to linguists than prose, and "internet speech" and other types of informal writing is an extension of that).
My counter-argument is that you need normative rules in order to have efficient communication, and particularly bad errors can actually impede that. He agrees in principle, but does not agree that those rules need to be established only by authorities. Description of actual usage is also acceptable, and this is generally how those rules originated in the first place. New words pop up continuously, and changes in spelling occur all the time. Sometimes they fulfil the function of making speech and writing easier, in other cases they stem from a misunderstanding of the "proper" expression. They might reach mainstream acceptance in the end, or not. My buddy would probably quip that "irregardless" is a perfectly cromulent word (he would have used a Norwegian equivalent, but never mind).
What there is no doubt about is that language is evolving, even "accepted" standards. Read some prose from the 19th century to see this clear as day. The evolution happens a lot faster now, as there is a lot more widespread communication happening than just a few decades or years ago. To me "irregardless" and its ilk is bollocks as well, and you and I may not like some of those neologisms, but they'll keep coming. It will only get worse as we get (even) older:)
I realise that this post might be (in)flammable to some, but I probably won't involve myself in further arguments.
Doesn't every product, everywhere, pass this test?
So, this is worthy of the front page why?
No, they don't. A buddy worked for the Norwegian testing agency NEMKO (he mostly tested phones and monitors), and prototypes frequently fail this kind of testing. These products are from the largest electronics manufacturers in the world. Manufacturers would frequently fly in technicians who were able to modify the prototypes onsite with a pretty basic toolkit. Some are rejected anyway, others pass after modifications, but even some of the best engineers in the world apparently can't get it right on the first try (or they realise that they took too many shortcuts to save on cost).
A good reason not to eat at places with abusive management. I have walked out of places because f the way they treat their employees.
That's why management at those places are instructed never to chew out employees in front of customers. I guess the instructions won't stick with the more abusive ones, if you care enough you can probably notify someone higher up the chain about the abuse.
When I have no flash (or do this remotely), I watch or listen to youtube videos streamed using
mplayer `youtube-dl -g youtubeurl`
This is neat, thanks a lot! I had a look at youtube-dl a couple of years back, but it didn't cut it as a downloader. Guess I didn't consider the -g option. I just dropped a script called 'yt' in my path:
#!/bin/bash mplayer `youtube-dl -g $1`
yt <paste url> now plays videos perfectly, it even seeks transparently without caching the whole thing.
There was also apparently a fuel dump. So, either the student pilot hit a wrong button, or when they say "catastrophic mechanical failure", catastrophic is probably not an exaggeration.
Just a guess, but maybe they dumped fuel in order to incinerate as little as possible of the crash site? It might even make sense for the flight computer to do this automatically if it predicts an imminent crash.
Plus, concert goers are pretty likely to buy the album. If they're actually good, chances are there are plenty of people who will go and support them by buying music on the various digital outlets too. The Pirate Bay could be doing a lot of good for these artists.
Here is what you do if you discover a new artist and they are going to play in your area: *don't* buy the CD from the store. The band literally makes only pennies from a CD sold in stores, if that. Many have draconian contracts in which they're obliged to "reimburse" the record company for heaps of semi-fictitious costs related to services rendered, leaving them with *nothing* until they've sold a huge amount of albums.
Instead, listen to them through Spotify, download them or whatever, buy a ticket for the gig, and get their albums from the merch boot. You're often allowed to tip them as well if you feel generous. From this the band can get as much as 2/3 or more of the asking price, that's the proper way to support the artist, and you'll have a great experience to boot. Oh, and grab a shirt as well while you're there:)
Slashdot Mirror
Please, tell me how public transit can get me from my front door on a minor city street with no bus service to my parents' house outside of a small town about 30 miles away.
I live in the capital of Norway, where the public transportation is very good. A car is just a hassle as parking within the city is difficult. If you're going to the boondocks, however, you can't rely on it. But I've also lived in Ecuador, where most people don't have cars. There you can get to even the remotest little mountain village by bus, you might have to wait a couple of hours for a bus going where you want, but the coverage is amazing and *very* cheap. There's no question that it's more efficient WRT resources used.
I wish that nation-wide public transportation were that efficient in Norway, sadly you have to rely on 1,5 tons of steel for transporting usually just one person in most parts of the country.
Adobe Flash Player, specifically. I think that's the last holdout, but for a lot of people it's a deal-breaker.
I recently installed the 64bit version of Mint 12, it seems that flash runs fine (for somewhat low values of "fine", but it runs about as well as on my Win7 work computer). Are there any issues with the 64bit version that I'm not aware off? It's an honest question, I'm not trying to be flippant here :)
Thanks!
I notice that it's not uncommon for indie developers to maintain Windows, Linux and MacOS versions (see the Humble Bundles for examples). Several open source games do the same, for instance Pingus [google.com] will build for all three from the exact same source tree, albeit with some different library dependencies. Building it for Linux, at least, is completely painless. This leads me to believe that portability is not very difficult if you keep it in mind from the start. I realise that you will need more testing for different platforms, but only for a limited subset of the code that might break with different APIs for different platforms, as game logic, for instance, remains the same.
I'm not a coder, but I'd love to hear from someone with experience doing cross-platform development: how much harder is it to target additional platforms nowadays if you plan for it from the start of development?
Sounds like an awesome niche for a techy service provider. Remind me again why we need publishers anymore?
OK. TL;DR: Go ahead and self-publish, but you *need* language assistance and other services, they could come from freelancers. I've summarised it in in this post, replicated below:
No, keep doing this until we can buy directly from the authors all the time. There isn't much need for a middleman with digital goods.
I should mention that I work as a tech guy at an academic publishing company, but I write this post as a reader, albeit one with a better than average insight in the actual creation process of a book.
There is a large amount of vanity-published ebooks available for free or next to nothing (but not marketed, see below). Go on, drink your fill of awkward language and sentences, grammar/spelling errors, story arcs that don't quite work, descriptions and whole chapters which are superfluous, plot inconsistencies, etc etc. All presented in epubs very badly converted from Word with no cover or table of contents. Then, come back and tell us again that publishers are worthless with their editors, copy-editors, proofreaders, graphic artists and layout professionals who all work together as a team. Or, you could ask published authors if they believe that their publisher added any value to their books (or just read some prefaces).
As an author, yes, you can hire all those people yourself if you have enough capital. Seriously, it's an alternative you could look into, if you're good and have a fair bit of luck it could work out for you. No, you or your friends can't do it, no matter how well you did in $language class. If you don't already have an established name, you'll probably need marketing as well, which is nicely substantiated by the fact that you (parent post) obviously haven't seen very many actual results of self-publishing.
I've actually read quite a few of those, mostly science fiction novelas and short stories. The saddest thing is when what could have been a good story is buried beneath heaps of flaws, marring the experience and diminishing the author's initial chance of making it big.
I'm not saying that what you describe couldn't be achieved if we had large pools of good, reliable and readily available freelancers. This will probably happen one day, but we're not there yet, and until then we need publishers for QA. Publishers can and do use freelancers if necessary, but even for them it's quite hard to find good ones.
If an author can't/won't use a publisher, that's fine, but he NEEDS to get professional assistance if he's serious about his work.
On the subject of printing costs, I have forever heard publishers whine about printing (especially setting up a run) and shipping being a significant part of the cost of the book. Now they are claiming that's not the case at all, that those costs are minimal, that it costs nearly just as much to sell an 'e' version of the book as it does to sell a physical copy.
Well, they're right. As printing technology goes forward (digital printing, and better tools for setting offset plates come to mind), printing costs have gone significantly down the last couple of decades. They are no longer a very large part of the cost of a finished paper book. Generally I agree that ebooks shouldn't cost more than a paperback, but ultimately, what decides the price is what the customers will pay. Amazon probably sets the price according to what their algorithms tell them will give most profits, although they may have loss-leaders to push Kindles as well. Some people would rather read ebooks (I'm definitely one of them), and thus Amazon might be justified in setting ebook prices higher than paperback. I'm also a reader who would like cheaper ebooks, I'm just trying to analyse what's going on here :)
As for self-publishing: I've read quite a few stories, and those authors almost invariably ignore editing, copy-editing, formatting, and leave proofreading to Word's spelling check. Saying that they are worse is a gross understatement, most self-published works are downright horrible quality-wise, and a pain to read. As I say in this post I'm all for it with proper QA, but it's sad that so many good stories end up unreadable because the author used a friend who got an A in English in lieu of the whole publishing process. In the end self-publishing might have a very positive effect on ebook pricing and availability.
E-book layout and structure is trivial compared to print if you have even minimal computer skills
I work in a publishing company, and have done the layout for countless [literally, I have no idea how many :) ] paper books, and made a heap of epubs from those Indesign sources. There are some unique challenges with ebooks, making a file that ends in .epub is easy, making a quality ebook is surprisingly hard. In one instance, a book with French grammar examples which was crossreferenced from here to next Sunday, I ended up with about 3200 links. I scripted parts of it, but still...
I would say that print and digital is about the same degree of difficulty, which is "not very difficult" if you take your time and know what you're doing. Digital just requires some additional skills, and better knowledge of the structural tools you have.
I'm curious, which books have you written? I promise not to buy and distribute them :)
Now for the bashing:
And yes, it is a method of ensuring that some stuff doesn't get pirated.
(My emphasis). Smauler is correct, and I don't think you understand the word "ensuring". Copying will always be possible as long as you can read the content, if everything else fails you can just photograph every page and run the result through Finereader. Note that this is not currently necessary as DRM for every ebook format (yes, all of them) is now removable as far as I know. It should be extremely obvious that what you're doing is not even hindering the pirates very much.
I don't like where DRM has gone, although I think that it's reached its most draconian point with video games, but I don't think the intent is wrong.
The intent is not wrong, but the result is horribly misguided, and based on a very poor understanding of how technology works. You're basically flipping off your paying customers, while doing absolutely nothing to "ensure" anything else. What you're up against is pirates delivering a vastly superiour product for free. In reality, most people are honest, and positively want to pay for a book they'd like to read. I work in a publishing company where I amongst other things make and publish DRM-free epub editions, and I have definitely done a bit of thinking about this. I'm also a voracious reader who strips DRM from every book he buys for his personal archive :)
The harsh reality is that you can't really control *all* distribution of digital content anymore. So yeah, I'm essentially telling you to not even bother. This "non-solution" is far better than any DRM scheme you can annoy your remaining fans with. You also state that a pirated version is NEVER better, which is demonstrably and utterly *wrong*. If you do nothing but stripping DRM by a variety of means the content remains identical -- except for the little fact that you can now use it on virtually all readers ever made, and probably most that will be made. Saying that a DRM-free but otherwise identical file is not better is completely ridiculous. Note that as MS Reader is being shut down, those books will become useless in a relatively short time. Microsofts "Playsforsure" (except in their own fucking product, the Zune) is another delightfully ironic example. I would actually go so far as to say that enticing your customers to buy a crippled product and then shutting down the necessary servers is evil, or at best fraud.
Annoyingly, while my reader can read ePub and MobiPocket, it can't read both; you have to flash either ePub firmware or MobiPocket firmware, due to DRM licensing issues with Adobe.
Yes, you are not allowed to have other DRM technologies on an ADE-compatible device. Yet another argument for how incredibly damaging DRM is. I read a lot, and buy the books that are not legal to download, but I invariably strip DRM prior to storing them. This is legal where I live BTW (tested in court). It's also very handy, as it allows me to ignore device constraints and buy books from whichever source. I love my E-Ink ADE-based reader, but haven't even authorised it with ADE. Removing DRM is trivial with the brilliant OSS Calibre and third-party plugins, google "apprentice alf" for all your DRM-liberating needs :)
I hope you didn't sign an NDA about that idea, or else you're done for now that you've disclosed it :)
How is loser pays more fair? It still screws the little guy. If I have a legit case against a huge megacorporation and I decide to sue them and lose because they have the best lawyers money can buy, should I have to pay for their million dollar defense? Hell no. Whereas the big megacorporation will have zero problem paying out for my legal defense if I win. The corporations who have lots and lots of money always have the upper hand.
Here, at least, it's not "loser funds the <megacorp> crack legal dept", but the court will sometimes award a reasonable fee if the case is relatively clear-cut or is seen as "fishing" (don't know the English term). For instance it's common in insurance cases where the company is likely trying to get out of paying a legitimate claim, and it happens all the time. If the little guy loses he will still not be ruined by a ridiculous lawyer recompensation. It actually enables the little guy to go up against <megacorp> without risking his whole life situation.
You know, if you could bother to take 10 seconds to do some basic research, you would have found out that they did make their coffee at nearly double the temperature you make your coffee:
(180 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit)
How on earth is this informative? That is around 82-88C, about the same as Pentium100's homemade coffee, unless you arbitrarily place your temperature zero point for coffee at about 80C. I suspect someone didn't bother to take 10 seconds for basic research about F/C. Discussions about the merits of different units aside, Slashdotters should at least be able to put them through the Google calculator.
As to the merits of the lawsuit and the complaints: fresh homemade coffee can (and often should) have those temperatures if it's made with a quality insulated press pot / percolator, or is instant. I have a severe problem recognizing that 700 adults needed to be told that their hot beverage is... hot, and that it can burn them. What were they thinking, "since this coffee is probably not that hot I can just go ahead and pour it on myself?" Even coffee at 60C might give you lesser degree burns if you do this, one can reasonably expect that coffee-drinkers are (re sig: be?) aware of that. This lawsuit is still occasionally ridiculed in newspapers over here. It's too bad that the poor woman suffered burns, but it was still her own damn fault.
My personal favourite is still farbrausch's "fr-08 - the product": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dcrV_7JpXQ
It was amazing "back then" and even today I still think it's highly awesome. All of that in 64k.
Yeah, that's a classic, complete with awful scene poetry and all :)
I have a couple of friends from Andromeda (Hyde and Archmage), they came in second to farbrausch's "debris" at Breakpoint 2007. Archmage simply stated that "losing only to farbrausch is still a victory".
That said, to me Gaia Machine surpasses the .product in technical quality and polish. Also check out some procedural 4k images, the best ones really boggle the mind.
That was exactly my question. If it's not 64K running on bare metal, it's cheating.
Running on bare metal is hardly feasible these days, as hardware is so varied. You need the driver APIs to get anything done. Or you can watch Amiga-demos from the same compo (some incredibly good stuff there as well), but remember that they're also "cheating", employing Denise, Paula and Agnus as they are. For shame, they probably even use the blitter instead of doing it in CPU!
And - did you actually *see* "Gaia Machina"? As there is no way they can pack all that geometry pre-made in 64KB, far less textures, they have to generate it procedurally. The result is, if not photo-realistic, at least very good-looking strawberries, apples, leaves, plants, stones and so on. Same goes for animation and geometry morphing. Yes, they get a lot of 3d functionality from DirectX, but as the starting line is moved, so are the goal posts.
If this is not impressive to you, you're incredibly jaded, or I could give you the benefit of the doubt and say that you probably didn't really consider it. Keep in mind that this is likely the *best 64KB demo in the world* right now. Be sure to let us know when you're the best in the world at something.
Oh! I thought you were talking about Obama/Sarkozy's assisting Al-queda take over Libya.
Citation or it didn't happen.
I was certain he was referring to Reagan/Bush selling missiles to Iran, funding the Contras, paying terrorists to hold Marines hostage, setting up the original Al Qaeda training camps, and so on, and so forth.
What's that? You were just looking for an opportunity to blatantly bash 'liberals,' as if neocons aren't guilty of the same (or worse) crimes?
Well, color me "surprised."
And these people control the most powerful military force on Earth. $deity help us all. I was going to write "God", but He obviously did a poor job advising the U.S. in the past. Do your worst, I have karma to burn.
Turns out a sensor was going bad, and had to get replaced, it would only work after it had sat idle for a while (with the power off to the furnace) Made me feel much better, that there actually was a problem...
I know that the story "Chalk mark: $1, knowing where to put it: $999 (or whatever)" is an urban legend, but never disregard experience. Two friends of mine are an electrician and a plumber, and you wouldn't believe the messes they've had to fix after hobby handymen who tried fixing things themselves (I don't really understand those mistakes, but to electricians and plumbers they are apparently hilarious). They are regularly abused for correcting those people's mistakes, to boot. Your furnace guy has experience with troubleshooting heating sensors or whatever could go wrong with furnaces, you don't. Calling him was a good decision :)
Another friend of mine who is a mechanic told me that "If you have a problem which makes your car not go, you can try to fix it yourself. If you have a problem with the things that should make your car stop (i.e. brakes), call me. *Don't* try to do it yourself". I'll heed his advice if I ever get a car.
This is tangential to your situation, obviously, but I cringe when I read about "IT support" workers telling stories about how clueless their users are, especially in complex corporate settings. I work with IT projects in a setting where most of my co-workers are academics, graphic artists, marketing people and the like. As part of a larger organisation we have a central helpdesk, but as I am also someone who "knows about computers" my colleagues use me as zeroth-level support line. Most of them have no clue about computers, and that's fine, because *that's not their job*. They are employed because they're brilliant editors, language experts or whatever, and their computer is nothing but a tool, albeit an essential one which must just work. I can often help them out in less than a minute, and I can always refer them to helpdesk if I don't have the time, but no-one expects them to be able to handle whichever trifling issue which might occur themselves.
So, to the sniggering nerds who laugh about their co-workers not being able to tell the difference between a "hard disk", a cpu and a computer case: try to rewrite an abstract of an academic article for publication, try to do accounting which requires intimate knowledge of *all* the relevant laws, interview applicants for social services, or perform whatever tasks your "clueless" co-workers are actually *paid* to do. Come back to me when you can do all of their tasks better than they can do yours. Of course help desk anecdotes can be amusing to people who know better, but the manner of superiority with which they are often told leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.
Because in Oceania sometimes 2 + 2 == 5.
Of course I know the source of this quote, but it reminded me of something: my high school (equivalent) maths teacher, who also had a BS in EE, retold this as a joke he'd heard from his lecturer at the university. According to him this is a problem you could actually run into if you needed to handle output from primitive logic circuits in the early 70's. Some components could output higher voltages than intended which led to such inconsistencies, which you then had to account for in your design. Obviously this was not about the actual numbers 2 and 5, but more of a truism when working with semi-analog circuits. My information is obviously very vague and my terminology is probably wrong (I'm no electronics engineer), and I know this is also a common joke about systems that work with floats internally but only output integers, but I thought maybe someone in the Slashdot community might know if what my teacher joked about could have a basis in the reality of electronics engineering at the time?
Good grief, that's not what the quote means. Richelieu had a team of expert forgers - the six lines were a handwriting sample, that would be used to produce a false confession (generally of dealings with the devil).
That's interesting, I've always wondered about that quote. Do you have a reference? Google yields a lot of noise for me.
ALSO I AM DUCK.
I see what you did there :)
On topic: I'm not sure about the legal aspects, but modifying a communication and reusing its content for your own financial gain is in any case a scummy practice, especially if the receiver is not explicitly made aware of this. I would also think that all the HTML in a web page is copyrighted, not only editorial content as presented by the page author, and that you are not allowed to alter and reuse it for financial gain even if you're implicitly allowed to forward it. As TFA states, they'd probably land in hot water if they had subtly redacted complimentary newspapers. I don't really see the difference.
Also, from your earlier post:
They own the hotspot, they can provide whatever they want. They can replace all the images with cats if they really feel the internet would be better if all images were cat pics.
No, not at all. There are lots of content and redactions you could provide that aren't legal anywhere. Where I live you'd also be slapped pretty hard with false advertising if you promoted your hotel as having free Wi-fi without mentioning that all images were replaced with cute kittens. So, where to draw the line? To me it seems reasonable to draw it at "no content altering whatsoever".
As I said, new words are fine. Breaking the basic grammatical rules of a language to accommodate common misspellings is not.
I'm not really taking sides here, but it seems that you and the other posters are talking about different things (normative/prescriptive vs. descriptive linguistics). I have had this discussion a number of times with a buddy who has a PhD in the field. I don't necessarily agree with him, especially when it comes to a few particularly egregious examples, hence the discussions :)
He (and descriptive linguistics in general) states that language/grammar consist of the actual usage of the language by native speakers, not what normative sources say is legitimate. Basically, everything goes as long as it's in use by a significant amount of speakers (speech is more important to linguists than prose, and "internet speech" and other types of informal writing is an extension of that).
My counter-argument is that you need normative rules in order to have efficient communication, and particularly bad errors can actually impede that. He agrees in principle, but does not agree that those rules need to be established only by authorities. Description of actual usage is also acceptable, and this is generally how those rules originated in the first place. New words pop up continuously, and changes in spelling occur all the time. Sometimes they fulfil the function of making speech and writing easier, in other cases they stem from a misunderstanding of the "proper" expression. They might reach mainstream acceptance in the end, or not. My buddy would probably quip that "irregardless" is a perfectly cromulent word (he would have used a Norwegian equivalent, but never mind).
What there is no doubt about is that language is evolving, even "accepted" standards. Read some prose from the 19th century to see this clear as day. The evolution happens a lot faster now, as there is a lot more widespread communication happening than just a few decades or years ago. To me "irregardless" and its ilk is bollocks as well, and you and I may not like some of those neologisms, but they'll keep coming. It will only get worse as we get (even) older :)
I realise that this post might be (in)flammable to some, but I probably won't involve myself in further arguments.
Doesn't every product, everywhere, pass this test?
So, this is worthy of the front page why?
No, they don't. A buddy worked for the Norwegian testing agency NEMKO (he mostly tested phones and monitors), and prototypes frequently fail this kind of testing. These products are from the largest electronics manufacturers in the world. Manufacturers would frequently fly in technicians who were able to modify the prototypes onsite with a pretty basic toolkit. Some are rejected anyway, others pass after modifications, but even some of the best engineers in the world apparently can't get it right on the first try (or they realise that they took too many shortcuts to save on cost).
A good reason not to eat at places with abusive management. I have walked out of places because f the way they treat their employees.
That's why management at those places are instructed never to chew out employees in front of customers. I guess the instructions won't stick with the more abusive ones, if you care enough you can probably notify someone higher up the chain about the abuse.
When I have no flash (or do this remotely), I watch or listen to youtube videos streamed using
mplayer `youtube-dl -g youtubeurl`
This is neat, thanks a lot! I had a look at youtube-dl a couple of years back, but it didn't cut it as a downloader. Guess I didn't consider the -g option. I just dropped a script called 'yt' in my path:
#!/bin/bash
mplayer `youtube-dl -g $1`
yt <paste url> now plays videos perfectly, it even seeks transparently without caching the whole thing.
There was also apparently a fuel dump. So, either the student pilot hit a wrong button, or when they say "catastrophic mechanical failure", catastrophic is probably not an exaggeration.
Just a guess, but maybe they dumped fuel in order to incinerate as little as possible of the crash site? It might even make sense for the flight computer to do this automatically if it predicts an imminent crash.
Plus, concert goers are pretty likely to buy the album. If they're actually good, chances are there are plenty of people who will go and support them by buying music on the various digital outlets too. The Pirate Bay could be doing a lot of good for these artists.
Here is what you do if you discover a new artist and they are going to play in your area: *don't* buy the CD from the store. The band literally makes only pennies from a CD sold in stores, if that. Many have draconian contracts in which they're obliged to "reimburse" the record company for heaps of semi-fictitious costs related to services rendered, leaving them with *nothing* until they've sold a huge amount of albums.
Instead, listen to them through Spotify, download them or whatever, buy a ticket for the gig, and get their albums from the merch boot. You're often allowed to tip them as well if you feel generous. From this the band can get as much as 2/3 or more of the asking price, that's the proper way to support the artist, and you'll have a great experience to boot. Oh, and grab a shirt as well while you're there :)