You might have noticed that they're going to be selling a bundle of three formats for one price (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket). With the non-PDF formats you can reflow the text and adjust the font size to fit the screen.
So what if Amazon publishes your ebook? They're a retailer, not a wholesaler, so you still have retail markup over wholesale costs.
Secondly, publishers won't sell at wholesale, as then they're undercutting their retailers. You'll notice you can't buy a physical book direct from the publisher at wholesale for that very reason.
Third, and in the same vein, price the ebook at too much of a discount, and you undercut sales of the physical book.
Finally, the value of a book lies with what is within it's pages, and not in its container or format. If you disagree, then I'd be happy to sell you all of the discounted hardbound blank books you'd care to buy.
If I'm looking for a book that's listed somewhere then I tend to want it now. That's why I paid for Amazon Prime so I get free second-day shipping (easily paid for itself, BTW). I don't want to browse some list of some books that some author may write and deliver a year from now.
And as been pointed out every time this comes up, ransomware really only works for known authors and known subjects. And it definitely doesn't work well for certain movies, as you can't tell people enough about the movie without spilling the beans. Think of the Matrix. How would you describe it to the point where someone would commit to spending $10 or more UP FRONT, and without spoiling the surprise?
And if you think about it, ransomware probably won't fly for movies simply because of the costs involved. Serenity, IIRC, cost on the order of $45 million dollars to make. How many fans would you have to get together to pony up that kind of dough?
Finally, it has been explored. Stephen King did a ransomware chapter- by-chapter ebook a while back and it worked fairly well. But then again, Stephen King is Stephen King.
"A party could easily come to the party that appeals to the left and the right."
No, they can't. As pretty much the last half-century has shown.
And just to cancel out your vote, I too would like a system where I could rank candidates and put the "worst" candidate last. Do away with the Electoral College too, as things have progressed just a bit past sending representatives to Washington by horse.
"... anything not specifically built for iPhone is just awkward to use."
Because the design language and interface UI requirements are different when you're making an application driven by touch as opposed to a "normal" web page with miniscule widgets and links designed to be manipulated by a mouse/cursor combination.
If you don't design for fingers, then the application WILL be awkward to use. Period.
"While you can use Objective-C to build Mac applications, you don't need to -- there are other languages that run on the Mac that are also commonly available on other platforms."
Unfortunately, the primary development framework is Cocoa, and that's the API Apple is going to support going forward. There may be wrappers for some languages that support some aspects of the framework, but none are ever going to be as complete, or as current.
"Plus, if you want that app to do anything moderately complex with an internet connection... you're probably going to want to use Apple's WebObjects."
WebObjects is a server-side technology. It's pretty easy to do infomation requests from the iPhone to any server running PHP or Ruby or any other web language you care to name.
"If you want to develop for the iPhone, you MUST have an intel based Mac."
Boo hoo. If I want to do Symbian development I have to buy Windows.
As they saying goes, your "rights" stop the second your fist impacts my nose.
Unfortunately, you "Conservative/Libertarian types" don't live in vacuum, nor on some remote island. Your "choice" has an impact on others. What you "choose" to consume (or not) impacts everyone else. Aggregated, your "choices" either help solve the problem... on contribute to it.
The number one problem I have with all "Conservative/Libertarian types" is that they're ready, willing, and able to enumerate all of their "rights" at the drop of a hat... but none of their responsibilities.
So unless and until you're willing to act like an adult and accept responsibility for your actions in a society, I suppose that same society has no choice but to treat you like the child you seem to be...
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, we burn roughly 400 million gallons of gasoline day-in and day-out. And roughly 60% of all of the petroleum consumed was imported, with 13% coming from the middle east (shipping is easier from SA). Finally, from 2000 to 2007, the US new fleet fuel economy has averaged 23.1 mpg, with light trucks and SUVs making up about 40% of the vehicles on the road.
So, LTs and SUVs make up 40%, but since their mileage sucks they burn 55-60% of the fuel... and I think that since you're so smart you can see where this is going.
Sure, Bush is an asshole, and adventuresome, and had something to "prove". And many corporations licked their chops at the potential profits and the spike in the economy deriving from a convenient little war. And oil companies wanted to re-parcel Iraq's oil blocks. And more. There's not just one reason we're at war.
But there's still a reason the catchphrase "reduce our dependance on foreign oil" exists.
Because if the SUV craze had never happened and if we were all driving much more efficient passenger cars then our oil "jones" wouldn't be half as bad as it is now. We'd be saving billions on oil imports, our economy and deficit wouldn't be nearly as bad, and a thinly-disguised "war for oil" would have been a much, much harder sell to the American public.
Replace SUVs, and we immediately save 120 million gallons each and every day, cut imports by 30%, and IMMEDIATELY cut our particular need for Middle Eastern oil. And, as an added bonus, we wouldn't be paying $4/gallon at the pump and experiencing a major drag on the economy.
But bottom line? Yes, your dad's SUV (and my dad's SUV, and Bob's dad's SUV, and...) is a major, major contributing factor.
You're carrying bikes for eight people and no one has a spot for a trailer? No one has parents or friends with a house and driveway? Heck, I've seen some flatbeds where people back 'em up to the side of a garage and then push 'em vertical. Takes up maybe eight square feet. No RV/"toy" paid parking lots near you?
And a Yakama car rack with gutter posts will hold four bikes easily. (Been there, done that.) Yeah, it might cost $600 for posts, rails, and racks, but that's a darn site better than an extra $8,000 or more for a bigger vehicle. Plus operating costs.
Or a smaller truck/car with a heavy-duty trailer hitch rack can hold three or four. (Mine does three, and folds up when not in use.)
And you can buy a car for day-to-day use, and then figure out something else for those special cases. (Heck, with the bottom dropping out of the huge SUV/truck market, you could have bought a car and then picked up a used truck for a song. (grin)).
Crossovers still tend to get horrendous gas milage (22MPG highway). Better than an Expedition, perhaps, but still no cigar. And gas just needs to go up another buck or so for them to be right back where they were, filling out 2nd mortgage applications at the pump.
The strawman you setup is that any efficient car is one that must be despised. Which is far from the case.
You then frame the issue as a matter of "choice", disregarding the fact that your "choice" has a significant impact on others. But as they say, "Your right to do as you wish stops the second your fist hits my face."
So when your "choice" translates into higher prices, more demand, more pollution, and ultimately is the root cause of our meddling in the affairs of other nation states and the deaths of our sons and daughters under the guise of "national security"...
"Leftists won't be satisfied until they've killed off all American industry and force us to become dependent on foreign companies and the government..."
As opposed to the right, who borrowed and then spent TRILLION's of dollars figuring out better ways to blow holes in the ground?
I'm leaning left at the moment, but am I wrong in thinking that we could have better spent trillions of dollars here at home researching technologies and building industries that could have actually solved much of our dependance on foreign oil? As opposed to trying to steal it?
Shouting "left" and "right" does nothing to solve the problem at hand. It simply polarizes issues and serves to distract us from the real culprits...
"Those of us who own and *use* SUVs can generally afford the gas anyway."
Lookup "supply and demand", and then tell me what happens when someone consumes too much of a limited resource. Hint: The price of said reasource begins to skyrocket, impacting everyone.
Translation: You're driving up prices for those who CAN'T afford it.
"Too many hot rod kids out there driving like assholes."
Okay, I'll bite. Just how often do you actually carry eight bikes? Twice a month? Every weekend? Once a year?
And even so, I'm willing to be that you could have bought a Liberty or even a Tacoma and stuck a small two-wheeled trailer on the back for the half-dozen times you actually needed to carry eight bikes, and then not have been stuck with a gas guzzler the other five days of the week when you're simply commuting to work. (The fact that you felt you had to take a picture of all those bikes together tends to indicate that it was an exception and not the rule.)
Everyone thinks they're a special case, but add all of those special cases together and you create an enormous demand that drives up the prices for everyone else. And where I grew up, thinking solely of your own needs with no regard whatsoever for how it might impact others was considered to be a 'might selfish.
"I take my 2.5 kids up the mountain 4x4ing and fishing all year round in my Liberty."
Yep, you definitely need a 4WD SUV to take the highway up the mountain to the paved turnoff leading to the trailhead parking lot. And while you're taking pictures, send me one of the Honda Civic and the VW Beetle parked next to you in the same lot. (I live in Colorado, BTW. See 'em parked side-by-side all the time.)
I'd estimate that MAYBE one in 10,000 SUV owners have EVER used their vehicle under the off-road conditions for which it was originally designed. And even then 99% of the time they're back home shuffling kids to soccer and groceries from the store.
Too many idiots bought them for what they could do, someday, maybe, and not for what they "actually" do day-in-and-day-out.
"And if you're not making an iPhone touch-based game, then what is the point?"
It greatly depends on how the game uses touch. A game like Popcap's Bejeweled or the ever popular Sudoku or Hold-em translated to mouse input would port easily, while an accelerometer-based driving game may not.
Either way, in many cases you've done the game logic and by-and-large have the art, plus you now have a team familiar with OS X development.
I suspect that you're forgetting a major incentive for a game company. As it stands, EVERY game downloaded to an iPhone from the AppStore will be paid for, unlike some platforms where you're lucky if one in ten users isn't ripping you off.
"This won't happen in sufficient numbers to hurt Nintendo, though."
Maybe so. Or maybe not. That's a matter of opinion, but either way it's certainly not going to HELP Nintendo.
BTW, did you read the article about how the inclusion of a GPS system in the iPhone has the world's largest dedicated GPS device manufacturer scared to death?
Slashdot Mirror
You might have noticed that they're going to be selling a bundle of three formats for one price (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket). With the non-PDF formats you can reflow the text and adjust the font size to fit the screen.
So what if Amazon publishes your ebook? They're a retailer, not a wholesaler, so you still have retail markup over wholesale costs.
Secondly, publishers won't sell at wholesale, as then they're undercutting their retailers. You'll notice you can't buy a physical book direct from the publisher at wholesale for that very reason.
Third, and in the same vein, price the ebook at too much of a discount, and you undercut sales of the physical book.
Finally, the value of a book lies with what is within it's pages, and not in its container or format. If you disagree, then I'd be happy to sell you all of the discounted hardbound blank books you'd care to buy.
If I'm looking for a book that's listed somewhere then I tend to want it now. That's why I paid for Amazon Prime so I get free second-day shipping (easily paid for itself, BTW). I don't want to browse some list of some books that some author may write and deliver a year from now.
And as been pointed out every time this comes up, ransomware really only works for known authors and known subjects. And it definitely doesn't work well for certain movies, as you can't tell people enough about the movie without spilling the beans. Think of the Matrix. How would you describe it to the point where someone would commit to spending $10 or more UP FRONT, and without spoiling the surprise?
And if you think about it, ransomware probably won't fly for movies simply because of the costs involved. Serenity, IIRC, cost on the order of $45 million dollars to make. How many fans would you have to get together to pony up that kind of dough?
Finally, it has been explored. Stephen King did a ransomware chapter- by-chapter ebook a while back and it worked fairly well. But then again, Stephen King is Stephen King.
"A party could easily come to the party that appeals to the left and the right."
No, they can't. As pretty much the last half-century has shown.
And just to cancel out your vote, I too would like a system where I could rank candidates and put the "worst" candidate last. Do away with the Electoral College too, as things have progressed just a bit past sending representatives to Washington by horse.
Copy the relevant portion of the message above and use the following link to send an email to your congress critter NOW.
https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml
Don't just bitch about it here, make it count.
"... anything not specifically built for iPhone is just awkward to use."
Because the design language and interface UI requirements are different when you're making an application driven by touch as opposed to a "normal" web page with miniscule widgets and links designed to be manipulated by a mouse/cursor combination.
If you don't design for fingers, then the application WILL be awkward to use. Period.
"While you can use Objective-C to build Mac applications, you don't need to -- there are other languages that run on the Mac that are also commonly available on other platforms."
Unfortunately, the primary development framework is Cocoa, and that's the API Apple is going to support going forward. There may be wrappers for some languages that support some aspects of the framework, but none are ever going to be as complete, or as current.
"Plus, if you want that app to do anything moderately complex with an internet connection... you're probably going to want to use Apple's WebObjects."
WebObjects is a server-side technology. It's pretty easy to do infomation requests from the iPhone to any server running PHP or Ruby or any other web language you care to name.
"If you want to develop for the iPhone, you MUST have an intel based Mac."
Boo hoo. If I want to do Symbian development I have to buy Windows.
"By going for Obj-C Apple made their SDK available to Obj-C developers. All 2 of them."
Yeah, that explains the 250,000 downloads of the SDK and the 25,000 PAID iPhone developer applications they received.
"...and not convenient. You wind up going riding a lot more often when preparation consists of "throw the bikes in the truck and go.""
Bingo. Other solutions are not as convenient. 'Nuff said.
As they saying goes, your "rights" stop the second your fist impacts my nose.
Unfortunately, you "Conservative/Libertarian types" don't live in vacuum, nor on some remote island. Your "choice" has an impact on others. What you "choose" to consume (or not) impacts everyone else. Aggregated, your "choices" either help solve the problem... on contribute to it.
The number one problem I have with all "Conservative/Libertarian types" is that they're ready, willing, and able to enumerate all of their "rights" at the drop of a hat... but none of their responsibilities.
So unless and until you're willing to act like an adult and accept responsibility for your actions in a society, I suppose that same society has no choice but to treat you like the child you seem to be...
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, we burn roughly 400 million gallons of gasoline day-in and day-out. And roughly 60% of all of the petroleum consumed was imported, with 13% coming from the middle east (shipping is easier from SA). Finally, from 2000 to 2007, the US new fleet fuel economy has averaged 23.1 mpg, with light trucks and SUVs making up about 40% of the vehicles on the road.
So, LTs and SUVs make up 40%, but since their mileage sucks they burn 55-60% of the fuel... and I think that since you're so smart you can see where this is going.
Sure, Bush is an asshole, and adventuresome, and had something to "prove". And many corporations licked their chops at the potential profits and the spike in the economy deriving from a convenient little war. And oil companies wanted to re-parcel Iraq's oil blocks. And more. There's not just one reason we're at war.
But there's still a reason the catchphrase "reduce our dependance on foreign oil" exists.
Because if the SUV craze had never happened and if we were all driving much more efficient passenger cars then our oil "jones" wouldn't be half as bad as it is now. We'd be saving billions on oil imports, our economy and deficit wouldn't be nearly as bad, and a thinly-disguised "war for oil" would have been a much, much harder sell to the American public.
Replace SUVs, and we immediately save 120 million gallons each and every day, cut imports by 30%, and IMMEDIATELY cut our particular need for Middle Eastern oil. And, as an added bonus, we wouldn't be paying $4/gallon at the pump and experiencing a major drag on the economy.
But bottom line? Yes, your dad's SUV (and my dad's SUV, and Bob's dad's SUV, and...) is a major, major contributing factor.
And we're all now paying the price.
"I don't have a place to store a trailer."
You're carrying bikes for eight people and no one has a spot for a trailer? No one has parents or friends with a house and driveway? Heck, I've seen some flatbeds where people back 'em up to the side of a garage and then push 'em vertical. Takes up maybe eight square feet. No RV/"toy" paid parking lots near you?
And a Yakama car rack with gutter posts will hold four bikes easily. (Been there, done that.) Yeah, it might cost $600 for posts, rails, and racks, but that's a darn site better than an extra $8,000 or more for a bigger vehicle. Plus operating costs.
Or a smaller truck/car with a heavy-duty trailer hitch rack can hold three or four. (Mine does three, and folds up when not in use.)
And you can buy a car for day-to-day use, and then figure out something else for those special cases. (Heck, with the bottom dropping out of the huge SUV/truck market, you could have bought a car and then picked up a used truck for a song. (grin)).
Crossovers still tend to get horrendous gas milage (22MPG highway). Better than an Expedition, perhaps, but still no cigar. And gas just needs to go up another buck or so for them to be right back where they were, filling out 2nd mortgage applications at the pump.
The strawman you setup is that any efficient car is one that must be despised. Which is far from the case.
You then frame the issue as a matter of "choice", disregarding the fact that your "choice" has a significant impact on others. But as they say, "Your right to do as you wish stops the second your fist hits my face."
So when your "choice" translates into higher prices, more demand, more pollution, and ultimately is the root cause of our meddling in the affairs of other nation states and the deaths of our sons and daughters under the guise of "national security"...
Then your "choice" needs to be anything but.
"Leftists won't be satisfied until they've killed off all American industry and force us to become dependent on foreign companies and the government..."
As opposed to the right, who borrowed and then spent TRILLION's of dollars figuring out better ways to blow holes in the ground?
I'm leaning left at the moment, but am I wrong in thinking that we could have better spent trillions of dollars here at home researching technologies and building industries that could have actually solved much of our dependance on foreign oil? As opposed to trying to steal it?
Shouting "left" and "right" does nothing to solve the problem at hand. It simply polarizes issues and serves to distract us from the real culprits...
"A motorbike has terrible aerodynamic drag, making the petrol consumption comparable to a small car..."
Yeah, it's not like a lot of motor bikes can get 40, 45, 50, or even 70MPG.
Wait.
http://www.motorcycle-training.f2s.com/review.html
"Those of us who own and *use* SUVs can generally afford the gas anyway."
Lookup "supply and demand", and then tell me what happens when someone consumes too much of a limited resource. Hint: The price of said reasource begins to skyrocket, impacting everyone.
Translation: You're driving up prices for those who CAN'T afford it.
"Too many hot rod kids out there driving like assholes."
They're not the only ones, apparently.
Okay, I'll bite. Just how often do you actually carry eight bikes? Twice a month? Every weekend? Once a year?
And even so, I'm willing to be that you could have bought a Liberty or even a Tacoma and stuck a small two-wheeled trailer on the back for the half-dozen times you actually needed to carry eight bikes, and then not have been stuck with a gas guzzler the other five days of the week when you're simply commuting to work. (The fact that you felt you had to take a picture of all those bikes together tends to indicate that it was an exception and not the rule.)
Everyone thinks they're a special case, but add all of those special cases together and you create an enormous demand that drives up the prices for everyone else. And where I grew up, thinking solely of your own needs with no regard whatsoever for how it might impact others was considered to be a 'might selfish.
"I take my 2.5 kids up the mountain 4x4ing and fishing all year round in my Liberty."
Yep, you definitely need a 4WD SUV to take the highway up the mountain to the paved turnoff leading to the trailhead parking lot. And while you're taking pictures, send me one of the Honda Civic and the VW Beetle parked next to you in the same lot. (I live in Colorado, BTW. See 'em parked side-by-side all the time.)
I'd estimate that MAYBE one in 10,000 SUV owners have EVER used their vehicle under the off-road conditions for which it was originally designed. And even then 99% of the time they're back home shuffling kids to soccer and groceries from the store.
Too many idiots bought them for what they could do, someday, maybe, and not for what they "actually" do day-in-and-day-out.
Well, they've got Sega and PopCap for sure, plus a few others that they showed at the WWDC. And at a $199 price point...
"And if you're not making an iPhone touch-based game, then what is the point?"
It greatly depends on how the game uses touch. A game like Popcap's Bejeweled or the ever popular Sudoku or Hold-em translated to mouse input would port easily, while an accelerometer-based driving game may not.
Either way, in many cases you've done the game logic and by-and-large have the art, plus you now have a team familiar with OS X development.
"iPhone mobile = proprietary platform for 1 phone on the market"
Well, you're forgetting the iPod Touch, of course. Plus that iPhone development = Cocoa development = Mac development.
Or about 30-40 million or so Macs.
I suspect that you're forgetting a major incentive for a game company. As it stands, EVERY game downloaded to an iPhone from the AppStore will be paid for, unlike some platforms where you're lucky if one in ten users isn't ripping you off.
"This won't happen in sufficient numbers to hurt Nintendo, though."
Maybe so. Or maybe not. That's a matter of opinion, but either way it's certainly not going to HELP Nintendo.
BTW, did you read the article about how the inclusion of a GPS system in the iPhone has the world's largest dedicated GPS device manufacturer scared to death?