It's hard to believe that the Google Chrome OS will have any short-term effect since it doesn't come out for a year minimum. It's like saying that gasoline prices will change next summer -- who cares now?
The big deal about Chrome is that it will run on ARM, and that's more about breaking the Intel monopoly than the Microsoft monopoly -- which I think is a good thing!
For such a small article, that was a fascinating read. Thanks for the link.
You are welcome. People here seldom say thanks. As for the article, I'd read that one, or a similar one, several years ago and thought it was great too. It just stuck with me to where I saw the original poster's comment. Now if we could only have an A.I. search engine that could parse postings and automatically create these links.
such a facility is needed as the US has fallen behind other countries in the race to build ever-larger wind turbines for energy production.
Wouldn't it be cheaper in these days of cutting back to piggyback off of their research instead. NIH is the biggest waster of money ever. Study success everywhere you find it.
Re:Cloud computing-Clouds in Elephant Units
on
How Heavy Is a Petabyte?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Clouds are as light as air!
A common misconception, and just saying it on Slashdot doesn't make it true. Clouds weigh more than elephants - much more. In fact, you can learn the weight of clouds in elephant units here.
Not only that, but clouds are usually darker than the air around them.
Boy, Kindle is sure getting a lot of coverage on Slashdot lately. You're left to think that somehow the world matters because of it - which it doesn't.
Google getting into book selling is a much bigger deal. Fictionwise's current meltdown where they apparently can't even report and pay royalties on time or properly is a big deal given their size in the eBook market and number of publishers involved. The fact that you don't even need a Kindle reader to buy and read Kindle books seems seldom mentioned. (A free Kindle reader app is available for iPhone/iPod Touch and there are millions more of those out there than Kindle hardware.)
Now another pundit tells us that Kindle must change, or die, in 3 years. Kindle is excellent for its intended uses. It's purpose built to provide eBook reading in a thin format with a very readable screen in bright light, weeks' long battery life, limited browsing, multiple formats, bookmarking, annotation, and sharing the book across multiple devices, and no-worries wireless connection. Also, lots of books available for it from the biggest bookseller on the planet. It's hard to see who is going to beat out that combination easily in the near future. I'd just as quickly predict the iPod demise as the end of Kindle.
Where do I see Kindle in 3 years? Cheaper, if production catches up to sales. Better browsing and better integration of its features into other formats (e.g. annotations on PDFs). Content (e.g. Newspapers) delivered to it by subscription replacing dead tree physical delivery. Or possibly limited to a hardware niche market while their reader software is running on every significant portable device with a screen large enough to read on.
One way or another "Kindle" survives as a brand as long as Amazon doesn't abandon it themselves and keeps developing the product.
My personal opinion? That the people predicting Kindle's demise are the ones who hate it in the first place and are trying to talk it away.
Even less fathomable is why you need "publishers" once you fully reach the ebook era.
Publishers are about as useful in the digital age as record companies.
You need publishers because you cannot get on sites like Fictionwise (biggest current eBook seller) as an individual, and that's where people are buying eBooks. While I recommend not dealing with Fictionwise in my above post (worth reading why), you can't just show up at a lot of big sellers yet, eBook in hand, and make your fortune by having them list it for you. They deal with established publishers, and they set what terms they want to define what makes for an established publisher.
And why don't they want to deal with your as an individual? The costs are simply too high. They have to list your books, deal with complaints about them if they contain inappropriate material (i.e. stuff publishers filter out if they want to remain listed), provide quarterly royalty reports and send out checks with those reports. For a publisher they send out one check for the publisher to distribute according to that publisher's contracts with its writers. They don't want to have to deal with thousands of individual authors when they can keep it down to a few dozen publishers instead.
If you want to find a publisher that suits your particular topic matter and want a relatively impartial listing, I recommend visiting Piers Anthony's Internet Publishers page. He has dealt with a lot of publishers over his long writing career, fought with many of them, and can provide a lot of information on where you might want to start.
Even less fathomable is why publishers are letting the ebook market degenerate into competing formats, proprietary readers and possible market dominance by Amazon. One would think it is in their interest to come up with and dictate a single book format, one which all readers can implement, one which all stores can sell books with. It sounds obvious but a single format would level the playing field and catapult ebooks into the mainstream.
You don't understand small publishers -- I do because I sell through one.
eBook publishers will seek to get their eBooks listed everywhere they can be sold. Because there is no upfront publishing costs for an eBook and minimal setup fees, you just shotgun the book out as widely as possible, and in every salable format. Setting up multiple formats isn't all that hard with modern tools and publishers are format agnostic as a result.
The current biggest eBook retailers are: Fictionwise (now part of B&N, who absolutely doesn't deserve to be given their shitty service and doubly-shitty treatment of authors and publishers, but they're big and still generate a lot of sales), Amazon, and Google is looking to become a big player soon. You do your best to sell to all of them, as well as a couple dozen smaller sites that may generate less sales each, but from whom it all adds up in the end.
That's the eBook publishing business today. You can rail against it, or play by its arcane rules and modestly profit from it.
As for readers, it has never been better. A whole lot of stuff is published in eBook form that you never would have had access to before - and at cheap prices. You have a variety of bookstores, dedicated eBook readers, computer-based readers, smart phone and iPod readers to choose from. Competition exists to keep prices under control.
So don't blame the publishers for the current state of affairs. In the end it's up to the consumer to pick the winner(s) and loser(s).
Oh, and this author says to buy from anyone other than Fictionwise. In their latest twist, they've just taken away their real-time sales reports from the publishers and told them to wait for audited end of quarter reports to know what their sales were for that quarter because the real-time data was apparently reporting sales up to 25% higher than publishers were being paid for at the end of the quarter. Two sets of numbers didn't agree and they paid the lower one (big surprise there). And complaints about their Customer Service are becoming legendary. If you have an alternative to Fictionwise for your purchases I would encourage you to vote with your feet and wallets until they can clean up their act. Anyone who has worked with numbers on computers knows that two reports proporting to report on the same data will never agree, but a full 25% is well outside the bounds of reasonable error.
I think Amazon should move to the inkjet approach of giving away the initial hardware and then making money on the refills. I wouldn't mind paying $5-$10 for a new bestseller (as long as it didn't crash/timeout and disappear on me) but the initial investment is rather daunting.
This would really prove a drag on Amazon profitability.
Currently with Kindle books (in my somewhat informed information) Amazon takes approximately 40% of the list price of the book as their profit, and any discount from list comes our of their 40% profit. The publisher/author receive the other 60%. Out of the 40% Amazon pays for all setup costs and listing costs, storage of the Kindle book on their server, wireless bandwidth to deliver it, any payment fees from credit card/Paypal purchases, the cost of maintaining the website, paying their employees, showing a profit, and keeping the lights on.
Now in addition to that you want them to give away an expensive piece of hardware at a huge loss, hardware that people can quite usefully use without ever buying Kindle book from Amazon. The numbers just don't add up.
If I were running Amazon (and if it were still in business after being run by me), the way I'd discount the Kindle would be to keep the price at where people are willing to buy all that they are already producing and offer a coupon with it worth, say, $75 in the Kindle store. Amazon would recoup some of that coupon value out of their profit percent when used, it would introduce the buyer into how easy shopping at Amazon can be, and some people would never use it costing Amazon nothing from them.
But for now, as long as Kindle continues to sell I fail to see why Amazon should reduce the price a single cent. That's Business!
Even if the key to this exact code wasn't known, you'd think that all of the types of codes in use at that time would have been known and only a lack of interest kept this one from being cracked much earlier.
but they pose no immediate threat for the real world applications that use AES.
Funny how news of just about every major break of an existing cryptography system or secure hash method has started out with just about those same exact words.
the first time I pop a blu-ray disc into my $300 player and it refuses to play because of one of your new little one-upmanship encryption schemes,
You may not initially realize that it's refusing to play. You may attribute your blank screen to an unusually long loading and initialization time endemic with blu-ray.
meaning that Blu-Ray discs could not be decrypted for a period of time about the same length as SlySoft's worst case scenario.
There are currently 19 movies that cannot be decrypted.
The blu-ray discs could certainly be decrypted after that period of time. And the unrippable discs of today will certainly be cracked tomorrow, or the day after, simply because the movie studios will continue to use the same method until it's again cracked.
If you can live with not having the disc on Day 1 then the movie studios lose. If you've simply gotta have it on the week of release then they win. They believe that you have no self-control when it comes to your viewing habits and unfortunately too many of you keep proving them right.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to believe that the Google Chrome OS will have any short-term effect since it doesn't come out for a year minimum. It's like saying that gasoline prices will change next summer -- who cares now?
The big deal about Chrome is that it will run on ARM, and that's more about breaking the Intel monopoly than the Microsoft monopoly -- which I think is a good thing!
Looks like time to start adding random noise to the ground line.
Next problem please.
How long before it learns all of the curse words in your life?
Tell that to my doctor the next time I stand on his scales.
You are welcome. People here seldom say thanks. As for the article, I'd read that one, or a similar one, several years ago and thought it was great too. It just stuck with me to where I saw the original poster's comment. Now if we could only have an A.I. search engine that could parse postings and automatically create these links.
Wouldn't it be cheaper in these days of cutting back to piggyback off of their research instead. NIH is the biggest waster of money ever. Study success everywhere you find it.
A common misconception, and just saying it on Slashdot doesn't make it true. Clouds weigh more than elephants - much more. In fact, you can learn the weight of clouds in elephant units here.
Not only that, but clouds are usually darker than the air around them.
I think the verdict should be reduced to below zero - entitling Jamie Thomas to a refund from those bastards.
Boy, Kindle is sure getting a lot of coverage on Slashdot lately. You're left to think that somehow the world matters because of it - which it doesn't.
Google getting into book selling is a much bigger deal. Fictionwise's current meltdown where they apparently can't even report and pay royalties on time or properly is a big deal given their size in the eBook market and number of publishers involved. The fact that you don't even need a Kindle reader to buy and read Kindle books seems seldom mentioned. (A free Kindle reader app is available for iPhone/iPod Touch and there are millions more of those out there than Kindle hardware.)
Now another pundit tells us that Kindle must change, or die, in 3 years. Kindle is excellent for its intended uses. It's purpose built to provide eBook reading in a thin format with a very readable screen in bright light, weeks' long battery life, limited browsing, multiple formats, bookmarking, annotation, and sharing the book across multiple devices, and no-worries wireless connection. Also, lots of books available for it from the biggest bookseller on the planet. It's hard to see who is going to beat out that combination easily in the near future. I'd just as quickly predict the iPod demise as the end of Kindle.
Where do I see Kindle in 3 years? Cheaper, if production catches up to sales. Better browsing and better integration of its features into other formats (e.g. annotations on PDFs). Content (e.g. Newspapers) delivered to it by subscription replacing dead tree physical delivery. Or possibly limited to a hardware niche market while their reader software is running on every significant portable device with a screen large enough to read on.
One way or another "Kindle" survives as a brand as long as Amazon doesn't abandon it themselves and keeps developing the product.
My personal opinion? That the people predicting Kindle's demise are the ones who hate it in the first place and are trying to talk it away.
You need publishers because you cannot get on sites like Fictionwise (biggest current eBook seller) as an individual, and that's where people are buying eBooks. While I recommend not dealing with Fictionwise in my above post (worth reading why), you can't just show up at a lot of big sellers yet, eBook in hand, and make your fortune by having them list it for you. They deal with established publishers, and they set what terms they want to define what makes for an established publisher.
And why don't they want to deal with your as an individual? The costs are simply too high. They have to list your books, deal with complaints about them if they contain inappropriate material (i.e. stuff publishers filter out if they want to remain listed), provide quarterly royalty reports and send out checks with those reports. For a publisher they send out one check for the publisher to distribute according to that publisher's contracts with its writers. They don't want to have to deal with thousands of individual authors when they can keep it down to a few dozen publishers instead.
If you want to find a publisher that suits your particular topic matter and want a relatively impartial listing, I recommend visiting Piers Anthony's Internet Publishers page. He has dealt with a lot of publishers over his long writing career, fought with many of them, and can provide a lot of information on where you might want to start.
You don't understand small publishers -- I do because I sell through one.
eBook publishers will seek to get their eBooks listed everywhere they can be sold. Because there is no upfront publishing costs for an eBook and minimal setup fees, you just shotgun the book out as widely as possible, and in every salable format. Setting up multiple formats isn't all that hard with modern tools and publishers are format agnostic as a result.
The current biggest eBook retailers are: Fictionwise (now part of B&N, who absolutely doesn't deserve to be given their shitty service and doubly-shitty treatment of authors and publishers, but they're big and still generate a lot of sales), Amazon, and Google is looking to become a big player soon. You do your best to sell to all of them, as well as a couple dozen smaller sites that may generate less sales each, but from whom it all adds up in the end.
That's the eBook publishing business today. You can rail against it, or play by its arcane rules and modestly profit from it.
As for readers, it has never been better. A whole lot of stuff is published in eBook form that you never would have had access to before - and at cheap prices. You have a variety of bookstores, dedicated eBook readers, computer-based readers, smart phone and iPod readers to choose from. Competition exists to keep prices under control.
So don't blame the publishers for the current state of affairs. In the end it's up to the consumer to pick the winner(s) and loser(s).
Oh, and this author says to buy from anyone other than Fictionwise. In their latest twist, they've just taken away their real-time sales reports from the publishers and told them to wait for audited end of quarter reports to know what their sales were for that quarter because the real-time data was apparently reporting sales up to 25% higher than publishers were being paid for at the end of the quarter. Two sets of numbers didn't agree and they paid the lower one (big surprise there). And complaints about their Customer Service are becoming legendary. If you have an alternative to Fictionwise for your purchases I would encourage you to vote with your feet and wallets until they can clean up their act. Anyone who has worked with numbers on computers knows that two reports proporting to report on the same data will never agree, but a full 25% is well outside the bounds of reasonable error.
This would really prove a drag on Amazon profitability.
Currently with Kindle books (in my somewhat informed information) Amazon takes approximately 40% of the list price of the book as their profit, and any discount from list comes our of their 40% profit. The publisher/author receive the other 60%. Out of the 40% Amazon pays for all setup costs and listing costs, storage of the Kindle book on their server, wireless bandwidth to deliver it, any payment fees from credit card/Paypal purchases, the cost of maintaining the website, paying their employees, showing a profit, and keeping the lights on.
Now in addition to that you want them to give away an expensive piece of hardware at a huge loss, hardware that people can quite usefully use without ever buying Kindle book from Amazon. The numbers just don't add up.
If I were running Amazon (and if it were still in business after being run by me), the way I'd discount the Kindle would be to keep the price at where people are willing to buy all that they are already producing and offer a coupon with it worth, say, $75 in the Kindle store. Amazon would recoup some of that coupon value out of their profit percent when used, it would introduce the buyer into how easy shopping at Amazon can be, and some people would never use it costing Amazon nothing from them.
But for now, as long as Kindle continues to sell I fail to see why Amazon should reduce the price a single cent. That's Business!
Even if the key to this exact code wasn't known, you'd think that all of the types of codes in use at that time would have been known and only a lack of interest kept this one from being cracked much earlier.
I wonder what the given tie-in video game will be like.
And no doubt these new improved cells will be available for commercial use in only 5 years - for the next 25 years!
And what if it doesn't find anything? Did we not do it, or did the aliens steal it afterwards for recycling?
The funniest result of this would be if they found it, but not where the astronauts actually thought they landed.
And while it's up there mapping, can it find that B-17 on the Moon that I saw the pictures of decades ago?
Funny how news of just about every major break of an existing cryptography system or secure hash method has started out with just about those same exact words.
You may not initially realize that it's refusing to play. You may attribute your blank screen to an unusually long loading and initialization time endemic with blu-ray.
The blu-ray discs could certainly be decrypted after that period of time. And the unrippable discs of today will certainly be cracked tomorrow, or the day after, simply because the movie studios will continue to use the same method until it's again cracked.
If you can live with not having the disc on Day 1 then the movie studios lose. If you've simply gotta have it on the week of release then they win. They believe that you have no self-control when it comes to your viewing habits and unfortunately too many of you keep proving them right.
The RIAA really needs to die. They are an annoyance to virtually everyone.
Of course we can see how up to date they are chasing after Usnet. That's so 1999 of them.
We're #3 - wow that's something to boast about.
According to Nike, this means that your the second loser.
US Senators Schumer and Graham - talk about an Odd Couple!
Sounds like a sex change to me.
Only one question matters: when is the next one due?
And I'm sure that you find your ignorance to be your bliss.
Why don't you go ahead and add Slashdot to your list.