I'm not too worried about cell phones acting as such, as we'll be too high and going too fast to make that do any good (plus I don't want a plane full of chatterboxes)
I've met people involved with getting cell phones working on planes by installing their own 'cell tower' on board, so in the future you'll probably have to pay extra for the cell-free flights.
I think more importantly, while things could have gone wrong, the difficulties in the lunar landers were not *malicious* in nature.
Indeed. There were some horrible bugs in the AGC software which were only found in space, but they didn't matter that much because no-one was actively trying to attack the system so they could be worked around.
For example, if I remember correctly on Apollo 7 someone accidentally ran the pre-launch attitude alignment program in orbit, so the AGC thought it was back on the launch pad and they had to reset it to the correct configuration. Simple fix: don't let it run after launch in the next release, but potentially lethal if it happened at the wrong time in the flight (like, say, the middle of re-entry).
That's not even true. Fossil fuels receive much more subsidies in the form of socialized health costs, military expenditures, and inter-generational debt transfer.
Not true. My own equally made-up figures show that wind power costs a hundred trazillion dollars a year.
Bing-o. Google search sucks now that they've made it 'smart', so if Bing isn't even as good as that, it really must suck.
My experience is that Bing has generally been better for technical searches because it doesn't try to 'help' by replacing my acronyms with words that are similar and so common that they completely overwhelm the things I'm actually searching for.
My first thought was that it could be great for video; no need to bother with precise focus while shooting if you can refocus when you edit. However, I'm guessing that it would require a huge data rate.
Oh, also, an automated car cannot become scared or panic.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the automated ABS systems in many cars will cut the brakes on fresh snow where locking the wheels would typically result in a shorter stopping distance.
Who exactly is going to program the car to deal with every possible dangerous situation?
If the Soviets could plan in (say) 1970 to land on Mars 47 years later, I don't see why the Chinese couldn't plan now to land on Mars in (say) 2049, which would be the Centennial of their revolution.
Yeah, because if the Chinese in 1912 had planned how they were going to be living in 1949, it would all have worked out marvellously.
Central planning is a silly idea at the best of times. Central planning for forty years in the future is laughable.
You need a disinterested third party whose job it is to go through the text carefully and weed out errors.
I wish the trade publishers would find some of those people, because ever since I read a few very bad self-published books full of glaring errors (typos, duplicated words, wrong words, etc) I've been looking for them in everything I read and pretty much every trade-published book I've read since has a few.
Yeah, Baen do seem to have got it, probably because they sell lots of SF books. I still have a bunch of free e-books that they released years ago to bring in new readers.
Because Amazon is doing that to drive out their competitors so they gain monopoly share which they can then use to raise prices.
Because setting up a competing e-book store would be so expensive that only a vast megacorporation could do it.
Oh, no, actually if the publishers had any brains they would have done it long before Amazon did. Like the music industry they're staring down the barrel of their own incompetence.
Because you think Amazon won't raise prices once they drive their competitors out? Are you that naive?
Amazon are a small fraction of the global book-seller market and their market share of e-books is shrinking. So wake us up when they do 'drive their competitors out'.
I know Slashdotters like to go on about buggy whip makers trying to force their extinct product on a society that no longer needs it, but this really isn't one of those cases - a publisher does more than take the final product from the author, slap a markup on it, and sell it to you.
That's odd, because plenty of mid-list authors have complained that their publishers do just that. No editing, some proof reading, if they're lucky a cover that bears some resemblance to the story, then straight out the door to the book store.
And the best part is that you can set it up in a small town somewhere with a low cost of living rather than a fancy New York office where you have to pay high wages so those employees can afford to eat...
The publishers are afraid that Amazon, in an effort to kill off their competitors and corner the ebook market, will set prices extremely low and sell ebooks at no profit or at a loss. I don't blame the publishers for being paranoid about it.
So publishers are upset that they might make more money?
If Amazon buys e-books from you for $5, why would you want them to sell for $10 rather than $1? At $1 you'd make a heck of a lot more sales, and Amazon would have to swallow the $4 loss on each one.
To be fair, I believe it's hardbacks that cost a lot to print; that's why publishers expect stores to return them if they don't sell, rather than destroy them as they would with a paperback.
Of course that also means that you have to take account of the number of copies that are destroyed when looking at paperback costs. If your paperback costs $1 to print but 50% don't sell, you're effectively paying $2 for every copy that does sell.
Because if nobody knows an author nobody will read his/her book.
That'll explain how previously unknown authors have sold millions of self-published e-books on Amazon.
Publishers advertise books where people can see the ads and they can somewhat transfer their previous customers to the books of completely unknown authors.
No, they don't. A new book by an unknown author will be extremely lucky to see any marketing money aimed at readers rather than book store buyers. All a publisher will do for most first novels by new authors are try to get them on the book store shelf. After that, they're on to the next book.
Probably because some of those cost are for editors, proof readers, illustrators, cover designers; all of whom play a crucial role in producing an outstanding or even good, for that matter, book.
And if your book is any good, you can hire them for a lot less than 75% of all future royalties.
Publishers only make sense in the ebook market for people who are going to sell millions of copies and can therefore negotiate better deals, and people whose books won't sell, so an advance of a few thousand dollars is more than they'd make themselves.
Otherwise, if your book sells 10,000 copies at $9.99, you've just paid $52,000 for those services while receiving $15,000 yourself.
It's not random. Don't confuse you being ignorant with the start menu being random.
Ah, so now instead of just going to the menu entry for the program I want to run, I'm supposed to work out whatever weird algorithm Windows uses to display a list of the programs I don't want to run?
I used the windows 8 developer preview and I noticed that metro was completely optional.
Wasn't that disabled in the latest release? I remember people saying 'duh, you can just do this magic registry crap to disable the Metrosexual interface' and people responding with 'duh, you can't'.
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I'm not too worried about cell phones acting as such, as we'll be too high and going too fast to make that do any good (plus I don't want a plane full of chatterboxes)
I've met people involved with getting cell phones working on planes by installing their own 'cell tower' on board, so in the future you'll probably have to pay extra for the cell-free flights.
Why? Microsoft is a huge corporation...
Huge, established corporations rarely do anything fast. Changing an icon in Windows probably takes sixteen committee meetings.
the UI seems good for tablets AND you can run your beloved windows apps on the tablet -> success
You can run your beloved windows apps on the x86 tablet for half an hour before the battery goes flat.
I think more importantly, while things could have gone wrong, the difficulties in the lunar landers were not *malicious* in nature.
Indeed. There were some horrible bugs in the AGC software which were only found in space, but they didn't matter that much because no-one was actively trying to attack the system so they could be worked around.
For example, if I remember correctly on Apollo 7 someone accidentally ran the pre-launch attitude alignment program in orbit, so the AGC thought it was back on the launch pad and they had to reset it to the correct configuration. Simple fix: don't let it run after launch in the next release, but potentially lethal if it happened at the wrong time in the flight (like, say, the middle of re-entry).
That's not even true. Fossil fuels receive much more subsidies in the form of socialized health costs, military expenditures, and inter-generational debt transfer.
Not true. My own equally made-up figures show that wind power costs a hundred trazillion dollars a year.
Bing-o. Google search sucks now that they've made it 'smart', so if Bing isn't even as good as that, it really must suck.
My experience is that Bing has generally been better for technical searches because it doesn't try to 'help' by replacing my acronyms with words that are similar and so common that they completely overwhelm the things I'm actually searching for.
My first thought was that it could be great for video; no need to bother with precise focus while shooting if you can refocus when you edit. However, I'm guessing that it would require a huge data rate.
Oh, also, an automated car cannot become scared or panic.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the automated ABS systems in many cars will cut the brakes on fresh snow where locking the wheels would typically result in a shorter stopping distance.
Who exactly is going to program the car to deal with every possible dangerous situation?
If the Soviets could plan in (say) 1970 to land on Mars 47 years later, I don't see why the Chinese couldn't plan now to land on Mars in (say) 2049, which would be the Centennial of their revolution.
Yeah, because if the Chinese in 1912 had planned how they were going to be living in 1949, it would all have worked out marvellously.
Central planning is a silly idea at the best of times. Central planning for forty years in the future is laughable.
Only on ARM computers.
No, that's Windows 8. Windows 9 will drop the other jackboot.
But it was funnier than Titanic.
No one is coming to take your PC.
But with Windows 9 it will be locked down with 'Secure Boot' so you can't install any other OS.
Agreed. Microsoft will still be around much like IBM as they still contribute value to the market at the enterprise level.
I'm not sure that a tablet OS is really going to work well for enterprise users who just want to run Word on a desktop PC.
You need a disinterested third party whose job it is to go through the text carefully and weed out errors.
I wish the trade publishers would find some of those people, because ever since I read a few very bad self-published books full of glaring errors (typos, duplicated words, wrong words, etc) I've been looking for them in everything I read and pretty much every trade-published book I've read since has a few.
Yeah, Baen do seem to have got it, probably because they sell lots of SF books. I still have a bunch of free e-books that they released years ago to bring in new readers.
Because Amazon is doing that to drive out their competitors so they gain monopoly share which they can then use to raise prices.
Because setting up a competing e-book store would be so expensive that only a vast megacorporation could do it.
Oh, no, actually if the publishers had any brains they would have done it long before Amazon did. Like the music industry they're staring down the barrel of their own incompetence.
Because you think Amazon won't raise prices once they drive their competitors out? Are you that naive?
Amazon are a small fraction of the global book-seller market and their market share of e-books is shrinking. So wake us up when they do 'drive their competitors out'.
I know Slashdotters like to go on about buggy whip makers trying to force their extinct product on a society that no longer needs it, but this really isn't one of those cases - a publisher does more than take the final product from the author, slap a markup on it, and sell it to you.
That's odd, because plenty of mid-list authors have complained that their publishers do just that. No editing, some proof reading, if they're lucky a cover that bears some resemblance to the story, then straight out the door to the book store.
And the best part is that you can set it up in a small town somewhere with a low cost of living rather than a fancy New York office where you have to pay high wages so those employees can afford to eat...
The publishers are afraid that Amazon, in an effort to kill off their competitors and corner the ebook market, will set prices extremely low and sell ebooks at no profit or at a loss. I don't blame the publishers for being paranoid about it.
So publishers are upset that they might make more money?
If Amazon buys e-books from you for $5, why would you want them to sell for $10 rather than $1? At $1 you'd make a heck of a lot more sales, and Amazon would have to swallow the $4 loss on each one.
To be fair, I believe it's hardbacks that cost a lot to print; that's why publishers expect stores to return them if they don't sell, rather than destroy them as they would with a paperback.
Of course that also means that you have to take account of the number of copies that are destroyed when looking at paperback costs. If your paperback costs $1 to print but 50% don't sell, you're effectively paying $2 for every copy that does sell.
Because if nobody knows an author nobody will read his/her book.
That'll explain how previously unknown authors have sold millions of self-published e-books on Amazon.
Publishers advertise books where people can see the ads and they can somewhat transfer their previous customers to the books of completely unknown authors.
No, they don't. A new book by an unknown author will be extremely lucky to see any marketing money aimed at readers rather than book store buyers. All a publisher will do for most first novels by new authors are try to get them on the book store shelf. After that, they're on to the next book.
Probably because some of those cost are for editors, proof readers, illustrators, cover designers; all of whom play a crucial role in producing an outstanding or even good, for that matter, book.
And if your book is any good, you can hire them for a lot less than 75% of all future royalties.
Publishers only make sense in the ebook market for people who are going to sell millions of copies and can therefore negotiate better deals, and people whose books won't sell, so an advance of a few thousand dollars is more than they'd make themselves.
Otherwise, if your book sells 10,000 copies at $9.99, you've just paid $52,000 for those services while receiving $15,000 yourself.
It's not random. Don't confuse you being ignorant with the start menu being random.
Ah, so now instead of just going to the menu entry for the program I want to run, I'm supposed to work out whatever weird algorithm Windows uses to display a list of the programs I don't want to run?
I used the windows 8 developer preview and I noticed that metro was completely optional.
Wasn't that disabled in the latest release? I remember people saying 'duh, you can just do this magic registry crap to disable the Metrosexual interface' and people responding with 'duh, you can't'.