Perhaps GIMP isn't pretty but I wouldn't be so quick to bash the software geeks who give up their own time to make image editing possible for those without the money to get Photoshop.
The problem I have with GIMP is that, aside from the insanely awful mass of windows spewed across the screen, everything is stuffed in random places and very little works the way I expect it to. I use GIMP for a few hours every few weeks to months and I can never remember where to find anything other than the most basic operations in the numerous menus and tools. Whenever I do find what I'm looking for I have to wonder 'what the hell is it doing _there_?'
And the retard who decided the random window spew should stick to the top over the actual image window I'm working on should be bashed mercilessly. Since my laptop only has a 1366x768 screen I find myself continually having to resize the image window just so I can see the damn thing when half the screen is taken up with a spew of windows I don't care about.
So...if I never looked for one before, why would I start now? Because you tend to find the good, cheap ebooks tend to have one? I have read far too much trash that has not only been published, but published and highly praised to give a crap about a publisher's mark.
There's still a big difference between trash and unreadable. At least you could potentially read to the end of the trash novel without wanting to pull your own brain out through your nose.
Seriously, go read a hundred self-published novel samples and see if you still feel the same way. Or go to fanfiction.net, read a few hundred random stories there and realise that the average self-published ebook isn't much better (they are generally a bit better because the formatting, etc, means they need a bit more dedication to release... on the other hand they don't have a competent set of characters and storylines to steal from the way fan fiction does).
They make decisions about what books to buy and how many authors to support based on whether the book will make a profit and whether it has the potential to make a good one. ebook sales factor into that decision.
Why would a publisher put a book on the shelf if they know it's going to lose money?
The ebook sales also aren't "free money." First, they're not free in the Lochean income-should-be-earned sense because you have at least some further work to be done or already done, including contract negotiations and new typesetting.
I didn't say they were 'free money', I said they were 'practically free money'. 'Typesetting' a typical fiction ebook is insanely easy compared to typesetting a print book, because there's very little formatting you can do. Contract negotiations have to be done regardless of how the book will be sold, so the additional cost is small.
As I said, 90% of the work is the same regardless of whether it's a dead tree book, an ebook or both. If you're already making a profit selling dead tree books, then the ebook is practically free money on top.
Third, either way, their free money isn't as much as you think it is, because distributor-retailers [e.g. Amazon] have monopolies that significantly limit publisher profits.
Amazon give 70% royalties, which is better than you'll get from a dead tree bookstore. And there are no returns to worry about, which can significantly eat into the profits from a dead tree book.
I have never in my life looked for a publisher's mark to determine if a book is good.
You didn't need to, because if it didn't have a publisher's mark on the cover it wasn't on the bookstore shelf. Getting into a bookstore was pretty much impossible for self-published fiction for the last few decades, which is why self-publishing has only become popular again now that it's become so easy.
Seriously, I looked at about a hundred self-published ebook samples recently. Most of them were dire, most of the rest were barely readable and the only ones I considered buying were the books that had previously been published in print but the rights had reverted to the author who was self-publishing them as ebooks.
I'd love to support more self-published authors, but I'm having a hard time finding any I can read more than two pages of without wanting to throw the ebook across the room.
You do realize that unless the book is distributed _only_ in ebook format the author still has to recoup the cost of printing the initial run of dead tree books right?
Which they do by selling those books.
Your argument is backwards: 90+% of the work of producing an ebook by a traditional publisher (editing, copyediting, cover production, etc) has already been done in order to produce the dead tree book, so the ebook sales are practically free money. That only changes if dead tree book sales drop to the point where they no longer cover their production costs, and that's unlikely to happen for quite a few years..
Real browsers don't do this because they have to deal with the reality that the linked pages are hosted remotely and therefore have latency and bandwidth issues which need to be balanced with the likelihood of a user wanting to actually follow that link.
Not to mention that we don't want to auto-open fifty goatse links every time we go to Slashdot.
So far I've been buying older books from Smashwords; a number of previously published authors are using it to sell their backlist of books that are out of print, and most are available in multiple formats from DRM-free Kindle files to plain text.
BTW, there was also an interesting thread on a writing site recently where someone who worked for a publisher was saying that pretty much everyone at the sharp end of ebook publishing in those companies was well aware that DRM didn't work and was costing them sales, but the people at the top still insist on including it (and charging the authors for doing so). So over time it's likely to go away.
I think we're going to see dramatic changes in publishing, but not to that extent. Self-publishing is great if you've already built up a reputation through print publishing, but for someone who's just starting out as a writer they're stuck with trying to differentiate themselves from the 99% of self-published fiction that's simply dire.
Having a known publisher's logo on your ebook is going to be beneficial for quite some time, if only to say 'give this book a try, it's not crap like all those other ones you've looked at'. Plus most writers want to write, not spend time marketing, creating book covers, etc.
Perhaps you'd have a different opinion if you, say, wrote books for a living.
From talking to published authors, they typically seem to get $1-2 per physical book sale, so they could still make more money if their ebooks were available for $2.99 on Amazon ($2.99 is about $2 per book at Amazon royalty rates). Most of the money in writing goes to the publisher and the retailer, not the author.
I still fail to see why anyone would want to spend money on an e book. I like to be able to read a book... not worry over when they will revoke the book from "my reader. "
Weird. All the e-books I own are DRM-free, so I can do whatever I want with them for my own use.
You're right though, I wouldn't want to pay paperback prices for an e-book with DRM which can be revoked at any time. That's why I avoid buying any which do have DRM.
I remember back when I used to run Windows on my laptop, if the battery suddenly dropped 50% in ten minutes I'd go to the task manager and find some minimized Firefox window maxing out a core running some Flash crap. Firefox seems to handle that better these days, or maybe Linux Flash does.
I hate the RIAA and their methods as much as anyone, but I don't think it is spurious to look at what's happened to the music industry in the last 15 years or so and say that the internet has not had a negative effect.
I suspect it's had far less of a negative effect than replacing musicians with manufactured bands designed by marketers.
Blue sky projects and huge investment in R&D (admittedly largely due to the Cold War) were the reason we were number 1.
Bombing, bankrupting or pushing your competitors into communism were the reasons why America was number one. No-one could compete with America as a productive power for many years after WWII.
Personally, I've had such ongoing, persistent library and software problems since I switched to 64-bit in 2006, that at this point I just want to go back to 32 bit.
Meanwhile every computer I own that has a 64-bit CPU runs 64-bit Linux and I've never seen any issue with the 64-bitness other than Adobe's inability to ship a working 64-bit Flash plugin.
This difference means that, given a sufficiently long lived solar installation, the initial cost doesn't matter. You will make your money back eventually, and once you do, you have a free source of power.
The only problem is that most solar installations aren't 'sufficiently long lived'.
Riiiight, and it'll run QuickBooks/Quicken? Aunt Tillie's camera software, all those games junior bought at Walmart? No? Then it isn't really useful on a desktop now is it?
And, uh, why does that determine whether it's useful on a desktop? If we're allowed to make arbitrary requirements I could equally well say that Windows doesn't come with free ponies, therefore it's not really useful on a desktop.
I haven't used Windows as a desktop OS in years, other than occasionally dual-booting into it for games or video editing. Most people don't play games beyond Farmville, don't need a high-end video editing package and spend most of their time just running a web browser.
Pimp the horrible "Games for Windows" service and use their monopoly to hurt Valve.
No-one in their right mind would use GFW if they could use Steam, so unless Microsoft can convince all the PC game publishers to stop selling on Steam it's not going to happen. Since, from what I've read, game developers are trying to avoid GFW because it's a steaming heap of crap that a lot of their customers hate, I don't see that happening any time soon.
I was really impressed when I ran GTA4 from Steam recently and GFW, which serves no purpose in the game at all that I can determine, announced that it had to do an update, which required downloading a load of crap then exiting and restarting GTA4, which now crashes in some GFW DLL when I try to start it. After that delightful experience I'll never touch another GFW-infected game again (fortunately GTA4 also sucks so I don't really care that Microsoft terminally broke it).
My first experience of Vista was trying to download a driver to a friend's laptop and having to sit there for several minnutes while it copied the downloaded 2MB file from IE's temporary directory to the download directory.
It's made no obvious difference to the battery life of the netbook which only uses 8W, and saving 0.5W is only going to give you a few extra minutes of battery life on a laptop that uses 30W.
I'd note, BTW, that the specs show my Intel SSD actually takes more power when writing data than the HDD that it replaced. It only saves power because it spends less time writing due to the lack of head seeks and the idle consumption is lower.
Slashdot Mirror
If necessary, they can just "duplicate" the IP, or require tech transfers to Chinese companies similar to how they are doing in commercial aviation.
And, uh, why would SpaceX give their technology to China? Particularly when it would probably be illegal to do so under ITAR.
No, you watch. Two years tops and win7 will be "legacy". That's obviously what they want, and who can blame them?
I'm sure software developers will just love having to develop software that runs on four different versions of Windows.
If you have 10 million watts per square centimetre of light focussed on something there are far more efficient ways to convert it into useful power.
Perhaps GIMP isn't pretty but I wouldn't be so quick to bash the software geeks who give up their own time to make image editing possible for those without the money to get Photoshop.
The problem I have with GIMP is that, aside from the insanely awful mass of windows spewed across the screen, everything is stuffed in random places and very little works the way I expect it to. I use GIMP for a few hours every few weeks to months and I can never remember where to find anything other than the most basic operations in the numerous menus and tools. Whenever I do find what I'm looking for I have to wonder 'what the hell is it doing _there_?'
And the retard who decided the random window spew should stick to the top over the actual image window I'm working on should be bashed mercilessly. Since my laptop only has a 1366x768 screen I find myself continually having to resize the image window just so I can see the damn thing when half the screen is taken up with a spew of windows I don't care about.
So...if I never looked for one before, why would I start now? Because you tend to find the good, cheap ebooks tend to have one? I have read far too much trash that has not only been published, but published and highly praised to give a crap about a publisher's mark.
There's still a big difference between trash and unreadable. At least you could potentially read to the end of the trash novel without wanting to pull your own brain out through your nose.
Seriously, go read a hundred self-published novel samples and see if you still feel the same way. Or go to fanfiction.net, read a few hundred random stories there and realise that the average self-published ebook isn't much better (they are generally a bit better because the formatting, etc, means they need a bit more dedication to release... on the other hand they don't have a competent set of characters and storylines to steal from the way fan fiction does).
They make decisions about what books to buy and how many authors to support based on whether the book will make a profit and whether it has the potential to make a good one. ebook sales factor into that decision.
Why would a publisher put a book on the shelf if they know it's going to lose money?
The ebook sales also aren't "free money." First, they're not free in the Lochean income-should-be-earned sense because you have at least some further work to be done or already done, including contract negotiations and new typesetting.
I didn't say they were 'free money', I said they were 'practically free money'. 'Typesetting' a typical fiction ebook is insanely easy compared to typesetting a print book, because there's very little formatting you can do. Contract negotiations have to be done regardless of how the book will be sold, so the additional cost is small.
As I said, 90% of the work is the same regardless of whether it's a dead tree book, an ebook or both. If you're already making a profit selling dead tree books, then the ebook is practically free money on top.
Third, either way, their free money isn't as much as you think it is, because distributor-retailers [e.g. Amazon] have monopolies that significantly limit publisher profits.
Amazon give 70% royalties, which is better than you'll get from a dead tree bookstore. And there are no returns to worry about, which can significantly eat into the profits from a dead tree book.
I have never in my life looked for a publisher's mark to determine if a book is good.
You didn't need to, because if it didn't have a publisher's mark on the cover it wasn't on the bookstore shelf. Getting into a bookstore was pretty much impossible for self-published fiction for the last few decades, which is why self-publishing has only become popular again now that it's become so easy.
Seriously, I looked at about a hundred self-published ebook samples recently. Most of them were dire, most of the rest were barely readable and the only ones I considered buying were the books that had previously been published in print but the rights had reverted to the author who was self-publishing them as ebooks.
I'd love to support more self-published authors, but I'm having a hard time finding any I can read more than two pages of without wanting to throw the ebook across the room.
You do realize that unless the book is distributed _only_ in ebook format the author still has to recoup the cost of printing the initial run of dead tree books right?
Which they do by selling those books.
Your argument is backwards: 90+% of the work of producing an ebook by a traditional publisher (editing, copyediting, cover production, etc) has already been done in order to produce the dead tree book, so the ebook sales are practically free money. That only changes if dead tree book sales drop to the point where they no longer cover their production costs, and that's unlikely to happen for quite a few years..
Real browsers don't do this because they have to deal with the reality that the linked pages are hosted remotely and therefore have latency and bandwidth issues which need to be balanced with the likelihood of a user wanting to actually follow that link.
Not to mention that we don't want to auto-open fifty goatse links every time we go to Slashdot.
So where do you get your E-Books from then?
So far I've been buying older books from Smashwords; a number of previously published authors are using it to sell their backlist of books that are out of print, and most are available in multiple formats from DRM-free Kindle files to plain text.
BTW, there was also an interesting thread on a writing site recently where someone who worked for a publisher was saying that pretty much everyone at the sharp end of ebook publishing in those companies was well aware that DRM didn't work and was costing them sales, but the people at the top still insist on including it (and charging the authors for doing so). So over time it's likely to go away.
I think we're going to see dramatic changes in publishing, but not to that extent. Self-publishing is great if you've already built up a reputation through print publishing, but for someone who's just starting out as a writer they're stuck with trying to differentiate themselves from the 99% of self-published fiction that's simply dire.
Having a known publisher's logo on your ebook is going to be beneficial for quite some time, if only to say 'give this book a try, it's not crap like all those other ones you've looked at'. Plus most writers want to write, not spend time marketing, creating book covers, etc.
Perhaps you'd have a different opinion if you, say, wrote books for a living.
From talking to published authors, they typically seem to get $1-2 per physical book sale, so they could still make more money if their ebooks were available for $2.99 on Amazon ($2.99 is about $2 per book at Amazon royalty rates). Most of the money in writing goes to the publisher and the retailer, not the author.
I still fail to see why anyone would want to spend money on an e book. I like to be able to read a book ... not worry over when they will revoke the book from "my reader. "
Weird. All the e-books I own are DRM-free, so I can do whatever I want with them for my own use.
You're right though, I wouldn't want to pay paperback prices for an e-book with DRM which can be revoked at any time. That's why I avoid buying any which do have DRM.
I remember back when I used to run Windows on my laptop, if the battery suddenly dropped 50% in ten minutes I'd go to the task manager and find some minimized Firefox window maxing out a core running some Flash crap. Firefox seems to handle that better these days, or maybe Linux Flash does.
It really is an evil monstrosity.
Labels manufacture boy bands and it-girls because they sell.
Then why does the music industry keep complaining that it's not making money anymore?
I hate the RIAA and their methods as much as anyone, but I don't think it is spurious to look at what's happened to the music industry in the last 15 years or so and say that the internet has not had a negative effect.
I suspect it's had far less of a negative effect than replacing musicians with manufactured bands designed by marketers.
Blue sky projects and huge investment in R&D (admittedly largely due to the Cold War) were the reason we were number 1.
Bombing, bankrupting or pushing your competitors into communism were the reasons why America was number one. No-one could compete with America as a productive power for many years after WWII.
Personally, I've had such ongoing, persistent library and software problems since I switched to 64-bit in 2006, that at this point I just want to go back to 32 bit.
Meanwhile every computer I own that has a 64-bit CPU runs 64-bit Linux and I've never seen any issue with the 64-bitness other than Adobe's inability to ship a working 64-bit Flash plugin.
This difference means that, given a sufficiently long lived solar installation, the initial cost doesn't matter. You will make your money back eventually, and once you do, you have a free source of power.
The only problem is that most solar installations aren't 'sufficiently long lived'.
A bad blocks scan at the weekend showed my year-old Toshiba hard drive has invalidated at least a hundred sectors so far.
We should, by now, be able to meet the rights for food and shelter and protection from harm
How can you have a 'right' to food, shelter and protection without enslaving others to provide those things for you? Don't those people have 'rights'?
Riiiight, and it'll run QuickBooks/Quicken? Aunt Tillie's camera software, all those games junior bought at Walmart? No? Then it isn't really useful on a desktop now is it?
And, uh, why does that determine whether it's useful on a desktop? If we're allowed to make arbitrary requirements I could equally well say that Windows doesn't come with free ponies, therefore it's not really useful on a desktop.
I haven't used Windows as a desktop OS in years, other than occasionally dual-booting into it for games or video editing. Most people don't play games beyond Farmville, don't need a high-end video editing package and spend most of their time just running a web browser.
Pimp the horrible "Games for Windows" service and use their monopoly to hurt Valve.
No-one in their right mind would use GFW if they could use Steam, so unless Microsoft can convince all the PC game publishers to stop selling on Steam it's not going to happen. Since, from what I've read, game developers are trying to avoid GFW because it's a steaming heap of crap that a lot of their customers hate, I don't see that happening any time soon.
I was really impressed when I ran GTA4 from Steam recently and GFW, which serves no purpose in the game at all that I can determine, announced that it had to do an update, which required downloading a load of crap then exiting and restarting GTA4, which now crashes in some GFW DLL when I try to start it. After that delightful experience I'll never touch another GFW-infected game again (fortunately GTA4 also sucks so I don't really care that Microsoft terminally broke it).
My first experience of Vista was trying to download a driver to a friend's laptop and having to sit there for several minnutes while it copied the downloaded 2MB file from IE's temporary directory to the download directory.
Sure it does - battery life.
It's made no obvious difference to the battery life of the netbook which only uses 8W, and saving 0.5W is only going to give you a few extra minutes of battery life on a laptop that uses 30W.
I'd note, BTW, that the specs show my Intel SSD actually takes more power when writing data than the HDD that it replaced. It only saves power because it spends less time writing due to the lack of head seeks and the idle consumption is lower.