So what? We're not talking about keeping your email secure, we're talking about keeping websites from reading your contact list or address book. If you're using POP3 for your email, there's nothing whatsoever in your browser's history, cookies, passwords or other hiding places for those snooping sites to find, and that's what we're talking about.
You're talking apples and oranges here. I'm not saying that OS drivers are better than proprietary ones, I'm only saying that once the specs are released and OS drivers written, the OEM no longer needs to worry about writing or maintaining them. Of course, they still can if that's what they want to, but that's their choice.
Have a look at how often nVidia has to change their Linux drivers and tell me who requires more.
And who's fault is that? If nVidia would release the specs on their cards (Yes, and ATI too.) so that open source drivers could be written, they wouldn't have to worry about it. Since they insist on keeping the details secret and doing all the development in house, they're going to have to rewrite them to fit the changes in each new kernel. I will say, however, that neither company is complaining about it.
I am part of that older, half-blind crowd you inconsiderate clod, and I hate the new layout! This isn't improving the appearance of Slashdot, it's changing it for the sake of changing it.
Yes, the undefended trademark tends to vanish in the haze -- think of both aspirin and kleenex. I wouldn't mind it if they'd limit their defense to their own shade of magenta, but I think they go too far by claiming that any and all shades are too close to theirs to be used, no matter what the context. Where does it stop? Do they eventually start telling people that they have to doctor photographs to take it out?
Thank you for the information. I hadn't known that there was such a difference, although I'm quite familiar with both flint and obsidian points. I have a friend, Dr. Arizona Gleason, who learned knapping while getting her PhD in Archeology, and now does it for a living. Mostly she uses flint and obsidian, although she also uses scraps of glass as well.
There's a difference here. UPS has trademarked a specific shade of brown, and protects its use. This would be like having the L.A. Dodgers try to trademark blue, instead of just Dodger Blue.
This, of course, ignores the fact that in Greek times the oarsmen of a ship were paid professionals, not slaves. I doubt that there were any galley slaves in the Greek ships that won the battle of Salamis. Not sure about the Persians, though.
Surgeons have experimented with flint scalpels made by modern flint knappers and found them as sharp as surgical steel, easy to sterilize and better at holding their edge. I don't have a cite, but I remember from many years ago reading about a flint knapper who ended up having tools he made used for his own cardiac surgery. Yes, it's quite possible for neolithic medicine men to have better surgical tools than anything less than the best modern steel, even if their understanding of the human body left something to be desired.
No, I'm not an agent, I'm a writer. And, in the SF genre, Hugo, Nebula and Campbell awards are highly regarded, especially by the readers This is why you'll see them prominently mentioned on the book cover or dust jacket.
There's no question that Spamazon is wrong in trying to force all POD companies to use their printing company. That's not the issue in this thread. We've gone off on the side-issue of the difference between POD and traditional publishing companies. Try to keep up, please!
I should probably just drop this, but I feel compelled to reply One More Time. The quality of POD books will vary far more than those from the big companies ever could simply because the editors at the majors reject most of the submissions as being unpublishable and the POD people don't. Yes, you can often read a sample, but if it turns out that the sample is the only part of the book that's been edited into something coherent, you can't send it back for a refund. I'd be the last to say that there's nothing worth buying from the POD people, but caveat emptor is a good motto to have in mind.
I hate to break this to you, but going via an old school publisher is no guarantee you'll ever cover your advance or make a profit, either. In any case, it will take a lot more book sales before you do...
I'll go further than that: the odds are that whatever you get for an advance will be the only money you ever see from your book because most books don't earn out their advances. However, there is no possible way that you are going to be out-of-pocket for any of the expenses involved, and that's Just Not True for POD.
What you don't understand, and probably don't want to is that editors and publishers don't decide what I read. What they do is decide which manuscripts are worth reading by anybody. I've read bits and pieces of books by a number of aspiring writers and, believe me, Sturgeon's Law is, if anything, an understatement. With traditional companies, I can go to a brick and mortar store, look at the book and see for myself if it's something I'd like. With POD, I can't. And if it turns out to be unreadable, incoherent bombast and fustian, I can't return it and get my money back because POD places don't take returns. Add that to the complete lack of a selection process by the printers and you'll see why I am leery to trust it, even though I too have a humor book in print that way.
I think we're talking apples and oranges here. You're talking about technical books and I'm writing about how it works with fiction. Even so, there's one, important thing you're missing that the traditional companies do: they provide all the money needed to assemble, print, distribute and market your book, then give you a percentage of what comes in. Going POD or self-publishing means that you have to pony up in advance, with no guarantee that you'll recover your investment, let alone make a profit.
There are already companies doing exactly that, as well as freelancers. Alas, even the best of them are hardly ever worth the money spent. Why? Not because they're no good, but because a third-party can never understand your book, your ideas, your voice as well as you do. Even the specialist copy editors at the big publishers don't actually make changes except to correct typos, spelling errors and missed punctuation. They mark up the copy, suggesting changes, then send it back to the author. That way, the feel of the book, which can make or break it, isn't changed. Alas, people who use these third-party services often don't understand this and either let them make the changes or take their suggestions as gospel, sometimes to the book's detriment. Yes, it can be done that way, and it can work well, but it doesn't, more often than not. In the long run, it's best for a new writer to learn how to do their own editing. Sorry to have gone so off-topic on this, but it's an important part of the publishing process that most people don't understand.
If someone wants to put out a quality book with a POD they simply need to pay someone to do the editing for them.
Your point being? All you've done is listed one of the problems of POD for an aspiring author: the need to invest your own money in your work to get it in print. For a professional author, as I've said in another post in this thread, money flows from the publisher, through the agent, if there is one, to the author; never, under any possible circumstances in the other direction.
You mean you actually like every single book published by a major publishing company and read every single one?
Don't be any more silly than you have to be. Of course not. What I meant is that the editorial staff of that company have picked out what they think are the best and most marketable (Not always, I'll grant, the same thing.) of the manuscripts submitted to them for publication and rejected the rest. Presuming that they know their business, that means that the quality of their work will, on the average, be better than that of a POD company, where no such selection process takes place.
The traditional publishers' 90% is usually professionally proofread and edited. Anyone who thinks a major publisher's imprint on a book is a guarantee of quality content really needs to read a lot more.
As far as this goes, you're right. However, if you stick to reading books published by traditional companies, you'll at least miss all of the badly-written, incoherent, unreadable crud that the editors have rejected. That's not true in POD! Except for filtering out hate literature, POD publishes anything you want, exactly the way you give it to them. And, if you're a high-school dropout who flunked English but want to write, your POD is going to look like it was written by a functional illiterate. The one important thing that the traditional imprints have that POD and self-publishing don't is that in order to get your work published that way you have to persuade a total stranger to invest money in it. That's because in the traditional, royalty-paying publishing business, and only in that form of publishing, money always flows from the publisher, through the agent (if there is one) to the author and never, under any circumstances, in the other direction.
Oh, and I wouldn't say that unpublished writers are the only ones feeling this way. I'm on speaking terms with a number of authors (All of whom earn most, if not all of their income from there writing.) and they all say the same thing. Several of them have won major awards, such as Hugos and Nebulas, along with several best sellers. It's not just, or even mostly, the unpublished that feel this way, it's most of the real professional authors.
I think you misunderstand. A traditional publisher only accepts those books that meet certain standards of writing quality. This includes, but is not limited to proper spelling, grammar, syntax and appropriate use of the language. It also, probably, includes minimizing the use of the passive voice and advancing the story by showing what happens instead of telling the reader. POD companies, OTOH, accept whatever the writer wants put into print except, in most cases, hate literature. A traditional publisher will work with the writer to correct any flaws in the manuscript and in some cases require scenes to be rewritten, while a POD company simply takes camera ready copy and puts it out. I'm not saying that there aren't good books to be found in the POD lineups -- Piers Anthony has put his entire backlist out via Xlibris -- but the average quality is poor by comparison to that put out by companies who pick and choose their product.
As far as your not needing a publisher to decide what's good and what's not, last year's National November Novel Writing Contest had 15,335 winners. I doubt that as many as 1% were readable, let alone worth publishing. Would you like to wade through that huge pile of dross looking for the few nuggets of gold? I certainly wouldn't, and I was one of them. No, I'll let literary agents and editors do that for me, TYVM!
No. In self-publishing, you start your own publishing company to handle your own works. (And only your own works, mind you.) Your company is responsible for distribution and handles all marketing and publicity. If you publish through a POD company, that company handles distribution for you, and might even give you a little help getting your marketing and publicity campaigns off the ground, for an extra fee. Not the same at all, because self published books can sell several thousand copies, while POD rarely get above 100.
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So what? We're not talking about keeping your email secure, we're talking about keeping websites from reading your contact list or address book. If you're using POP3 for your email, there's nothing whatsoever in your browser's history, cookies, passwords or other hiding places for those snooping sites to find, and that's what we're talking about.
Use POP3 for all your email. That way no website can ever get access to your contacts or personal data.
You're talking apples and oranges here. I'm not saying that OS drivers are better than proprietary ones, I'm only saying that once the specs are released and OS drivers written, the OEM no longer needs to worry about writing or maintaining them. Of course, they still can if that's what they want to, but that's their choice.
And who's fault is that? If nVidia would release the specs on their cards (Yes, and ATI too.) so that open source drivers could be written, they wouldn't have to worry about it. Since they insist on keeping the details secret and doing all the development in house, they're going to have to rewrite them to fit the changes in each new kernel. I will say, however, that neither company is complaining about it.
I may be half-blind, but unlike you, I don't consider myself an idiot. YMMV and obviously does.
You end up on Moya, fleeing from the Peacekeepers. What else would you expect?
I am part of that older, half-blind crowd you inconsiderate clod, and I hate the new layout! This isn't improving the appearance of Slashdot, it's changing it for the sake of changing it.
Yes, the undefended trademark tends to vanish in the haze -- think of both aspirin and kleenex. I wouldn't mind it if they'd limit their defense to their own shade of magenta, but I think they go too far by claiming that any and all shades are too close to theirs to be used, no matter what the context. Where does it stop? Do they eventually start telling people that they have to doctor photographs to take it out?
Thank you for the information. I hadn't known that there was such a difference, although I'm quite familiar with both flint and obsidian points. I have a friend, Dr. Arizona Gleason, who learned knapping while getting her PhD in Archeology, and now does it for a living. Mostly she uses flint and obsidian, although she also uses scraps of glass as well.
There's a difference here. UPS has trademarked a specific shade of brown, and protects its use. This would be like having the L.A. Dodgers try to trademark blue, instead of just Dodger Blue.
This, of course, ignores the fact that in Greek times the oarsmen of a ship were paid professionals, not slaves. I doubt that there were any galley slaves in the Greek ships that won the battle of Salamis. Not sure about the Persians, though.
Surgeons have experimented with flint scalpels made by modern flint knappers and found them as sharp as surgical steel, easy to sterilize and better at holding their edge. I don't have a cite, but I remember from many years ago reading about a flint knapper who ended up having tools he made used for his own cardiac surgery. Yes, it's quite possible for neolithic medicine men to have better surgical tools than anything less than the best modern steel, even if their understanding of the human body left something to be desired.
br? Look: if Bill and MS want good karma, they should stop posting as AC, and give up trolling, just like anybody else.
No, I'm not an agent, I'm a writer. And, in the SF genre, Hugo, Nebula and Campbell awards are highly regarded, especially by the readers This is why you'll see them prominently mentioned on the book cover or dust jacket.
There's no question that Spamazon is wrong in trying to force all POD companies to use their printing company. That's not the issue in this thread. We've gone off on the side-issue of the difference between POD and traditional publishing companies. Try to keep up, please!
I should probably just drop this, but I feel compelled to reply One More Time. The quality of POD books will vary far more than those from the big companies ever could simply because the editors at the majors reject most of the submissions as being unpublishable and the POD people don't. Yes, you can often read a sample, but if it turns out that the sample is the only part of the book that's been edited into something coherent, you can't send it back for a refund. I'd be the last to say that there's nothing worth buying from the POD people, but caveat emptor is a good motto to have in mind.
I'll go further than that: the odds are that whatever you get for an advance will be the only money you ever see from your book because most books don't earn out their advances. However, there is no possible way that you are going to be out-of-pocket for any of the expenses involved, and that's Just Not True for POD.
What you don't understand, and probably don't want to is that editors and publishers don't decide what I read. What they do is decide which manuscripts are worth reading by anybody. I've read bits and pieces of books by a number of aspiring writers and, believe me, Sturgeon's Law is, if anything, an understatement. With traditional companies, I can go to a brick and mortar store, look at the book and see for myself if it's something I'd like. With POD, I can't. And if it turns out to be unreadable, incoherent bombast and fustian, I can't return it and get my money back because POD places don't take returns. Add that to the complete lack of a selection process by the printers and you'll see why I am leery to trust it, even though I too have a humor book in print that way.
I think we're talking apples and oranges here. You're talking about technical books and I'm writing about how it works with fiction. Even so, there's one, important thing you're missing that the traditional companies do: they provide all the money needed to assemble, print, distribute and market your book, then give you a percentage of what comes in. Going POD or self-publishing means that you have to pony up in advance, with no guarantee that you'll recover your investment, let alone make a profit.
There are already companies doing exactly that, as well as freelancers. Alas, even the best of them are hardly ever worth the money spent. Why? Not because they're no good, but because a third-party can never understand your book, your ideas, your voice as well as you do. Even the specialist copy editors at the big publishers don't actually make changes except to correct typos, spelling errors and missed punctuation. They mark up the copy, suggesting changes, then send it back to the author. That way, the feel of the book, which can make or break it, isn't changed. Alas, people who use these third-party services often don't understand this and either let them make the changes or take their suggestions as gospel, sometimes to the book's detriment. Yes, it can be done that way, and it can work well, but it doesn't, more often than not. In the long run, it's best for a new writer to learn how to do their own editing. Sorry to have gone so off-topic on this, but it's an important part of the publishing process that most people don't understand.
Your point being? All you've done is listed one of the problems of POD for an aspiring author: the need to invest your own money in your work to get it in print. For a professional author, as I've said in another post in this thread, money flows from the publisher, through the agent, if there is one, to the author; never, under any possible circumstances in the other direction.
Don't be any more silly than you have to be. Of course not. What I meant is that the editorial staff of that company have picked out what they think are the best and most marketable (Not always, I'll grant, the same thing.) of the manuscripts submitted to them for publication and rejected the rest. Presuming that they know their business, that means that the quality of their work will, on the average, be better than that of a POD company, where no such selection process takes place.
As far as this goes, you're right. However, if you stick to reading books published by traditional companies, you'll at least miss all of the badly-written, incoherent, unreadable crud that the editors have rejected. That's not true in POD! Except for filtering out hate literature, POD publishes anything you want, exactly the way you give it to them. And, if you're a high-school dropout who flunked English but want to write, your POD is going to look like it was written by a functional illiterate. The one important thing that the traditional imprints have that POD and self-publishing don't is that in order to get your work published that way you have to persuade a total stranger to invest money in it. That's because in the traditional, royalty-paying publishing business, and only in that form of publishing, money always flows from the publisher, through the agent (if there is one) to the author and never, under any circumstances, in the other direction.
Oh, and I wouldn't say that unpublished writers are the only ones feeling this way. I'm on speaking terms with a number of authors (All of whom earn most, if not all of their income from there writing.) and they all say the same thing. Several of them have won major awards, such as Hugos and Nebulas, along with several best sellers. It's not just, or even mostly, the unpublished that feel this way, it's most of the real professional authors.
As far as your not needing a publisher to decide what's good and what's not, last year's National November Novel Writing Contest had 15,335 winners. I doubt that as many as 1% were readable, let alone worth publishing. Would you like to wade through that huge pile of dross looking for the few nuggets of gold? I certainly wouldn't, and I was one of them. No, I'll let literary agents and editors do that for me, TYVM!
No. In self-publishing, you start your own publishing company to handle your own works. (And only your own works, mind you.) Your company is responsible for distribution and handles all marketing and publicity. If you publish through a POD company, that company handles distribution for you, and might even give you a little help getting your marketing and publicity campaigns off the ground, for an extra fee. Not the same at all, because self published books can sell several thousand copies, while POD rarely get above 100.