These days, Pages and Keynote and Numbers are so much better than Microsoft Office on any platform, for the vast majority of users.
I do freelance graphics work, and have worked at many offices, large and small. I often receive work in Microsoft Office formats that I have to prepare for publishing, and I can tell you, in 10 years I have yet to meet an office worker who knows how to work Microsoft Office. Nobody uses Styles, the most basic of word processing features. The work output looks like crap at all times. They can't manage versions, I would constantly send edits to users and have to train them how to approve the edits, and then they would accidentally send me back a version from 3 days ago. PowerPoint presentations are like a kind of eye test, they all use the same 16 colors and are low-res and every presentation has at least one graphic with a white square around it because there is no alpha mask tool in PowerPoint. And everybody other than accountants just uses Excel as a big table. Almost nobody knows how to put in anything other than a very basic sum formula. The problem is, the Microsoft apps look like a 747 dashboard. People are overwhelmed by gewgaws and they give up learning the actual craft of work processing, presenting, and whatever it is that Excel actually does.
And the Apple tools are a fraction of the price and require no administration, and the iPad and iPhone versions are amazing. Every time someone switches to them, their work output goes up dramatically, their work quality goes up dramatically, and their stress goes down.
Yeah, you really are using a different definition of “just works” than Mac users, so it seems like Linux is really for you.
For me, just works is the fact that it takes less than 5 minutes to turn a stock Mac into a Logic workstation with Apogee hardware, and that I can connect any MIDI instrument over USB or Wi-Fi and the Mac recognizes it and works correctly with it. Or that the color management is already on and working and the typography is all professional grade, so I can do graphics work and not have any surprises when I see my work on another system.
For you, you are talking about I-T work “just working.” Updates and patches and so on. Me I don't want to do any I-T work at all. I really do want Apple to do all of that. And they are doing a great job for me. I have almost zero downtime for the last 10 years of so on the Mac, other than a GPU failure one time and a couple of hard disk failures, all of which Apple fixed within 3 days at their expense, and Time Machine restored the data onto the new hard drives. I'm not concerned with updates or patches at all, Software Update has been doing that for me since the 90's, before OS X even shipped.
So you are very correct. If the original poster is concerned with I-T work, maybe that is why he is dissatisfied lately. Apple is not just your hardware maker, they are your I-T consultant, they build you a custom system so you can make music or art or whatever, specifically so you don't have to do I-T work.
LaunchPad descends from Launcher in classic Mac OS. The reason it is necessary for most users today is that users have hundreds of apps, not 5. Take it out of your Dock and ignore it if you don't want to use it.
Mac App Store is a necessary part of a world where there are malicious software developers and consumer users. And also necessary when you have hundreds of apps, not 5. You can ignore it, though, if you like. You can set the Security preference to run anything.
Full screen apps make perfect sense on systems that only run Photoshop all day, or only run Aperture all day, or only run Logic all day. There are many Macs like that. You can ignore the full-screen button if you don't want full screen apps.
Even if iOS never existed, these features would have come to the Mac. They are simply ahead on iOS because iOS moved faster since its launch.
I can't really think of what else would be your problem. I'm running Macs since the 80's and the latest release seems to me to be a very natural extension of everything that has gone before. It hasn't changed in any significant way to me. I hated downloading disk images and installing apps and putting in serial numbers, I hated updating them manually. I hated having 30 things in my Dock and digging through the Applications folder for the rest. Now, I don't keep anything in my Dock, I launch apps from LaunchPad, and my Dock shows me what is running, only the apps I'm actually using. It works a lot better for me. Nothing to do with iOS. In 2001, you could put all your apps in the Dock and it would not even be full. Now, there are just too many.
I strongly recommend you don't look down your nose at these features. They are not only for newbies. Mac App Store protects newbies and enables them to install and use native apps (and pay developers for their work,) but for sophisticated users, it enables you to have hundreds of apps without having to do any updating or managing. If Mac App Store doesn't seem necessary to you, get more apps! It will seem necessary pretty shortly.
Also, I can tell you, I've had like 20 years of virus-free computing. I'm not willing to give that up. I'm glad Apple is continuing to enhance security, because I have unpublished work on my Mac. I can't have viruses and native malware digging through stuff.
Maybe it is browser plug-ins you miss? I certainly don't. They were always supposed to go away. I was a Flash developer from 1997 through about 2002 and we used to dream of a future where vector graphics, animations, and audio video ran in the browser. The Web needs to improve in order to compete with native apps, even if there weren't massive security and administration issues with plug-ins.
If you can get by with a Linux on your desktop, that is great, you should probably do that. But the reason to do it is apps. The non-app part of the Mac is functional, it is just a foundation for the apps. If the apps on a Linux desktop do it for you, then you have that opportunity. If you're not using apps like iMovie, iPhoto, Keynote, Pages, BBEdit, Hype, Xcode, PaintCode, Transmit, iTunes, Pixelmator, Sketch, or Creative Suite, Logic, Final Cut, Avid, Aperture — then use Linux. If you're not depending on subsystems like CoreAudio, CoreMIDI, CoreImage, CoreVideo, QuickTime — then bolt to Linux. I use Linux Web servers but I use a Mac workstation because I really need the unique-to-the-Mac apps. The apps pay for themselves for me many times over compared to any other system.
Because something in the mouse is stimulating the tooth to grow. In your own adult mouth, there is nothing that will stimulate a new tooth to grow from scratch. Ideally, someone would develop a method to grow a tooth in your own mouth, but that's another step away from this.
As gross as this sounds, dental implants sound much worse. They drill a hole in your jaw and put in a giant screw. Hopefully they put it in right. Here at least it is a real tooth, grown from a piece of your own gums.
The only rule in English is there are no rules. We specifically designed it that way to infuriate the French. Whatever “rule” you think you’re following, 50% of the world’s English speakers do it the other way. In half the world’s schools they teach you that “my friend and I” is incorrect, and in the other half, they teach you that “me and my friend” is incorrect. Half the words in English are adopted from other languages — even American.
No rules means no referees. It’s always inappropriate to correct someone’s English.
You can subscribe to Netflix and soak your eyeballs in content if you want. You can also soak a video camera in the content if you want. It's flying through your living room, and you can record it. That is where you exercise your fair use. In your living room, not on Netflix servers. What is coming into your eyeballs can also go into your video camera, and you can use that recording in any non-commercial way. You don't have a right to demand that Netflix servers store the content in the particular digital format you favor. You don't have a right to demand they send their content over the Internet in an unencrypted form because that would be more convenient to you. The content is not published on a server, it is published in a Netflix app on the screen in front of you.
Being a technical person, you are probably thinking, “well, I want to copy the content in the highest possible quality, and accessing the server will give me better quality than what I get on my camcorder.” Also bullshit. The content that is coming out of the screen is better quality than the content that is coming off the server, because what is coming off the screen is motion video, while what is coming off the server is just an encrypted bitstream, not video at all. The best possible picture is already there with you in the room. If you don't like it, go ahead and record the encrypted bitstream. But you don't have a right to the key, same as you don't have the right to the master tapes to Led Zeppelin IV because you bought the LP. If you copy the LP, it will have clicks and pops and vinyl distortion, so you may want the master tapes to get a much better sound. Well, you don't have a right to that unpublished work. The encrypted bitstream between a Netflix server and client is also unpublished work — it is not published until it hits the screen in decrypted form.
In short:
- Netflix servers = master tapes <— unpublished works - Netflix client = LP <— published works... you only have a right to fair use on published works.
Netflix is a subscription. People understand they will lose access to the content when they cancel their subscription.
On iPad at least, you can screenshot a Netflix stream if you want to fair use it in a blog post or something.
The most important thing when you're taking an ethical stand is to ensure that everybody who is participating is a consenting adult who is informed about what is going on. If so, then WTF is the problem? Nobody is getting conned by Netflix. The only complaint I have with them after 3 years of subscribing is the fucking Silverlight on Mac. You can't port the 3 year old iPad app over? Sheesh.
Buy an AppleTV for $99 and you can watch Netflix on it. Or get an iPad mini — Netflix has been on iPad since the beginning in 2010. If you move Netflix and similar stuff off your Mac, not only is that stuff better on iOS, but it makes your Mac better, enables you to focus it on workstation tasks that only the Mac can do.
> Plus, Jobs didn't put up with that sort of thing in his little walled garden.
By that I guess you mean the only name-brand PC to ship with an open source core OS, open source browser engine, and over 200 open source projects installed. Which has supported HTML5 out-of-the-box since 2003, before it was even called HTML5. And is from the company behind WebKit, the most successful open source project with the possible exception of Linux.
I think your whole comment is a mistake. And since I have a monopoly on fining people for mistaken comments, I charge you $250 for your comment. Payable to The Smile Train, who for $250, will fix a kid's cleft palate. Don't be a hypocrite and not pay — you already said $250 is a small price to pay to learn from your mistakes.
The Smile Train is the reason I resent the $250 per book I have to pay for fucking ISBN's. Because I would rather give that $250 to The Smile Train and fix some kid's cleft palate and restore his hearing and ability to speak and enable him to have a better life. I give a portion of every book to The Smile Train, and I give a portion of every book to fucking Bowker. Guess who deserves the money more? Yes, the disabled kids and the volunteer surgeons and nurses who fix their simple birth defect, something that no kid should even have to go begging for in the first place.
Nobody is learning any lessons from fucking highway-robbery ISBN's. Your comment is both ridiculous and insulting.
I also publish sound recordings, which have ISRC's. For $70, I bought an “ISRC prefix” that is unique to me, and enables me to generate 10,000 ISRC numbers per year for 100 years. So why in the hell am I paying $250 for 10 ISBN's? In Canada, you get an ISBN prefix for free and generate your own ISBN's. Maybe not “for free” — you pay $0.001 per year in taxes so that all the books published in Canada can be sold, archived, and the cultural legacy preserved with minimal waste of precious human time and effort (which adds up to whole lifetimes very quickly.)
So ISRC's are $0.00007 each, but ISBN's are $125 each, or $25 each if you buy 10 at a time. How does that make any sense?
ISSN's are free in the US. The Library of Congress doles them out. Why the fuck doesn't Library of Congress also dole out ISBN's for free? It would cost less money for them to do that than it does for them to deal with books that lack ISBN's (Amazon has lots of these) and books that have duplicate ISBN's (because somebody resold the same ISBN over and over to self-publishers who balked at $250 per title.)
So please, spare ME.
Don't forget to pay $250 to The Smile Train and fix a kid's mouth and redeem your stupid mistake.
How do you know $125 is the actual cost of one ISBN? There is no market for ISBN's, only a monopoly.
In Canada and many other countries, the cost of one ISBN is free. A whole ISBN prefix can be had for free. There ends up being no excuse not to apply an ISBN, and so all books have ISBN's, and everybody benefits.
> Costco
What has a private grocery store got to do with public infrastructure like ISBN's? An ISBN costs nothing to create, and you can't eat it. We put them on books not for our own private interest, but for the good of society and culture. So you can find a specific book 20 years from now. So retailers can save time and money in administrative costs and put that into better serving readers.
A much better analogy is Social Security Numbers. You don't want to have one, but you have one for the benefit of the whole society. What possible benefit would there be to charging people to obtain a Social Security Number? We want them to have a job, we want them to be uniquely identified in the Social Security database.
I also don't think you understand that books have multiple ISBN's. So we are talking about $250 per title. For what?
Library of Congress, for one. They need ISBN's. Every bookstore with the exception of Amazon, who are a technology company and have worked around that. Every publisher, whose systems are all setup assuming ISBN's.
URL's are not suitable, because that requires managing the domain name and server, and paying for both. When that fails, the book becomes unidentifiable. Further, there is no standard for how to structure the URL, how to read it. How long can your book URL be?
An ISBN is more akin to the unique identifier in a website's database than it is to the website's URL's.
Even if you have a book URL like jackkerouac.com/on/the/road — that book is available in possibly hundreds of editions, each with its own ISBN. For example, the audio book has its own ISBN. The paperback has its own. Another paperback with different cover art has its own. How do you state all that in the URL? You can't even use jackkerouac.com/paperback/on/the/road because there are dozens of paperbacks. So you end up thinking about things like jackkerouac.com/095F013A-15A0-43A0-A384-6E2DF3301399 which is essentially a non-standard ISBN. Is the database at a book retailer setup to hold that? Probably not. Is it better than an ISBN? Probably not.
ISBN's used to be shorter, they were upped to 13 characters. The best way forward, in my opinion, is to up them again to 32 characters and use UUID's, which a publisher can use a tool like uuidgen (ships with every Mac) to generate a unique number on their own, without any central database that has to make sure no duplicates are given out. Although it would require a lot of work to do that, it would at least solve the problem for the foreseeable future. It could be phased in as “electronic ISBN's” and apply to eBooks only at first.
> By putting an ISBN on your work, it is available in every wholesalers and retailer's database. > Your book can be ordered anywhere by anyone.
Not even close to true.
ISBN's are just serial numbers. Applying a serial number to a product does not magically cause it to appear in ordering systems around the country or globe. Registering a domain name does not cause you to appear in everybody's bookmark list in their browser. All that separates ISBN's from a serial number is they have to be unique, therefore there has to be some system to dole them out, same as domain names. You obtain an ISBN and apply it to your book and then — nothing happens. Nothing at all.
You are imagining that a $125 ISBN comes with some kind of distribution component. No, it doesn't. To get your book into ordering systems, you have to actually get the book into ordering systems.
> Authors don't have to pay that much for an ISBN when they self publish. Lulu.com for instance > charges $40 for a "global distribution package" which includes an ISBN.
Well, first, Lulu.com is technically a publisher. We are talking here about self-publishing. Lulu.com can generate ISBN's cheaply because they buy them in lots of 10,000, just like other publishers. We're talking here about the fact that a bullshit monopoly is artificially inflating the cost of self-publishing. I shouldn't be driven to use a publisher because ISBN's are only sensibly-priced in lots of 10,000.
And Lulu.com is only setup to publish Word documents, essentially. You cannot even generate your own ePub, let alone make a photo book or interactive book with audio video and so on. It is not suitable for about 60% of the books in the bookstore that can't be represented in a Word document. These are the books that are the most missing from the electronic catalog, which is why iBooks Author and iPad are so important, and why iBookstore's 70% royalty (which Amazon then had to adopt) is so important. It encourages independent grassroots book publishing like App Store encourages 1-person developer teams.
Some self-published books are textbooks written by teachers for their own students, because the school can't afford textbooks any other way. These books should also have ISBN's. There is no money to pay a bullshit monopolist for those ISBN's.
You can't trust a resold ISBN to be unique. So that alone shows that the system is broken. It makes no sense at all for anyone to be selling an ISBN to anyone. That is basically just gambling. Casino economy. No product, no benefit, just money changing hands.
Every book that lacks an ISBN on Kindle and every book that was published with a non-unique ISBN is a huge ball of pain for everybody in publishing plus Library of Congress. You're saying “game on” to that! ISBN's aren't too expensive because hey, you can buy one from a guy I know.
So as usual, the American way is to privatize public infrastructure (ISBN's, medicine, wireless networks) and then pay more, but get less. In Canada, the ISBN's are free to publishers and it is your civic duty to assign one to your book so that you don't generate massive problems for everyone else as your book goes through its life. And every book has a unique ISBN. In the US, you pay hundreds of dollars to get ISBN's for one book (pay more) yet Amazon encourages you to publish without an ISBN, and people are buying duplicate ISBN's off the back of a truck (get less) and ultimately, Library of Congress will spend more money sorting this out than it would cost them to dole out ISBN's. It is crazy.
How about if before you took that $500 college course, you had to get a special ID number for $125 from a bullshit monopolist, increasing the cost of your course to $625? How about if you needed 6 or 7 special ID numbers for that one college course (like a book that is published in 6 or 7 formats,) so you buy 10 of them for $250 and now your course is $750, a 50% markup going to a bullshit monopolist?
I agree, investing money in schooling or professional opportunities can pay off. But that money should go to teachers and so on, not to people who are milking the fact that they for some reason were sold the only highway that leads to getting these numbers.
The stupidest part is the Library of Congress doles out ISSN's for free, but instead of doling out ISBN's for free, they direct you to the bullshit private monopolist. If Library of Congress was doing it for free, then we wouldn't have this mess on Kindle where there are thousands of books without ISBN's — that is going to fuck up Library of Congress real bad all by itself. And we'd have more books published and grow the economy. ISBN's are infrastructure, not a private investment or private profit center.
> Realistically, if you have no other income than self publishing, you are dead broke > and you should get a job flipping burgers and write on your time off.
Take out “self“ and it is just as true and just as stupid.
You're forgetting that many authors today have published both ways. There is not necessarily a bunch of self-publishers separate from everyone else.
Print publishing collapsed for good in 2009. The cost of paper is 200% the cost of a book. There are hundreds of thousands of missing books — books that should have been published by a healthy publishing industry but were not simply because of paper costs. We published fewer and fewer books every year of the 21st century, not because people were reading less, but because paper was too expensive.
Now, a writer can write his or her manuscript, hire an editor, drop the manuscript into iBooks Author and/or export it from Pages as ePub, and publish a book where they keep 70% of retail. A print book might be 5% for the writer, or less. And with iBooks Author, you can do interactivity, audio, video, 3D — you can for example do a cookbook that is part cookbook and part cooking show, with interactivity that asks you how many you want to serve and then does the math on the recipe so your ingredients are exactly right, and even links you out to an online service that will deliver those ingredients. That is the kind of thing that makes readers reach for their wallets.
So even though my print books were done by a giant publisher and sold in dozens of countries and translated into 25 languages, my electronic books make me more money, and are much more fun to make, much more creative.
There are authors making $1 million per year from Kindle romance novels. I never heard of a romance writer making $1 million lifetime in print books.
So I sympathize somewhat with your negativity because yes, publishing as an industry is fucked right now. However, I think we are just in a transition between print and digital, and readers are sick of the tired content on the Web and more and more people want to pay a cheap price for something great rather than get something awful for free. So it is getting better and I think the industry will be healthy soon, when it takes advantage of digital instead of fighting it, and when even more people have iPads with Retina Display. Buying and reading books on iPad is easier than surfing the Web, and even with low cover prices, we can make more money than expensive print books.
It is expensive because doling out a bullshit number is not comparable to cover art. If the ISBN was $10, that would be $115 extra for the cover artist, or the copy editor, or someone else who is actually contributing to the book with their sweat.
It is expensive because the print book, ePub, iBook, Kindle, and audio book all require their own ISBN's. And future revisions of the book also require their own ISBN's. In print, that might be 2 revisions — in digital, we might revise an iBook every month.
It is expensive because in Canada and other countries, ISBN's are free. They didn't establish a private monopoly that can extort money from publishers at every turn.
It is expensive because there is almost no money in publishing. Publishing houses are full of women because men won't work that cheap. Writers often get a tiny fraction of a book's price.
With ISRC numbers, which are like ISBN's for sound recordings, every publisher pays a $70 one-time fee and gets their own unique “ISRC prefix,” which is the first 5 characters of an ISRC number. That prefix is to be used by only one publisher, who can then publish 10,000 songs per year for 100 years. You make your own ISRC's by going prefix+2-digit-year+5-digit-serial. That kind of approach is much better. The $70 from each publisher supports the system that doles out the numbers, but doesn't rob the publisher at every turn.
As for cover artists, they are the lowest of the low on the food chain. Many books don't even have cover art. You pay an editor and copy editor first. If you have some money to buy some bullshit stock photo and stick it on there. So the $250 for an ISBN (because you need a block of 10 for the various formats) might actually be your whole cover art budget — the money that was going to buy a stock photo. Your book might go without cover art because you had to pay through the nose to be doled out a bullshit number.
ISBN uniquely identifies just one book, not one book title. If you revise the book, it gets a new ISBN.
Also, the paper book, the ePub, the iBook, the Kindle book, and the audio book all get their own ISBN's.
So a book that is revised 3 times and ships in 5 formats needs 15 different ISBN's.
> bad for inventory control
Just the opposite. The way you can identify the older versions of a book is by their unique ISBN's. So you stop selling the old ISBN, and start selling the new ISBN. If they both have the same ISBN, how do you now which are old and which are new? Looking at them? We have numbers so we don't have to sort books manually.
They could be replaced by URL's, i.e. the identifier for “On the Road” could be jackkerouac.com/on/the/road and could lead to a website with credits and other metadata.
If domain names were free, squatters would run scripts to register every possible character combination, then sell them to the highest bidder. The price of domain names would go up.
To be free, there would have to be rules like you have to put up a real website before you register the name, and if the server goes offline for a month you lose the name.
Slashdot Mirror
These days, Pages and Keynote and Numbers are so much better than Microsoft Office on any platform, for the vast majority of users.
I do freelance graphics work, and have worked at many offices, large and small. I often receive work in Microsoft Office formats that I have to prepare for publishing, and I can tell you, in 10 years I have yet to meet an office worker who knows how to work Microsoft Office. Nobody uses Styles, the most basic of word processing features. The work output looks like crap at all times. They can't manage versions, I would constantly send edits to users and have to train them how to approve the edits, and then they would accidentally send me back a version from 3 days ago. PowerPoint presentations are like a kind of eye test, they all use the same 16 colors and are low-res and every presentation has at least one graphic with a white square around it because there is no alpha mask tool in PowerPoint. And everybody other than accountants just uses Excel as a big table. Almost nobody knows how to put in anything other than a very basic sum formula. The problem is, the Microsoft apps look like a 747 dashboard. People are overwhelmed by gewgaws and they give up learning the actual craft of work processing, presenting, and whatever it is that Excel actually does.
And the Apple tools are a fraction of the price and require no administration, and the iPad and iPhone versions are amazing. Every time someone switches to them, their work output goes up dramatically, their work quality goes up dramatically, and their stress goes down.
Yeah, you really are using a different definition of “just works” than Mac users, so it seems like Linux is really for you.
For me, just works is the fact that it takes less than 5 minutes to turn a stock Mac into a Logic workstation with Apogee hardware, and that I can connect any MIDI instrument over USB or Wi-Fi and the Mac recognizes it and works correctly with it. Or that the color management is already on and working and the typography is all professional grade, so I can do graphics work and not have any surprises when I see my work on another system.
For you, you are talking about I-T work “just working.” Updates and patches and so on. Me I don't want to do any I-T work at all. I really do want Apple to do all of that. And they are doing a great job for me. I have almost zero downtime for the last 10 years of so on the Mac, other than a GPU failure one time and a couple of hard disk failures, all of which Apple fixed within 3 days at their expense, and Time Machine restored the data onto the new hard drives. I'm not concerned with updates or patches at all, Software Update has been doing that for me since the 90's, before OS X even shipped.
So you are very correct. If the original poster is concerned with I-T work, maybe that is why he is dissatisfied lately. Apple is not just your hardware maker, they are your I-T consultant, they build you a custom system so you can make music or art or whatever, specifically so you don't have to do I-T work.
LaunchPad descends from Launcher in classic Mac OS. The reason it is necessary for most users today is that users have hundreds of apps, not 5. Take it out of your Dock and ignore it if you don't want to use it.
Mac App Store is a necessary part of a world where there are malicious software developers and consumer users. And also necessary when you have hundreds of apps, not 5. You can ignore it, though, if you like. You can set the Security preference to run anything.
Full screen apps make perfect sense on systems that only run Photoshop all day, or only run Aperture all day, or only run Logic all day. There are many Macs like that. You can ignore the full-screen button if you don't want full screen apps.
Even if iOS never existed, these features would have come to the Mac. They are simply ahead on iOS because iOS moved faster since its launch.
I can't really think of what else would be your problem. I'm running Macs since the 80's and the latest release seems to me to be a very natural extension of everything that has gone before. It hasn't changed in any significant way to me. I hated downloading disk images and installing apps and putting in serial numbers, I hated updating them manually. I hated having 30 things in my Dock and digging through the Applications folder for the rest. Now, I don't keep anything in my Dock, I launch apps from LaunchPad, and my Dock shows me what is running, only the apps I'm actually using. It works a lot better for me. Nothing to do with iOS. In 2001, you could put all your apps in the Dock and it would not even be full. Now, there are just too many.
I strongly recommend you don't look down your nose at these features. They are not only for newbies. Mac App Store protects newbies and enables them to install and use native apps (and pay developers for their work,) but for sophisticated users, it enables you to have hundreds of apps without having to do any updating or managing. If Mac App Store doesn't seem necessary to you, get more apps! It will seem necessary pretty shortly.
Also, I can tell you, I've had like 20 years of virus-free computing. I'm not willing to give that up. I'm glad Apple is continuing to enhance security, because I have unpublished work on my Mac. I can't have viruses and native malware digging through stuff.
Maybe it is browser plug-ins you miss? I certainly don't. They were always supposed to go away. I was a Flash developer from 1997 through about 2002 and we used to dream of a future where vector graphics, animations, and audio video ran in the browser. The Web needs to improve in order to compete with native apps, even if there weren't massive security and administration issues with plug-ins.
If you can get by with a Linux on your desktop, that is great, you should probably do that. But the reason to do it is apps. The non-app part of the Mac is functional, it is just a foundation for the apps. If the apps on a Linux desktop do it for you, then you have that opportunity. If you're not using apps like iMovie, iPhoto, Keynote, Pages, BBEdit, Hype, Xcode, PaintCode, Transmit, iTunes, Pixelmator, Sketch, or Creative Suite, Logic, Final Cut, Avid, Aperture — then use Linux. If you're not depending on subsystems like CoreAudio, CoreMIDI, CoreImage, CoreVideo, QuickTime — then bolt to Linux. I use Linux Web servers but I use a Mac workstation because I really need the unique-to-the-Mac apps. The apps pay for themselves for me many times over compared to any other system.
Because something in the mouse is stimulating the tooth to grow. In your own adult mouth, there is nothing that will stimulate a new tooth to grow from scratch. Ideally, someone would develop a method to grow a tooth in your own mouth, but that's another step away from this.
Anthony Atala: Printing a human kidney | Video on TED.com
That has already been done.
Anthony Atala: Printing a human kidney | Video on TED.com
http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney.html
As gross as this sounds, dental implants sound much worse. They drill a hole in your jaw and put in a giant screw. Hopefully they put it in right. Here at least it is a real tooth, grown from a piece of your own gums.
The only rule in English is there are no rules. We specifically designed it that way to infuriate the French. Whatever “rule” you think you’re following, 50% of the world’s English speakers do it the other way. In half the world’s schools they teach you that “my friend and I” is incorrect, and in the other half, they teach you that “me and my friend” is incorrect. Half the words in English are adopted from other languages — even American.
No rules means no referees. It’s always inappropriate to correct someone’s English.
No, that is bullshit.
You can subscribe to Netflix and soak your eyeballs in content if you want. You can also soak a video camera in the content if you want. It's flying through your living room, and you can record it. That is where you exercise your fair use. In your living room, not on Netflix servers. What is coming into your eyeballs can also go into your video camera, and you can use that recording in any non-commercial way. You don't have a right to demand that Netflix servers store the content in the particular digital format you favor. You don't have a right to demand they send their content over the Internet in an unencrypted form because that would be more convenient to you. The content is not published on a server, it is published in a Netflix app on the screen in front of you.
Being a technical person, you are probably thinking, “well, I want to copy the content in the highest possible quality, and accessing the server will give me better quality than what I get on my camcorder.” Also bullshit. The content that is coming out of the screen is better quality than the content that is coming off the server, because what is coming off the screen is motion video, while what is coming off the server is just an encrypted bitstream, not video at all. The best possible picture is already there with you in the room. If you don't like it, go ahead and record the encrypted bitstream. But you don't have a right to the key, same as you don't have the right to the master tapes to Led Zeppelin IV because you bought the LP. If you copy the LP, it will have clicks and pops and vinyl distortion, so you may want the master tapes to get a much better sound. Well, you don't have a right to that unpublished work. The encrypted bitstream between a Netflix server and client is also unpublished work — it is not published until it hits the screen in decrypted form.
In short:
- Netflix servers = master tapes <— unpublished works ... you only have a right to fair use on published works.
- Netflix client = LP <— published works
Netflix is a subscription. People understand they will lose access to the content when they cancel their subscription.
On iPad at least, you can screenshot a Netflix stream if you want to fair use it in a blog post or something.
The most important thing when you're taking an ethical stand is to ensure that everybody who is participating is a consenting adult who is informed about what is going on. If so, then WTF is the problem? Nobody is getting conned by Netflix. The only complaint I have with them after 3 years of subscribing is the fucking Silverlight on Mac. You can't port the 3 year old iPad app over? Sheesh.
Buy an AppleTV for $99 and you can watch Netflix on it. Or get an iPad mini — Netflix has been on iPad since the beginning in 2010. If you move Netflix and similar stuff off your Mac, not only is that stuff better on iOS, but it makes your Mac better, enables you to focus it on workstation tasks that only the Mac can do.
> Plus, Jobs didn't put up with that sort of thing in his little walled garden.
By that I guess you mean the only name-brand PC to ship with an open source core OS, open source browser engine, and over 200 open source projects installed. Which has supported HTML5 out-of-the-box since 2003, before it was even called HTML5. And is from the company behind WebKit, the most successful open source project with the possible exception of Linux.
I think your whole comment is a mistake. And since I have a monopoly on fining people for mistaken comments, I charge you $250 for your comment. Payable to The Smile Train, who for $250, will fix a kid's cleft palate. Don't be a hypocrite and not pay — you already said $250 is a small price to pay to learn from your mistakes.
The Smile Train is the reason I resent the $250 per book I have to pay for fucking ISBN's. Because I would rather give that $250 to The Smile Train and fix some kid's cleft palate and restore his hearing and ability to speak and enable him to have a better life. I give a portion of every book to The Smile Train, and I give a portion of every book to fucking Bowker. Guess who deserves the money more? Yes, the disabled kids and the volunteer surgeons and nurses who fix their simple birth defect, something that no kid should even have to go begging for in the first place.
Nobody is learning any lessons from fucking highway-robbery ISBN's. Your comment is both ridiculous and insulting.
I also publish sound recordings, which have ISRC's. For $70, I bought an “ISRC prefix” that is unique to me, and enables me to generate 10,000 ISRC numbers per year for 100 years. So why in the hell am I paying $250 for 10 ISBN's? In Canada, you get an ISBN prefix for free and generate your own ISBN's. Maybe not “for free” — you pay $0.001 per year in taxes so that all the books published in Canada can be sold, archived, and the cultural legacy preserved with minimal waste of precious human time and effort (which adds up to whole lifetimes very quickly.)
So ISRC's are $0.00007 each, but ISBN's are $125 each, or $25 each if you buy 10 at a time. How does that make any sense?
ISSN's are free in the US. The Library of Congress doles them out. Why the fuck doesn't Library of Congress also dole out ISBN's for free? It would cost less money for them to do that than it does for them to deal with books that lack ISBN's (Amazon has lots of these) and books that have duplicate ISBN's (because somebody resold the same ISBN over and over to self-publishers who balked at $250 per title.)
So please, spare ME.
Don't forget to pay $250 to The Smile Train and fix a kid's mouth and redeem your stupid mistake.
How do you know $125 is the actual cost of one ISBN? There is no market for ISBN's, only a monopoly.
In Canada and many other countries, the cost of one ISBN is free. A whole ISBN prefix can be had for free. There ends up being no excuse not to apply an ISBN, and so all books have ISBN's, and everybody benefits.
> Costco
What has a private grocery store got to do with public infrastructure like ISBN's? An ISBN costs nothing to create, and you can't eat it. We put them on books not for our own private interest, but for the good of society and culture. So you can find a specific book 20 years from now. So retailers can save time and money in administrative costs and put that into better serving readers.
A much better analogy is Social Security Numbers. You don't want to have one, but you have one for the benefit of the whole society. What possible benefit would there be to charging people to obtain a Social Security Number? We want them to have a job, we want them to be uniquely identified in the Social Security database.
I also don't think you understand that books have multiple ISBN's. So we are talking about $250 per title. For what?
Library of Congress, for one. They need ISBN's. Every bookstore with the exception of Amazon, who are a technology company and have worked around that. Every publisher, whose systems are all setup assuming ISBN's.
URL's are not suitable, because that requires managing the domain name and server, and paying for both. When that fails, the book becomes unidentifiable. Further, there is no standard for how to structure the URL, how to read it. How long can your book URL be?
An ISBN is more akin to the unique identifier in a website's database than it is to the website's URL's.
Even if you have a book URL like jackkerouac.com/on/the/road — that book is available in possibly hundreds of editions, each with its own ISBN. For example, the audio book has its own ISBN. The paperback has its own. Another paperback with different cover art has its own. How do you state all that in the URL? You can't even use jackkerouac.com/paperback/on/the/road because there are dozens of paperbacks. So you end up thinking about things like jackkerouac.com/095F013A-15A0-43A0-A384-6E2DF3301399 which is essentially a non-standard ISBN. Is the database at a book retailer setup to hold that? Probably not. Is it better than an ISBN? Probably not.
ISBN's used to be shorter, they were upped to 13 characters. The best way forward, in my opinion, is to up them again to 32 characters and use UUID's, which a publisher can use a tool like uuidgen (ships with every Mac) to generate a unique number on their own, without any central database that has to make sure no duplicates are given out. Although it would require a lot of work to do that, it would at least solve the problem for the foreseeable future. It could be phased in as “electronic ISBN's” and apply to eBooks only at first.
> By putting an ISBN on your work, it is available in every wholesalers and retailer's database.
> Your book can be ordered anywhere by anyone.
Not even close to true.
ISBN's are just serial numbers. Applying a serial number to a product does not magically cause it to appear in ordering systems around the country or globe. Registering a domain name does not cause you to appear in everybody's bookmark list in their browser. All that separates ISBN's from a serial number is they have to be unique, therefore there has to be some system to dole them out, same as domain names. You obtain an ISBN and apply it to your book and then — nothing happens. Nothing at all.
You are imagining that a $125 ISBN comes with some kind of distribution component. No, it doesn't. To get your book into ordering systems, you have to actually get the book into ordering systems.
> Authors don't have to pay that much for an ISBN when they self publish. Lulu.com for instance
> charges $40 for a "global distribution package" which includes an ISBN.
Well, first, Lulu.com is technically a publisher. We are talking here about self-publishing. Lulu.com can generate ISBN's cheaply because they buy them in lots of 10,000, just like other publishers. We're talking here about the fact that a bullshit monopoly is artificially inflating the cost of self-publishing. I shouldn't be driven to use a publisher because ISBN's are only sensibly-priced in lots of 10,000.
And Lulu.com is only setup to publish Word documents, essentially. You cannot even generate your own ePub, let alone make a photo book or interactive book with audio video and so on. It is not suitable for about 60% of the books in the bookstore that can't be represented in a Word document. These are the books that are the most missing from the electronic catalog, which is why iBooks Author and iPad are so important, and why iBookstore's 70% royalty (which Amazon then had to adopt) is so important. It encourages independent grassroots book publishing like App Store encourages 1-person developer teams.
Some self-published books are textbooks written by teachers for their own students, because the school can't afford textbooks any other way. These books should also have ISBN's. There is no money to pay a bullshit monopolist for those ISBN's.
You can't trust a resold ISBN to be unique. So that alone shows that the system is broken. It makes no sense at all for anyone to be selling an ISBN to anyone. That is basically just gambling. Casino economy. No product, no benefit, just money changing hands.
Every book that lacks an ISBN on Kindle and every book that was published with a non-unique ISBN is a huge ball of pain for everybody in publishing plus Library of Congress. You're saying “game on” to that! ISBN's aren't too expensive because hey, you can buy one from a guy I know.
So as usual, the American way is to privatize public infrastructure (ISBN's, medicine, wireless networks) and then pay more, but get less. In Canada, the ISBN's are free to publishers and it is your civic duty to assign one to your book so that you don't generate massive problems for everyone else as your book goes through its life. And every book has a unique ISBN. In the US, you pay hundreds of dollars to get ISBN's for one book (pay more) yet Amazon encourages you to publish without an ISBN, and people are buying duplicate ISBN's off the back of a truck (get less) and ultimately, Library of Congress will spend more money sorting this out than it would cost them to dole out ISBN's. It is crazy.
How about if before you took that $500 college course, you had to get a special ID number for $125 from a bullshit monopolist, increasing the cost of your course to $625? How about if you needed 6 or 7 special ID numbers for that one college course (like a book that is published in 6 or 7 formats,) so you buy 10 of them for $250 and now your course is $750, a 50% markup going to a bullshit monopolist?
I agree, investing money in schooling or professional opportunities can pay off. But that money should go to teachers and so on, not to people who are milking the fact that they for some reason were sold the only highway that leads to getting these numbers.
The stupidest part is the Library of Congress doles out ISSN's for free, but instead of doling out ISBN's for free, they direct you to the bullshit private monopolist. If Library of Congress was doing it for free, then we wouldn't have this mess on Kindle where there are thousands of books without ISBN's — that is going to fuck up Library of Congress real bad all by itself. And we'd have more books published and grow the economy. ISBN's are infrastructure, not a private investment or private profit center.
> Realistically, if you have no other income than self publishing, you are dead broke
> and you should get a job flipping burgers and write on your time off.
Take out “self“ and it is just as true and just as stupid.
You're forgetting that many authors today have published both ways. There is not necessarily a bunch of self-publishers separate from everyone else.
Print publishing collapsed for good in 2009. The cost of paper is 200% the cost of a book. There are hundreds of thousands of missing books — books that should have been published by a healthy publishing industry but were not simply because of paper costs. We published fewer and fewer books every year of the 21st century, not because people were reading less, but because paper was too expensive.
Now, a writer can write his or her manuscript, hire an editor, drop the manuscript into iBooks Author and/or export it from Pages as ePub, and publish a book where they keep 70% of retail. A print book might be 5% for the writer, or less. And with iBooks Author, you can do interactivity, audio, video, 3D — you can for example do a cookbook that is part cookbook and part cooking show, with interactivity that asks you how many you want to serve and then does the math on the recipe so your ingredients are exactly right, and even links you out to an online service that will deliver those ingredients. That is the kind of thing that makes readers reach for their wallets.
So even though my print books were done by a giant publisher and sold in dozens of countries and translated into 25 languages, my electronic books make me more money, and are much more fun to make, much more creative.
There are authors making $1 million per year from Kindle romance novels. I never heard of a romance writer making $1 million lifetime in print books.
So I sympathize somewhat with your negativity because yes, publishing as an industry is fucked right now. However, I think we are just in a transition between print and digital, and readers are sick of the tired content on the Web and more and more people want to pay a cheap price for something great rather than get something awful for free. So it is getting better and I think the industry will be healthy soon, when it takes advantage of digital instead of fighting it, and when even more people have iPads with Retina Display. Buying and reading books on iPad is easier than surfing the Web, and even with low cover prices, we can make more money than expensive print books.
Because ISBN's go back many years and were done in a bureaucratic way. They are 13 digits now but used to have fewer digits.
It is expensive because doling out a bullshit number is not comparable to cover art. If the ISBN was $10, that would be $115 extra for the cover artist, or the copy editor, or someone else who is actually contributing to the book with their sweat.
It is expensive because the print book, ePub, iBook, Kindle, and audio book all require their own ISBN's. And future revisions of the book also require their own ISBN's. In print, that might be 2 revisions — in digital, we might revise an iBook every month.
It is expensive because in Canada and other countries, ISBN's are free. They didn't establish a private monopoly that can extort money from publishers at every turn.
It is expensive because there is almost no money in publishing. Publishing houses are full of women because men won't work that cheap. Writers often get a tiny fraction of a book's price.
With ISRC numbers, which are like ISBN's for sound recordings, every publisher pays a $70 one-time fee and gets their own unique “ISRC prefix,” which is the first 5 characters of an ISRC number. That prefix is to be used by only one publisher, who can then publish 10,000 songs per year for 100 years. You make your own ISRC's by going prefix+2-digit-year+5-digit-serial. That kind of approach is much better. The $70 from each publisher supports the system that doles out the numbers, but doesn't rob the publisher at every turn.
As for cover artists, they are the lowest of the low on the food chain. Many books don't even have cover art. You pay an editor and copy editor first. If you have some money to buy some bullshit stock photo and stick it on there. So the $250 for an ISBN (because you need a block of 10 for the various formats) might actually be your whole cover art budget — the money that was going to buy a stock photo. Your book might go without cover art because you had to pay through the nose to be doled out a bullshit number.
I don't know about Microsoft platforms, but in bash there is uuidgen command that makes GUIDs.
ISBN uniquely identifies just one book, not one book title. If you revise the book, it gets a new ISBN.
Also, the paper book, the ePub, the iBook, the Kindle book, and the audio book all get their own ISBN's.
So a book that is revised 3 times and ships in 5 formats needs 15 different ISBN's.
> bad for inventory control
Just the opposite. The way you can identify the older versions of a book is by their unique ISBN's. So you stop selling the old ISBN, and start selling the new ISBN. If they both have the same ISBN, how do you now which are old and which are new? Looking at them? We have numbers so we don't have to sort books manually.
They could be replaced by URL's, i.e. the identifier for “On the Road” could be jackkerouac.com/on/the/road and could lead to a website with credits and other metadata.
If domain names were free, squatters would run scripts to register every possible character combination, then sell them to the highest bidder. The price of domain names would go up.
To be free, there would have to be rules like you have to put up a real website before you register the name, and if the server goes offline for a month you lose the name.