And they typically only did it on a small part of the catalog- popular books to attract people, and then books further down the sales list would sell for a profit to make up for it.
There were a number of different such efforts that were hyped within the industry as the thing that would displace Amazon and restore full control of e-book retail to the publishing industry.
The failure of all those efforts is why the big publishers were willing to join together and sign on to a deal to try to swap Amazon's practical domination of the retail e-book market for Apple domination on terms slightly more favorable to the publishers.
I recently became a small publisher and my impression of the big publishers is that they have many of the of same problems as the music industry and haven't gotten to the point of being forced to give up on DRM yet.
Any competing effort that shuts out amazon from sales also cuts out access to the most popular ways for people to read ebooks unless you go DRM free. If you want to keep DRM, you can do adobe versions of things that are usable on some readers, but you don't have nearly the market as with kindle, and it's not nearly as convenient for readers. Amazon and B&N like DRM because it gives them device lock-in, so they're less likely to force things open like Apple did with music. Apple doesn't have the market share yet to do it, and you can get Kindle/Nook/kobo readers for iThings, which makes iThings very appealing for readers, and helps reduce Apple's incentive to try to force things open.
A little late replying, hopefully you'll see this.
We can't really do much with universities at the institutional level, but we can work with individual faculty who want to switch. We have already been contacted by a bookstore at a major U about getting copies of one of our books. It's up on amazon now for $9.99 with no DRM, and we'll make it available through the B&N academic books program as well. One of our founders is a prof at a major university and started this in part because students couldn't afford to buy the textbooks for her classes. She was also frustrated with her own experience in writing a textbook, and wanted to offer alternatives.
Some of the DIY stuff is pretty straightforward, but some of it (using regular expressions to do references) takes a bit of computer ability.
We also like reading a lot of other stuff, so we're publishing an interesting range of things, with a history book, a political non-fiction book, one in health and beauty, an academic mystery, and a young adult paranormal coming out this fall.
Only 2 out of the 6 major publishers will sell libraries eBooks.
One of those two publishers only allows the library to check out an eBook 26 times before they must purchase the book again.
Every time a patron checks out an eBook, the library pays the publisher $5.
I understand the importance of copyright, but this is ridiculous. The people who get their eBooks from libraries do so because they can't afford the books, or they want to try before they buy. If they want to limit the number of times an eBook can be loaned out, then they should charge a reasonable rate for the books.
In general, the ebooks aren't $800/book, though some of the big publishers charge triple or so of the retail price for library copies. There are other models where the library pays a fee per checkout, but sometimes nothing up front. Try offering ebooks free or at a discount to a library-- there's not really a mechanism to do it. With paper books you can go buy a copy and donate it to your local library. With ebooks, they generally get them through a distributor who provides the distribution software as well, and publishers don't have a way to donate copies or provide discounts to particular libraries (e.g. local to their authors). There's just no mechanism with the current lending systems, and it's frustrating. A few public libraries are finally starting to put together their own ebook lending systems, which won't make the big publishers happy, but might help open things up a little.
Personally, I would love to start writing textbooks and self-publish them to get around this system. I've already done some basic lecture notes in certain subjects and given them to students, I can try to write it up during free time. Are there good creative-commons or similarly licensed projects to start textbooks in many college disciplines?
The most notable one is Khan academy. MIT also has open courseware (not quite the same). If you're interested in writing your own textbook, check my homepage in the link and see if you're interested. Among other things, we're trying to make electronic textbooks available cheap (generally not free, because there *is* a lot of work in making a good one, but in the $10-$20 range, and DRM free). Even if you're not interested, there's some useful info on DIY there if you want to do it on your own.
However, that said, it does take practice and as I like to say, "I've never met anyone who learned how to patch-clamp after getting a Ph.D."
I know quite a few (including me) but most of them got their PhDs in physics, EE, or something non-biological before learning to poke at wet things. It didn't take long-- I was doing sharp electrode in about 2 hours, and getting gigaohm seals and action potentials within a few sessions.
It was homemade amplifiers that Jerry Pine had made (probably published somewhere). I don't think we had enough manipulators to get 4, but there was room-- to do 3 it was 2 on one side of the scope, and one on the other. 4 would have been the same, but two on each side. There wouldn't have been room for 5. The manipulators were just micrometer style-- no piezo, but they were very smooth and could sit on a cell for a couple hours without slipping. Data storage for a while was with an analog storage scope and a polaroid scope camera (for real!).
I got pretty good at it as a hobby trying to work on multi-electrode array stuff with neurons. It's not that hard if you're patient and have a light touch on the controls and can read an oscilloscope. I could do two mouse hippocampal neurons (in a dish) at once pretty reliably, and I tried did 3 a couple of times just to show off. The limiting factor on how many you can do at once is generally the size of the manipulators and amplifiers. Getting 4 in is possible but tricky, more than that starts to get really hard, which is part of why we were working on using electrode arrays for talking to neurons. I was visiting a lab about a year ago and could still do it, even after a break of 5+ years.
And they really do last. I have a bunch of old mac laptops sitting around the house working as servers of one sort or another. All the way back to an old G3 300 wallstreet. They all still work, and some are still pretty useful (the wallstreet really isn't good for much anymore).
Until OS X Lion I would have disagreed, but with Lion they're making it harder and harder to use a mac as a dev machine for anything other than apple products. The command line tools are no longer even automatically installed with XCode, and they're less well behaved than they were in Snow Leopard. I'll probably still have to have a mac for some things that I'm working on, but I'm leaning towards switching to linux for non-mac development with my next machine.
The cost is often 10 to 20% of the cost of the mission, but it has a lot to do with the cost of everything else. A fairly large launch vehicle can cost in the $100M range, so it makes it important that whatever you're putting on it is going to work, and it's worth spending a lot of money to do that. Think of it in terms of domestic travel-- if it cost $1M to fly from LA to New York, you'd probably spend more than that making sure you had the whole trip planned out in incredible detail. With it costing only a few hundred dollars, it's within reach of many people for a spur of the moment weekend trip.
You make very valid points about where training/equipment crosses the line into cheating, but the part about "when done professionally it is not dangerous" is incorrect. A number of pro cyclists have died from heart issues, and there is at least some belief that EPO use is implicated. I don't know how credible the allegations are regarding EPO, but certainly overuse of steroids comes with very serious side effects.
There were a bunch of young (early 20's) dutch and belgian riders dropping dead from heart attacks during and after training rides. They'd use EPO to get their hematocrit up, but when they got dehydrated from training their hearts couldn't push the sludge through their veins.
Not in sports, it doesn't. In any athletic endeavors, your raw physical ability continually decreases as you age (past a peak at 20-25). In some sports, your skill at it increases enough to compensate for that loss well into your 30s, but if you had had the same skill a decade earlier, you'd have set world records.
In endurance sports it's not at all unusual for 35+ year olds to remain competitive. There's a lot of skill in cycling, but it's still (especially for grand tours) all about endurance and suffering. Few cyclists peak around 20-- late 20's is much more common, and peak years are typically late 20's-early 30's, with a long tail that's probably driven more by wanting to stop and have a life (or in some cases serious injury) than by physiology.
Lance won and kept winning even against younger, superior talent. Something isn't right there. At his age, response time, peripheral vision and quickness just arent what they were 15-20 years ago.
Response time, peripheral vision, and quickness aren't the keys to winning a big tour. Ability to suffer more than anybody else, combined with good logistics and team support matters more. Endurance Cyclists don't really peak until late 20s/early 30s, and can maintain very high performance for quite a while after that. One of my favorite examples is the Madison results in the Beijing olympics-- 3 or 4 of the top 6 riders (it's teams of 2 people) were over 38, with at least one over 40. Llaneras also won the points race at his advanced age. Those two races are probably the two in cycling that depend the most on response time, peripheral vision, and quickness, and they're generally well populated with older riders.
No he didn't. DOPING is the taking something because it's a masking agent for a, wait for it, 'performance enchancing drug. So that it doesn't look like you've taken the enhancing drug.
I've spent a lot of time around elite cyclists (and even know a few who have been popped) and have never heard the word doping used the way you describe. It's primarily used to refer to use of PEDs, though the masking agents themselves are enough to get you the boot. WADA and USADA have that D in their names not because they're out to stop the use of masking agents, but because they're out to stop the use of PEDs (the dope they're referring to with the D).
In competition riders could be pulled for testing before or after a stage. Pretty hard to give yourself EPO while riding and all the cameras on you, it has to be injected, not taken as food, drink or from a patch. If tested before a stage a tested rider cannot return to his hotel or disappear into a team bus, but must go to the starting area. Out in the open it's pretty darn har to hide needles, bags of transfusion blood, etc.
It's a pretty weak whack the USADA is taking at Armstrong and I'm quite surprised he's not going into their den and ripping up the accusations in the faces of his accusers.
Not just before or after a stage, but any time of the day or night, any day, no matter where they are. Riders competing internationally at a high level have to provide WADA with their whereabouts at pretty much all times, and the drug testers can show up on a moments notice for a sample. If you aren't available within a certain amount of time (hours), you fail by default. LA certainly had plenty of out-of-competition testing, too.
The people you would expect to find evidence of doping if there was anything concrete would be the insurance company that had to pay out after he won the tour. He took a pretty small salary to ride with USPS, but with a clause that paid him $5M if he won the tour. The team management bought an insurance policy to cover that, and the insurance company lost the bet. They also tried for a long time to not pay (claiming doping) but were unable to prove anything, despite having a lot of money on the line.
I had T-mobile for a while in LA, and the coverage was terrible. It was disappointing because the plan was good, the rates were good, they allowed tethering, and had good customer service. I just had no signal a large fraction of the time. I even asked if I could use an iPhone if I had an unlocked one, and tech support said that while some things wouldn't work, they'd support as much as they could and could walk me through a lot of things.
I don't see how it's really a threat to Amazon and B&N at all-- they both have apps that let you read their content on iThings, and they're primarily content companies not hardware companies. The bigger issue might be whether it cuts into iPhone sales.
And depending on what you want it for, it may not be a major competitor at all. I've got a collection of various e-readers and tablets, and the iPad isn't that great of an e-reader. It's big (making it less convenient to read in bed), and the backlighting sucks power and isn't as good for extended reading as the reflected-light reading of e-Ink. And it's too big to fit in your pocket, and doesn't make phone calls... The advantage (to me, focusing on ebook related things) is that it supports equations and is better if you want to to picture books and that sort of thing. I kind of prefer the kindle fire over the iPad (and that's coming from someone who has a house full of old macs of various flavors). And for just plain reading I prefer the eInk versions of the kindle and nook.
You have to watch the news conferences on the web (10 am pacific every day)-- they have many of the real engineers and scientists answering questions in a pretty good Q&A with reporters. *way* better than your average press conference. What happens in an article is that you have a reporter with little technical background working from a press release or some short summary, and they they're trying to dumb fit it into a short article written at 5th grade level.
Sending new software to missions after they leave earth is pretty standard, particularly for things with a long cruise phase. For MSL, they had EDL software with the control loops to get safely to the ground dominating things, and now are dumping the software that they don't need so they can use the space for code that will be useful on the ground. Something that's important to remember (and other posters have mentioned) is that you pay a lot for every gram of mass you send to another planet, so you can't go packing in a lot of extra stuff, and if you can dump something you don't need (like the landing software) to make room for something that's more useful (like driving around software) you do.
Another thing to remember (that's also already been noted) is that missions like this have technology freeze *long* before launch, so that you can ensure that everything will play together and you can test everything really thoroughly (every time there's a change you go through a lot of retesting, and it involves hardware so it's more work than just typing "make test").
Watching the press conference this morning, they do the upgrade pretty much the same way I do OS upgrades at home, but it takes about 4 days. They have two computers (I use two drives, but I can go to the store to get replacement bits) and they do the upgrade stepwise, one computer at a time, and test the software on one computer (without letting it take over in a full boot) before they then boot into it and do a checkout then install it on the other. They did an upgrade a couple months ago during cruise to update the software for EDL, too.
Most of the budget for big missions like this (and even small missions, really) goes into testing, verification, and documentation. The cost of the stuff often seems incidental compared to the cost of all the testing to make sure it's going to work and documenting it.
Slashdot Mirror
And they typically only did it on a small part of the catalog- popular books to attract people, and then books further down the sales list would sell for a profit to make up for it.
There were a number of different such efforts that were hyped within the industry as the thing that would displace Amazon and restore full control of e-book retail to the publishing industry.
The failure of all those efforts is why the big publishers were willing to join together and sign on to a deal to try to swap Amazon's practical domination of the retail e-book market for Apple domination on terms slightly more favorable to the publishers.
I recently became a small publisher and my impression of the big publishers is that they have many of the of same problems as the music industry and haven't gotten to the point of being forced to give up on DRM yet.
Any competing effort that shuts out amazon from sales also cuts out access to the most popular ways for people to read ebooks unless you go DRM free. If you want to keep DRM, you can do adobe versions of things that are usable on some readers, but you don't have nearly the market as with kindle, and it's not nearly as convenient for readers. Amazon and B&N like DRM because it gives them device lock-in, so they're less likely to force things open like Apple did with music. Apple doesn't have the market share yet to do it, and you can get Kindle/Nook/kobo readers for iThings, which makes iThings very appealing for readers, and helps reduce Apple's incentive to try to force things open.
A little late replying, hopefully you'll see this.
We can't really do much with universities at the institutional level, but we can work with individual faculty who want to switch. We have already been contacted by a bookstore at a major U about getting copies of one of our books. It's up on amazon now for $9.99 with no DRM, and we'll make it available through the B&N academic books program as well. One of our founders is a prof at a major university and started this in part because students couldn't afford to buy the textbooks for her classes. She was also frustrated with her own experience in writing a textbook, and wanted to offer alternatives.
Some of the DIY stuff is pretty straightforward, but some of it (using regular expressions to do references) takes a bit of computer ability.
We also like reading a lot of other stuff, so we're publishing an interesting range of things, with a history book, a political non-fiction book, one in health and beauty, an academic mystery, and a young adult paranormal coming out this fall.
I understand the importance of copyright, but this is ridiculous. The people who get their eBooks from libraries do so because they can't afford the books, or they want to try before they buy. If they want to limit the number of times an eBook can be loaned out, then they should charge a reasonable rate for the books.
In general, the ebooks aren't $800/book, though some of the big publishers charge triple or so of the retail price for library copies. There are other models where the library pays a fee per checkout, but sometimes nothing up front. Try offering ebooks free or at a discount to a library-- there's not really a mechanism to do it. With paper books you can go buy a copy and donate it to your local library. With ebooks, they generally get them through a distributor who provides the distribution software as well, and publishers don't have a way to donate copies or provide discounts to particular libraries (e.g. local to their authors). There's just no mechanism with the current lending systems, and it's frustrating. A few public libraries are finally starting to put together their own ebook lending systems, which won't make the big publishers happy, but might help open things up a little.
Personally, I would love to start writing textbooks and self-publish them to get around this system. I've already done some basic lecture notes in certain subjects and given them to students, I can try to write it up during free time. Are there good creative-commons or similarly licensed projects to start textbooks in many college disciplines?
The most notable one is Khan academy. MIT also has open courseware (not quite the same). If you're interested in writing your own textbook, check my homepage in the link and see if you're interested. Among other things, we're trying to make electronic textbooks available cheap (generally not free, because there *is* a lot of work in making a good one, but in the $10-$20 range, and DRM free). Even if you're not interested, there's some useful info on DIY there if you want to do it on your own.
However, that said, it does take practice and as I like to say, "I've never met anyone who learned how to patch-clamp after getting a Ph.D."
I know quite a few (including me) but most of them got their PhDs in physics, EE, or something non-biological before learning to poke at wet things. It didn't take long-- I was doing sharp electrode in about 2 hours, and getting gigaohm seals and action potentials within a few sessions.
It was homemade amplifiers that Jerry Pine had made (probably published somewhere). I don't think we had enough manipulators to get 4, but there was room-- to do 3 it was 2 on one side of the scope, and one on the other. 4 would have been the same, but two on each side. There wouldn't have been room for 5. The manipulators were just micrometer style-- no piezo, but they were very smooth and could sit on a cell for a couple hours without slipping. Data storage for a while was with an analog storage scope and a polaroid scope camera (for real!).
Ridiculous isn't it? A bunch of people land a fucking robot on Mars, and everyone's attention is on one of the guys' haircut.
Not just a robot, but a robot with a death ray
I got pretty good at it as a hobby trying to work on multi-electrode array stuff with neurons. It's not that hard if you're patient and have a light touch on the controls and can read an oscilloscope. I could do two mouse hippocampal neurons (in a dish) at once pretty reliably, and I tried did 3 a couple of times just to show off. The limiting factor on how many you can do at once is generally the size of the manipulators and amplifiers. Getting 4 in is possible but tricky, more than that starts to get really hard, which is part of why we were working on using electrode arrays for talking to neurons. I was visiting a lab about a year ago and could still do it, even after a break of 5+ years.
And they really do last. I have a bunch of old mac laptops sitting around the house working as servers of one sort or another. All the way back to an old G3 300 wallstreet. They all still work, and some are still pretty useful (the wallstreet really isn't good for much anymore).
Until OS X Lion I would have disagreed, but with Lion they're making it harder and harder to use a mac as a dev machine for anything other than apple products. The command line tools are no longer even automatically installed with XCode, and they're less well behaved than they were in Snow Leopard. I'll probably still have to have a mac for some things that I'm working on, but I'm leaning towards switching to linux for non-mac development with my next machine.
The cost is often 10 to 20% of the cost of the mission, but it has a lot to do with the cost of everything else. A fairly large launch vehicle can cost in the $100M range, so it makes it important that whatever you're putting on it is going to work, and it's worth spending a lot of money to do that. Think of it in terms of domestic travel-- if it cost $1M to fly from LA to New York, you'd probably spend more than that making sure you had the whole trip planned out in incredible detail. With it costing only a few hundred dollars, it's within reach of many people for a spur of the moment weekend trip.
You make very valid points about where training/equipment crosses the line into cheating, but the part about "when done professionally it is not dangerous" is incorrect. A number of pro cyclists have died from heart issues, and there is at least some belief that EPO use is implicated. I don't know how credible the allegations are regarding EPO, but certainly overuse of steroids comes with very serious side effects.
There were a bunch of young (early 20's) dutch and belgian riders dropping dead from heart attacks during and after training rides. They'd use EPO to get their hematocrit up, but when they got dehydrated from training their hearts couldn't push the sludge through their veins.
Younger means fuck-all.
Not in sports, it doesn't. In any athletic endeavors, your raw physical ability continually decreases as you age (past a peak at 20-25). In some sports, your skill at it increases enough to compensate for that loss well into your 30s, but if you had had the same skill a decade earlier, you'd have set world records.
In endurance sports it's not at all unusual for 35+ year olds to remain competitive. There's a lot of skill in cycling, but it's still (especially for grand tours) all about endurance and suffering. Few cyclists peak around 20-- late 20's is much more common, and peak years are typically late 20's-early 30's, with a long tail that's probably driven more by wanting to stop and have a life (or in some cases serious injury) than by physiology.
Lance won and kept winning even against younger, superior talent. Something isn't right there. At his age, response time, peripheral vision and quickness just arent what they were 15-20 years ago.
Response time, peripheral vision, and quickness aren't the keys to winning a big tour. Ability to suffer more than anybody else, combined with good logistics and team support matters more. Endurance Cyclists don't really peak until late 20s/early 30s, and can maintain very high performance for quite a while after that. One of my favorite examples is the Madison results in the Beijing olympics-- 3 or 4 of the top 6 riders (it's teams of 2 people) were over 38, with at least one over 40. Llaneras also won the points race at his advanced age. Those two races are probably the two in cycling that depend the most on response time, peripheral vision, and quickness, and they're generally well populated with older riders.
No he didn't. DOPING is the taking something because it's a masking agent for a, wait for it, 'performance enchancing drug. So that it doesn't look like you've taken the enhancing drug.
I've spent a lot of time around elite cyclists (and even know a few who have been popped) and have never heard the word doping used the way you describe. It's primarily used to refer to use of PEDs, though the masking agents themselves are enough to get you the boot. WADA and USADA have that D in their names not because they're out to stop the use of masking agents, but because they're out to stop the use of PEDs (the dope they're referring to with the D).
In competition riders could be pulled for testing before or after a stage. Pretty hard to give yourself EPO while riding and all the cameras on you, it has to be injected, not taken as food, drink or from a patch. If tested before a stage a tested rider cannot return to his hotel or disappear into a team bus, but must go to the starting area. Out in the open it's pretty darn har to hide needles, bags of transfusion blood, etc.
It's a pretty weak whack the USADA is taking at Armstrong and I'm quite surprised he's not going into their den and ripping up the accusations in the faces of his accusers.
Not just before or after a stage, but any time of the day or night, any day, no matter where they are. Riders competing internationally at a high level have to provide WADA with their whereabouts at pretty much all times, and the drug testers can show up on a moments notice for a sample. If you aren't available within a certain amount of time (hours), you fail by default. LA certainly had plenty of out-of-competition testing, too.
The people you would expect to find evidence of doping if there was anything concrete would be the insurance company that had to pay out after he won the tour. He took a pretty small salary to ride with USPS, but with a clause that paid him $5M if he won the tour. The team management bought an insurance policy to cover that, and the insurance company lost the bet. They also tried for a long time to not pay (claiming doping) but were unable to prove anything, despite having a lot of money on the line.
I guess the next mission needs to be called Satisfaction.
Except then we'd never get that mission...
but we'll try, and we'll try...
Duck duck go
not affiliated other than having a duck problem, too.
Looks like thermal blanket that's just a little wrinkly, and the seam is a little smushed on one spot, but that's really soft stuff.
I had T-mobile for a while in LA, and the coverage was terrible. It was disappointing because the plan was good, the rates were good, they allowed tethering, and had good customer service. I just had no signal a large fraction of the time. I even asked if I could use an iPhone if I had an unlocked one, and tech support said that while some things wouldn't work, they'd support as much as they could and could walk me through a lot of things.
I don't see how it's really a threat to Amazon and B&N at all-- they both have apps that let you read their content on iThings, and they're primarily content companies not hardware companies. The bigger issue might be whether it cuts into iPhone sales.
And depending on what you want it for, it may not be a major competitor at all. I've got a collection of various e-readers and tablets, and the iPad isn't that great of an e-reader. It's big (making it less convenient to read in bed), and the backlighting sucks power and isn't as good for extended reading as the reflected-light reading of e-Ink. And it's too big to fit in your pocket, and doesn't make phone calls... The advantage (to me, focusing on ebook related things) is that it supports equations and is better if you want to to picture books and that sort of thing. I kind of prefer the kindle fire over the iPad (and that's coming from someone who has a house full of old macs of various flavors). And for just plain reading I prefer the eInk versions of the kindle and nook.
You have to watch the news conferences on the web (10 am pacific every day)-- they have many of the real engineers and scientists answering questions in a pretty good Q&A with reporters. *way* better than your average press conference. What happens in an article is that you have a reporter with little technical background working from a press release or some short summary, and they they're trying to dumb fit it into a short article written at 5th grade level.
Sending new software to missions after they leave earth is pretty standard, particularly for things with a long cruise phase. For MSL, they had EDL software with the control loops to get safely to the ground dominating things, and now are dumping the software that they don't need so they can use the space for code that will be useful on the ground. Something that's important to remember (and other posters have mentioned) is that you pay a lot for every gram of mass you send to another planet, so you can't go packing in a lot of extra stuff, and if you can dump something you don't need (like the landing software) to make room for something that's more useful (like driving around software) you do.
Another thing to remember (that's also already been noted) is that missions like this have technology freeze *long* before launch, so that you can ensure that everything will play together and you can test everything really thoroughly (every time there's a change you go through a lot of retesting, and it involves hardware so it's more work than just typing "make test").
Watching the press conference this morning, they do the upgrade pretty much the same way I do OS upgrades at home, but it takes about 4 days. They have two computers (I use two drives, but I can go to the store to get replacement bits) and they do the upgrade stepwise, one computer at a time, and test the software on one computer (without letting it take over in a full boot) before they then boot into it and do a checkout then install it on the other. They did an upgrade a couple months ago during cruise to update the software for EDL, too.
Most of the budget for big missions like this (and even small missions, really) goes into testing, verification, and documentation. The cost of the stuff often seems incidental compared to the cost of all the testing to make sure it's going to work and documenting it.