If you sell 10,000 copies of a paper book that costs $40, chances are you get $2 per copy (10% of the publisher's $20 in revenue), leaving you with $20,000 royalties. Not bad.
If, however, you sell 2,000 copies of a PDF at $20 copy, and you get $16 per copy, you get $32,000. That's better. Furthermore, that assumes $0 in print royalty revenue. Similarly, if you sell 3,000 PDFs, and you get the same $16 per copy, you get $48,000. Much better. Plus, with print books, there's the annoying aspect of returns, etc.
Don't be so sure that PDF books should be a marketing tool for paper books. I like to think about paper books as a marketing tool for PDF books: if you sell 1/3 as many PDFs you're more than twice as far ahead...
I call bullshit: I have self-published a PDF-only book on Lulu, and I made $16 per copy. This book is currently for sale with a real publisher, and I would miss the PDF royalties *very* much if they evaporated. (My book is copied on BitTorrent, and there's nothing I can do about it.)
Authors are real people with families and mortgages; this isn't just some juvenile "you vs. the **AA" thing -- that may be true to a degree for records or movies where the **AA is evil, but it's not true for books. Many publishers are decent individuals, and authors aren't exactly millionaires...
I have one of those. It would be great if the damn cushion stayed attached to the hard plastic surface. Instead, there are five plastic snap fasteners, that unsnap way too easily to be useful...
Nah, they should make you evolve into Duke Nukem, and then you can run around saying "it's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum, but I haven't evolved teeth"
Maybe there should be a new name: "Sporever"
(The sad thing is that I really want to play Spore; at least, I want to play the ideal as presented in demos...)
[me using random software]: 'This sucks. I could code something better in two weeks.' [false, or "true in theory, but I didn't do it"]
[Linus Torvalds using random software]: 'This sucks, and basically 99% of the software in this entire category sucks, for reasons X, Y and Z. I could code something better in two weeks.' [true; done]
Truly impressive. Whenever I start to think I've accomplished anything programming, I look at video like that (which was on reddit how long ago?) and realize once again that there are people who live on a different planet than I do.
Flex can talk to anything on the server side by passing XML over HTTPService -- Java,.NET, Rails, etc. You can also use RemoteObject to talk AMF3 to a server.
Shameless plug: see my signature for my book on the Flex + Rails combination:)
Buy an MS Natural 4000 keyboard and use Dvorak layout with it. This keyboard is great (ironically, it's even more configurable with OS X than with Windows). Start by going to http://gigliwood.com/abcd/abcd.html and work through that "course" once. Then, just try Dvorak for 3 weeks. You won't type faster, but your hands will be happier.
Shameless self-promotion: I blogged at length about this almost a year ago.
One thing that is special about GUIs is that it's much harder to unit test them. Yes, you can build an object model and unit test that, but it's not as ideal a situation as what server side developers can do. If you don't have a comprehensive suite of tests, it makes refactoring much harder. Server side developers are spoiled in this regard (building good unit tests is much easier), but many don't realize it...
The problem with trying to give TV in moderation is that it becomes all about a struggle of wills. You go from a happy toddler playing to a toddler happily watcthing TV, but then you say "let's go play trains" and it's "noooo" and "a-geh" (again) over and over...
Having a TV, especially one whose on button is at toddler height, puts you on the slippery slope toward "electronic babysitter". Rather than having to fight those battles every day, I have chosen to remove the source of them.
I'm not a pushover, but there are enough times you need to be the bad guy without adding a whole class of other times...
That will be a problem to solve in a few years when he's 5 -- a 2 year old does not understand moderation:-) Also, we have a DVD player--the TV could migrate back into the living room as a DVD playing machine only at that time, if necessary.
Hopefully in a few years all the kids will be just playing various Nintendo Wii or DS video games, and talking about those things rather than TV. My hope is that YouTube makes normal TV watching uncool, something that old people do. (New Slashdot meme: "TV is for Old People.") So, if that happens, there is less of a shared cultural context--it's a lot more fragmented.
I'm still on the fence about what is the right age for introducing the wonders of (nonviolent, benign) video games like on a DS or a Wii is. I do know it's not 2 though--so it's probably somewhere between 4 and 6:-)
(Never, ever let a 2 year old see you playing Mario Kart on a DS Lite. It is The Most Interesting Thing In The World.:-)
At least with a (good) video game you are actively thinking. Puzzle solving certainly beats being turned into a mindless receptacle of content. And I can't wait for the day when we can play Civ 4 (or probably 6 by that point) against each other...
In lieu of being able to revise your own comments to make them more literate, this is what I'm intending to say but slightly more articulately (or at least longer):
Heh, I smoked for about 7 years but quit about 5 years ago.
I had a TV my entire life, but quit about 2 weeks ago.
Quitting smoking was harder, but there are parallels. When you remove something, you realize how much a part of your life it was. After the World Cup ended, I didn't think I'd miss much except the English Premier League soccer--but it's weird. Life is much quieter.
And yeah, I certainly doubt that TV causes autism fully. The number one takeaway I got from psychology was that pretty much nothing has one cause. However, many things have contributing factors. The relevant question if you're a parent is are you willing to bet that TV isn't one of them. And are you willing to make that bet for your child?
The weird thing is that as a parent you get more risk-averse about things, since you're making decisions which affect someone who is helpless. So, even if I would normally think "big deal" and take the risk myself, if I do that now I'm taking a risk for someone else who has no say about whether they would have wanted that risk to have been taken for them. It's hard to explain without sounding cliched or condescending, but I don't mean to be either...
In Canada we have warning labels on cigarette packs. Big warning labels. Cigarettes cause cancer, etc. So, naturally, some dollar store entrepreneur creates fake warning labels.
Anyway, when I was a stereotypical angry young philosophy student, I thought it would be fun to make my own fake warning labels to put on my cigarette packs. So, who did I turn to? Hume, of course.
So, my cigarette packs had a big warning: "Correlation Does Not Imply Causation" on them. I thought it was a good joke, by philosophy joke standards anyway.
Now, I knew perfectly well that in this case even though it did not imply it, it was in fact true. Of course cigarretes caused cancer. In many cases correlation is, um, correlated with causation. But I was 18 so I didn't care; I thought it was funny.
What a joke.
So, the point is: correlation is a start. If there is a correlation, you should look for ways to establish whether causation exists or not.
Now, you usually cannot do real proper experiments on humans with smoking (starting with a large random set of non-smokers, making half of them smoke their entire lives, and seeing how many of each group died of cancer). The ethics boards at the university wouldn't approve;-)
So, do you just give up and say "thank you for smoking" or "well, we'll never prove anything according to David Hume then". No, you don't. There are statistical tools like factor analysis which let people smarter than me figure out how much of A is (probably) caused by B, etc.
Anyway, I have a 2 year old son now, and stuff I thought was funny at 18 is certainly not funny anymore over a decade later. I quit smoking. I certainly wouldn't give my son a cigarette, ever.
However, if there is a strong correlation between TV and autism, I have to wonder whether I am in effect doing something similar. What if further anaylsis proves (as much as you can prove anything) that it is indeed a cause?
What would I have done??
[yeah, yeah, there's a mountain of evidence in one of the cases vs. one study in another... it's obviously not a perfect analogy, but I've been debugging way too long to care]
"Correlation Does Not Imply Causation" does not mean act insanely. You have only ever seen gravity by correlation, but you still believe in it. (Yes you do. Wipe that smirk off your face.)
As a Canadian who has read Slashdot for many years, will someone please explain to me what is so hard about voting?
1. Take a piece of paper. 2. Mark an X in a big box CLEARLY beside the candidate you want. 3. Put it in the ballot box.
Can it really be that simple? Yes!
As a software developer, I have to ask:
WHY IS ANYONE IN THEIR RIGHT MINDS USING A BLOODY COMPUTER TO DO THIS? I don't care if it's open source or closed source software on it, running on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, whatever. All of these are harder to verify (if not impossible) that no tampering was done than SIMPLE PIECES OF PAPER.
You can use Flex with anything: J2EE, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails, etc--anything that you can send an HTTP POST request to. Obviously, Adobe want to sell their server-side stuff, but other stuff works too...
That's exactly why you should look at Flex. It might just be what you're looking for if you're coming from a Java or C# background. (I spent years doing Java Swing development, having never made a Flash movie in my life, and Flex was simple to learn...)
[Disclaimer: I'm selling something related to this (see my sig), so take anything I say with the appropriate amount of salt...]
The Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish doctrine is a real conspiracy.
No, since it is the actions of one company. (Yes, obviously there are multiple people within the company involved, but by that reasoning every action by every company is a conspiracy. And only the most vehemently anti-corporate person would argue that:-)
Actually, your iPod would have probably been fine skiing (just put it in an inside pocket), unless you are really extreme or really do tumble the whole way down:-) (I have a shuffle and a regular iPod, and I only use the shuffle when running -- I use the regular iPod for anything else, including snowboarding. It works great snowboarding, since it's not being bounced up and down constantly like it is if I'm running.
Actually, it was a plurality, not a majority. And it wasn't enough of a plurality to get a majority government, so we're stuck with a minority government. In many ways this is a good thing, since the Conservatives can't be too extreme. And even though Paul Martin was an excellent finance minister, his party became too corrupt so it's good that they got thrown out--if only it had been a bit more emphatically...
Finally, note that despite all the spin on both sides, most of our Conservative party resembles your Democratic Party far, far more than your Republican Party. (They have the odd nut, but so do the Democrats:-)
But I think that all Canadians can agree that our voting process is far superior to yours;-) Mark a big X in a big circle, put it in the box (which is monitored by scrutineers from both/all parties), go home, eat, turn on TV, see results which regardless of how happy you are with them (I'm pretty happy) you know are fair.
Um, exactly. The link you're including says the trial is in Vancouver, BC -- which has the climate of Seattle: rainy yes, cold no. In January, there's about 25 to 45 degrees (celsius) difference between Vancouver and anywhere in Saskatchewan, Manitoba etc. And regardless of whether "it's a dry cold", it's f---ing COLD!
It's a team effort all right, and it's great too, but one sleep-deprived night at 3 am I hope you look back on the "will be a great team effort" and realize you sound like a very earnest boy scout... trust me;-)
I recommend two switches: to the Dvorak layout, and to a Kinesis keyboard. (You can get Kinesis keyboards with dual QWERTY and Dvorak legends.) I used to have repetitive stress, and switching to Kinesis fixed most of it and switching to Dvorak fixed the rest. I'm not sure if they're better done at the same time or one at a time; I switched to a Kinesis first and then to Dvorak. (And I remapped the keys somewhat for programming--Ctrl and Escape got moved to more convenient locations, since I use emacs.)
It takes a few weeks to be comfortable with the Kinesis or with Dvorak, so I guess switching to both at the same time might save you some time, even though it will be even more frustrating at first...
Note: I have no financial relationship with Kinesis, I'm just a happy customer; I'm not astroturfing; I don't want a free iPod; yada yada yada...
Slashdot Mirror
Not so fast...
If you sell 10,000 copies of a paper book that costs $40, chances are you get $2 per copy (10% of the publisher's $20 in revenue), leaving you with $20,000 royalties. Not bad.
If, however, you sell 2,000 copies of a PDF at $20 copy, and you get $16 per copy, you get $32,000. That's better. Furthermore, that assumes $0 in print royalty revenue. Similarly, if you sell 3,000 PDFs, and you get the same $16 per copy, you get $48,000. Much better. Plus, with print books, there's the annoying aspect of returns, etc.
Don't be so sure that PDF books should be a marketing tool for paper books. I like to think about paper books as a marketing tool for PDF books: if you sell 1/3 as many PDFs you're more than twice as far ahead...
I call bullshit: I have self-published a PDF-only book on Lulu, and I made $16 per copy. This book is currently for sale with a real publisher, and I would miss the PDF royalties *very* much if they evaporated. (My book is copied on BitTorrent, and there's nothing I can do about it.)
Authors are real people with families and mortgages; this isn't just some juvenile "you vs. the **AA" thing -- that may be true to a degree for records or movies where the **AA is evil, but it's not true for books. Many publishers are decent individuals, and authors aren't exactly millionaires...
I have one of those. It would be great if the damn cushion stayed attached to the hard plastic surface. Instead, there are five plastic snap fasteners, that unsnap way too easily to be useful...
Nah, they should make you evolve into Duke Nukem, and then you can run around saying "it's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum, but I haven't evolved teeth"
Maybe there should be a new name: "Sporever"
(The sad thing is that I really want to play Spore; at least, I want to play the ideal as presented in demos...)
This is what's great about Linus Torvalds:
[me using random software]: 'This sucks. I could code something better in two weeks.' [false, or "true in theory, but I didn't do it"]
[Linus Torvalds using random software]: 'This sucks, and basically 99% of the software in this entire category sucks, for reasons X, Y and Z. I could code something better in two weeks.' [true; done]
Truly impressive. Whenever I start to think I've accomplished anything programming, I look at video like that (which was on reddit how long ago?) and realize once again that there are people who live on a different planet than I do.
Flex can talk to anything on the server side by passing XML over HTTPService -- Java, .NET, Rails, etc. You can also use RemoteObject to talk AMF3 to a server.
:)
Shameless plug: see my signature for my book on the Flex + Rails combination
Buy an MS Natural 4000 keyboard and use Dvorak layout with it. This keyboard is great (ironically, it's even more configurable with OS X than with Windows). Start by going to http://gigliwood.com/abcd/abcd.html and work through that "course" once. Then, just try Dvorak for 3 weeks. You won't type faster, but your hands will be happier.
Shameless self-promotion: I blogged at length about this almost a year ago.
One thing that is special about GUIs is that it's much harder to unit test them. Yes, you can build an object model and unit test that, but it's not as ideal a situation as what server side developers can do. If you don't have a comprehensive suite of tests, it makes refactoring much harder. Server side developers are spoiled in this regard (building good unit tests is much easier), but many don't realize it...
The problem with trying to give TV in moderation is that it becomes all about a struggle of wills. You go from a happy toddler playing to a toddler happily watcthing TV, but then you say "let's go play trains" and it's "noooo" and "a-geh" (again) over and over...
Having a TV, especially one whose on button is at toddler height, puts you on the slippery slope toward "electronic babysitter". Rather than having to fight those battles every day, I have chosen to remove the source of them.
I'm not a pushover, but there are enough times you need to be the bad guy without adding a whole class of other times...
That will be a problem to solve in a few years when he's 5 -- a 2 year old does not understand moderation :-) Also, we have a DVD player--the TV could migrate back into the living room as a DVD playing machine only at that time, if necessary.
:-)
:-)
Hopefully in a few years all the kids will be just playing various Nintendo Wii or DS video games, and talking about those things rather than TV. My hope is that YouTube makes normal TV watching uncool, something that old people do. (New Slashdot meme: "TV is for Old People.") So, if that happens, there is less of a shared cultural context--it's a lot more fragmented.
I'm still on the fence about what is the right age for introducing the wonders of (nonviolent, benign) video games like on a DS or a Wii is. I do know it's not 2 though--so it's probably somewhere between 4 and 6
(Never, ever let a 2 year old see you playing Mario Kart on a DS Lite. It is The Most Interesting Thing In The World.
At least with a (good) video game you are actively thinking. Puzzle solving certainly beats being turned into a mindless receptacle of content. And I can't wait for the day when we can play Civ 4 (or probably 6 by that point) against each other...
In lieu of being able to revise your own comments to make them more literate, this is what I'm intending to say but slightly more articulately (or at least longer):
Baby David Hume (Fun with Correlation, Causation and TV)
Heh, I smoked for about 7 years but quit about 5 years ago.
I had a TV my entire life, but quit about 2 weeks ago.
Quitting smoking was harder, but there are parallels. When you remove something, you realize how much a part of your life it was. After the World Cup ended, I didn't think I'd miss much except the English Premier League soccer--but it's weird. Life is much quieter.
And yeah, I certainly doubt that TV causes autism fully. The number one takeaway I got from psychology was that pretty much nothing has one cause. However, many things have contributing factors. The relevant question if you're a parent is are you willing to bet that TV isn't one of them. And are you willing to make that bet for your child?
The weird thing is that as a parent you get more risk-averse about things, since you're making decisions which affect someone who is helpless. So, even if I would normally think "big deal" and take the risk myself, if I do that now I'm taking a risk for someone else who has no say about whether they would have wanted that risk to have been taken for them. It's hard to explain without sounding cliched or condescending, but I don't mean to be either...
In Canada we have warning labels on cigarette packs. Big warning labels. Cigarettes cause cancer, etc. So, naturally, some dollar store entrepreneur creates fake warning labels.
;-)
... it's obviously not a perfect analogy, but I've been debugging way too long to care]
e -against-the-mighty-machines-day-9-of-no-tv.
Anyway, when I was a stereotypical angry young philosophy student, I thought it would be fun to make my own fake warning labels to put on my cigarette packs. So, who did I turn to? Hume, of course.
So, my cigarette packs had a big warning: "Correlation Does Not Imply Causation" on them. I thought it was a good joke, by philosophy joke standards anyway.
Now, I knew perfectly well that in this case even though it did not imply it, it was in fact true. Of course cigarretes caused cancer. In many cases correlation is, um, correlated with causation. But I was 18 so I didn't care; I thought it was funny.
What a joke.
So, the point is: correlation is a start. If there is a correlation, you should look for ways to establish whether causation exists or not.
Now, you usually cannot do real proper experiments on humans with smoking (starting with a large random set of non-smokers, making half of them smoke their entire lives, and seeing how many of each group died of cancer). The ethics boards at the university wouldn't approve
So, do you just give up and say "thank you for smoking" or "well, we'll never prove anything according to David Hume then". No, you don't. There are statistical tools like factor analysis which let people smarter than me figure out how much of A is (probably) caused by B, etc.
Anyway, I have a 2 year old son now, and stuff I thought was funny at 18 is certainly not funny anymore over a decade later. I quit smoking. I certainly wouldn't give my son a cigarette, ever.
However, if there is a strong correlation between TV and autism, I have to wonder whether I am in effect doing something similar. What if further anaylsis proves (as much as you can prove anything) that it is indeed a cause?
What would I have done??
[yeah, yeah, there's a mountain of evidence in one of the cases vs. one study in another
"Correlation Does Not Imply Causation" does not mean act insanely. You have only ever seen gravity by correlation, but you still believe in it. (Yes you do. Wipe that smirk off your face.)
Now, coincidentally, I also cancelled cable TV after reading Gregg Easterbrook's original Slate article. Obligatory blog whoring: I blogged about it at http://peterarmstrong.com/articles/2006/10/08/rag
Do I think there is conclusive, Hume-would-be-proud proof that TV causes autism. No.
Do I think that TV is good for young children?
Would I give my 2 year old son a cigarette?
don't substitute, merge: Slashdautism
As a Canadian who has read Slashdot for many years, will someone please explain to me what is so hard about voting?
;-) http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031211. html
1. Take a piece of paper.
2. Mark an X in a big box CLEARLY beside the candidate you want.
3. Put it in the ballot box.
Can it really be that simple? Yes!
As a software developer, I have to ask:
WHY IS ANYONE IN THEIR RIGHT MINDS USING A BLOODY COMPUTER TO DO THIS? I don't care if it's open source or closed source software on it, running on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, whatever. All of these are harder to verify (if not impossible) that no tampering was done than SIMPLE PIECES OF PAPER.
Here, I'll link to Cringely, that way you'll know it's true
You can use Flex with anything: J2EE, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails, etc--anything that you can send an HTTP POST request to. Obviously, Adobe want to sell their server-side stuff, but other stuff works too...
That's exactly why you should look at Flex. It might just be what you're looking for if you're coming from a Java or C# background. (I spent years doing Java Swing development, having never made a Flash movie in my life, and Flex was simple to learn...)
[Disclaimer: I'm selling something related to this (see my sig), so take anything I say with the appropriate amount of salt...]
Wall Street agrees with you:
n &z=m&q=l&c=SNE&c=%5EGSPC&c=%5EIXIC&c=%5EDJI
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=1y&s=NTDOY.PK&l=o
(Yeah, obviously it's more complex since Sony does tons of other stuff, like make exploding battery packs...)
The Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish doctrine is a real conspiracy.
:-)
No, since it is the actions of one company. (Yes, obviously there are multiple people within the company involved, but by that reasoning every action by every company is a conspiracy. And only the most vehemently anti-corporate person would argue that
They get that *nix's text based communication is a crude and outdated way of doing things
+5 funny
"it works reliably and is simple to understand, therefore it must be horrible"
(compare that to SOAP, which is like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man of communication...)
Actually, your iPod would have probably been fine skiing (just put it in an inside pocket), unless you are really extreme or really do tumble the whole way down :-) (I have a shuffle and a regular iPod, and I only use the shuffle when running -- I use the regular iPod for anything else, including snowboarding. It works great snowboarding, since it's not being bounced up and down constantly like it is if I'm running.
Actually, it was a plurality, not a majority. And it wasn't enough of a plurality to get a majority government, so we're stuck with a minority government. In many ways this is a good thing, since the Conservatives can't be too extreme. And even though Paul Martin was an excellent finance minister, his party became too corrupt so it's good that they got thrown out--if only it had been a bit more emphatically...
:-)
;-) Mark a big X in a big circle, put it in the box (which is monitored by scrutineers from both/all parties), go home, eat, turn on TV, see results which regardless of how happy you are with them (I'm pretty happy) you know are fair.
Finally, note that despite all the spin on both sides, most of our Conservative party resembles your Democratic Party far, far more than your Republican Party. (They have the odd nut, but so do the Democrats
But I think that all Canadians can agree that our voting process is far superior to yours
Um, exactly. The link you're including says the trial is in Vancouver, BC -- which has the climate of Seattle: rainy yes, cold no. In January, there's about 25 to 45 degrees (celsius) difference between Vancouver and anywhere in Saskatchewan, Manitoba etc. And regardless of whether "it's a dry cold", it's f---ing COLD!
It's a team effort all right, and it's great too, but one sleep-deprived night at 3 am I hope you look back on the "will be a great team effort" and realize you sound like a very earnest boy scout ... trust me ;-)
I recommend two switches: to the Dvorak layout, and to a Kinesis keyboard. (You can get Kinesis keyboards with dual QWERTY and Dvorak legends.) I used to have repetitive stress, and switching to Kinesis fixed most of it and switching to Dvorak fixed the rest. I'm not sure if they're better done at the same time or one at a time; I switched to a Kinesis first and then to Dvorak. (And I remapped the keys somewhat for programming--Ctrl and Escape got moved to more convenient locations, since I use emacs.)
It takes a few weeks to be comfortable with the Kinesis or with Dvorak, so I guess switching to both at the same time might save you some time, even though it will be even more frustrating at first...
Note: I have no financial relationship with Kinesis, I'm just a happy customer; I'm not astroturfing; I don't want a free iPod; yada yada yada...