- Today’s Odd Lots is a rare (nay, to this date unique) all-video edition. I dislike TV sufficiently so that that’s a contrarian act all by itself.
- To begin: We used to make five-stick “popsicle bombs” on the fourth-grade playground, and compete to see whose bombs would toss sticks the farthest. (I actually devised a 4-stick bomb, but nobody seemed impressed. The technology has clearly advanced since 1961.) Anyway: Here’s a linearly detonating, 2,250-stick popsicle bomb, and it is indeed a thing of beauty.
- While we’re blowing things up, consider this unfortunate attempt to demolish what appears to be an apartment building molded of solid concrete. They should feel fortunate that the building had not been erected on even a mild slope, or it would simply have rolled down the hill until it struck something bigger and denser than it was. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I guess if you’re going to blow a demolition, do it this way. Then you either buy more dynamite, or advertise it as a tourist attraction.
- And this may be the most amazing video clip I’ve seen in years: An Atlas booster breaking the sound barrier at just about the altitude where ice crystals responsible for sundogs form. Watch what happens to the sundog! (Thanks to Mary Lynn Johnson for the link.)
- Admittedly this is a hybrid, but don’t miss the video if you’re a train freak. That double-stacked consist is 18,000 feet long, propelled by what is essentially a local-area network of nine computer-controlled diesel-electric locomotives distributed evenly among the cars and operated by one guy in the cab of the lead engine. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Several people have asked why I didn’t post any photos from the big 4-day dog show in Denver, and I must admit (with profound annoyance) that my camera bag vanished sometime on Monday, and both of my digital cameras were in it. That’s a Canon G10 and a Nikon CoolPix S630, and with the biggish SD cards I put in them, it’s close to a $1000 loss. Neither the hotel nor the National Western Complex recovered the bag, so I can only assume it was stolen during the show, and with it went all the photos we took through Sunday night.
- Slashdot reports that 80% of all software exploits during the fourth quarter of 2009 were malicious PDF documents. I’ve been a Foxit user for some time, but as Foxit becomes more popular, the bad guys will begin exploiting its flaws as well. (There is evidence that this has already happened.) It may be time to test software like Evince and Sumatra, both of which are available for Linux and Windows.
- As I write this, you have eight hours to bid on the Compaq II machine that Anders Hejlsberg used to develop Turbo Pascal 4.0. The proceeds from the auction go to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. It’s one of those green-screen luggable that I always admired, but bidding is currently at $2025, yikes. (Thanks to the many who pointed this out, with Larry O’Brien being the first.)
- Something confirming a phenomenon that I’ve noticed: Food expiration dates are conservative, and most food is good for a reasonable period after they supposedly time out. Still, after expiry, your nose is your stomach’s best friend.
- For whatever it’s worth, here’s a list of the top-grossing movies of all time, with inflation-adjusted values. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.) Unsurprisingly, Gone With the Wind still beats all comers with a mind-boggling 1.5 billion dollars, the though the original Star Wars is right behind it at $1.3B. What’s worth noting is that all but six films in the top 14 were either Disney animation or special-effects extravaganzas. (It’s all but five if you think the opticals in The Ten Commandments were significant, as I do.) Lesson: We don’t go to the movies to watch unpleasant people screaming at one another.
- Also from Frank comes a pointer to a short item suggesting that we kiss to enforce reproductive monogamy by developing immunities to one another’s specific viruses. I’m not sure I buy it either, but evolution has done far weirder things than this.
Yapstravaganza: Catchup and Wrapup
Ok. I had hoped to post an update each night we were up in Denver at the dog show, but hotel connectivity is evidently a lot less reliable than most people think. (It went away after the first night and I did not have the time nor the energy to pursue a fix or alternatives.) So much for the Cloud–like I ever believed in reliably pervasive connectivity.
Anyway. We got into the dog show routine fairly quickly, and it was pretty aerobic: Awaken at 5 AM, scramble into clothes, pile dogs into kennels, pile kennels onto the rolly cart, pile grooming bins on top of kennels, top off with the grooming table (one of three; the other two are the scruffy ones that we leave in the cattle pens) and bungie the whole mess together. Then roll the laden cart into the elevator, get it down to parking ramp, pull it all apart, and stuff everything into its appointed place in the 4Runner. Run through the drive-up window at McDonalds, get McMuffins, and eat in the car, with the engine running when it’s less than 20 degrees out. (Which it was on Days 3 and 4.) Fight early rush-hour traffic on I-70 for the six miles to the National Western Complex. Wait in line for a spot at the unloading docks, which are ironically plastered with signs reading ABSOLUTELY NO DOGS ALLOWED. (Dogs are not a good fit at cattle and horse shows.) Haul everything out of the 4Runner and pile it on the rolly cart. Roll the cart in the doors and through the fetid vastness of the cattle pens to the open grooming area we’ve staked out for the local bichon club. Then I get to run back to the car, drive it what seems like three counties east to the big parking lot, and walk back. While Carol gets her gear laid out, I carry each dog to the public potty pens, which are bedroom-sized chicken-wire enclosures ankle deep in fresh wood chips. Unlike the area surrounding the complex, the potty pens are grime-free and won’t make a pure-white dog’s paws turn gray. Even walking them on the cattle pen floors makes short work of a bath and groom job, so we carry them everywhere they have to go. (Walking them on pavement gives them a condition we call “pave paws,” which is an aerospace joke I expect almost none of you to get.)
Finally (and by now it’s maybe 7 and just about sunrise) we get one dog up on each of our three tables and start spiffing them. The other club members arrive about then, but since they have only one dog apiece, there’s less for them to do. I hold the blow dryer while Carol spritzes, combs, brushes, and tips (scissor trims) three bichon haircuts. She’s good; she can chitchat with her friends all through the process, and although it takes about two and a half hours, we generally have the dogs looking about as good as they’re capable of looking well before ring time.
Ring time for bichons is mid-morning, from ten to eleven-thirty. Each class is judged separately: Puppies, Open Dog, Open Bitch, and specialty classes like Bred By and Amateur Owner/Handler. Then the winner from each class re-enters the ring by sex for the Winners competition, which results in a Winners Dog and a Winners Bitch. Finally, Winners Dog and Winners Bitch compete against one another (and against “specials,” which are dogs and bitches who are already champions but are still showing) for Best of Breed. Later in the day, Best of Breed goes up against Best of Breeds for the other breeds in the group (which for bichons is Non-Sporting) for Best of Group. Finally, the Best of Groups compete for Best in Show.
There are not a lot of bichons as a rule, at least not compared to French Bulldogs (39 this weekend!) and Dalmatians. So judging is fairly quick, and may take all of fifteen minutes to go from individual classes to Best of Breed. After Best of Breed is decided, we all go back down to the cattle pens (dogs tucked under arms or riding in baby strollers) and hang out in the grooming area. Senior club members pass along tips for grooming and handling to junior members (like us) and all the local dog gossip trades around. Lunch is had, though the food at the Complex is legendarily awful. (The Denver locals brown-bag it.) After lunch, people shop at the huckster tables upstairs or just hang out. Dog show attendees come down and wander around the grooming area, petting the dogs, taking pictures, and sometimes asking after puppies. By three or three-thirty, Carol and I begin to retrace our morning steps: We throw the dogs into their kennels, throw the kennels onto the rolly cart, pile whatever we need for the evening on top of the cart, and Carol waits by the docks while I fetch the car. In the early evening, Carol washes some or all portions of Certain Dogs Who Can’t Keep Their Noses Off the Floor (nothing like gray-black whiskers on a bichon) and I go fetch Chinese from Panda Express. Come 8:30, we take them to the cleanest patch of grass we can find out beside the hotel, then kiss them good night, jump in the shower, and collapse into bed by 9.
Whew. I’m a congenital insomniac, but at dog shows, I sleep like a rock.
As for how we did, well, not as well as we’d hoped, but not as badly as we (occasionally) feared, especially when the pack was misbehaving, getting filthy when we weren’t looking, or making a racket. Aero took Winners Dog and picked up two points on Saturday. One other male dog withdrew from the show, so we didn’t have a major, alas. On Sunday, something a little odd happened: The judge was one who simply liked large dogs. So Jack beat bantamweight Aero in Open Dog, and then in Winners Dog, Dash beat Jack, largely because Jack was still a little show-shy and wouldn’t keep his tail up. So our rowdy, scruffy, eight-month puppy bested his pack mates to become Winners Dog and win his first two points. Again, we did not have a major, but then we did not think Dash would take Winners Dog, either. As we expected, Dash was beaten for Best of Breed by a past-champion special, but we didn’t think he’d get even that far.
At today’s judging, Aero again took Winners Dog and the two points, giving him four for the weekend. He now has ten out of fifteen, and needs only those five points and one more major win to become a new champion. Carol is delighted. We’re both exhausted. The dogs are glad to be back home and are already fast asleep. Next show? The four-day Bichon Frise National Specialty (which I call Bichonicon) in Indianapolis, over the first full weekend in May. I expect to sleep well there, but still–that’s about as soon as I could handle it!
Yapstravaganza, Day 1
We pulled into the National Western Complex at 8 this morning, with a 4Runner full of dogs and associated paraphernalia. We had staked out a grooming area down in the cattle pens yesterday afternoon, and with machine-gun efficiency Carol got Aero, Jack, and Dash up on their grooming tables and started in on their coats. Jack, as is his habit, threw up in his kennel on the way here from the hotel, so he had to have a session with the no-rinse shampoo. (He’s riding in the front seat with Carol tomorrow. He may still hurl, but Carol will have a towel in her lap and can keep him from walking in it. Barf management is one of the essential skills of the dog show circuit.)
My back has been giving me some grief the last few days, and when I pulled out a Tylenol I fumbled it, and it landed on the floor. Even though I watch MythBusters and am a firm believer in the power of my immune system, this is a cattle show complex and we’re in a cattle pen. They hose it down every so often, but when you walk in the door you know what sorts of animals hang out here most of the time and what they use the floor for. That Tylenol went in the trash. (We have lots more.)
Carol did her magic, and come 10:30 we marched upstairs, Carol holding Jack, and me with Aero and Dash each under an arm. Compared to all the grooming, the showing happens in a flash. Aero and Jack both had first-day syndrome: Overwhelmed by the crush of humanity and caninity, they were edgy and whiny and neither would keep his tail up. And so when the dust settled, another bichon took Best Dog. Aero got second, and Jack third.
This has happened before with Aero. However, by tomorrow he’ll be a lot more at ease in the show environment, and we expect the tail to be back up where it belongs. Furthermore, losing can sometimes be useful: The dog who beat Aero took today’s major, and (as it happened) by doing so became a new champion. That means that he’s out of the running for the next three days of the show, giving Aero and perhaps Jack a shot at the major and three points that will be on the table each of tomorrow, Sunday, and Monday. Aero needs 9 points and a second major, so if he takes Open Dog for the next three days, he’ll be a new champion too.
And the bichon who vanquished Aero in the first round fell in the second, when our friend Mary Provost took Best of Breed with her bitch Cameo Gallerie of Mona Lisa. Mona has all the points she needs to become a champion, and now lacks only a second major. If Aero takes Best Dog tomorrow and Mona beats him for Best of Breed, Mona becomes a new champion–but because she’s of the opposite sex, Aero still gets a major win for having beaten three males. Mona gets a major as well for having beaten four bichons, including Aero.
Dash didn’t do as well. He’s a hunter, and his heart’s in the highlands, a-chasin’ the deer. (When we encounter deer on one of our walks, he looks over his shoulder at me as though to say, “Hey, Boss! I’ll kill ’em if you cook ’em!) He wouldn’t keep his nose off the floor, and the only other puppy entered took Best Puppy Dog.
So it goes; this show is his first, and necessary calibration. Behavior issues are a puppy’s stock in trade, and what he won’t grow out of we’ll deal with using bacon and stern words.
Carol is coming into her own as a bichon groomer, and the guys look fantastic. The dog who beat Aero today is owned by a woman who has been breeding and grooming bichons for over 25 years. Carol will have her day, and Aero will get his championship, if not this show then fairly soon. I’m down here in the cattle pen writing this up and will post it later today. (Cattle pens rarely come with free Wi-Fi.) Carol’s tweaking Dash’s coat under Mary’s expert tutelage, and we’ll all get another chance tomorrow. Stay tuned.
Daywander
Boy, I’ve never been gladder that I no longer live in Baltimore. Local snow totals there went well over 40 inches, which is pretty scary. Right before we moved to California, we had a freak late-season storm (it was mid-March!) that dumped 24″ or so, and the movers had to dig a path between the van and the front door. We got about 8″ here across the last two days, but it was a slow and steady fall that I blew out of the driveway twice, as our little mini-blower won’t chomp that much snow in one gulp.
The neighborhood is now a winter wonderland, which is great as long as you don’t have to go anywhere. City government is currently throwing a raging tantrum because we told them to stuff it when they demanded a huge tax increase, so they’re not plowing anything, and have turned half our streetlights off. There will be no familiar faces there after November, trust me.
But if you ever wanted to live in a palace on the slopes of a mountain, here’s your chance: A house right around the corner from us and probably 1500′ from my front door went into foreclosure, and you can now get it for $690K, and probably less. It’s a weird house, once the most expensive in the neighborhood (originally listed at $1.2M!!) but whoever built it put all the money into interior touches like marble columns and art niches. (Check out those stairways!) The exterior is plain as can be, and the house does not look anywhere near as large nor as luxurious as it actually is. Great city lights views off the back deck, and you get a free beehive in one of the pines close to the street. We walk the dogs past it almost every day, at least when it’s not a winter wonderland here. The bees are courteous, as bees go.
Dogs, yes. Tomorrow afternoon we take QBit over to Sunrise Kennels and blast north to Denver with the other three, for the Rocky Mountain Cluster Dog Show, a 4-day all-breed yapstravaganza. (QBit is not show-quality, but is still Lord of the Pack.) Carol has shown Aero intermittently over the last two and a half years, but this is the first time we have ever tried to show more than one dog at a show. And we have three. Yes indeedy, Dash makes his debut in the 6-9 mo. Puppy Dog category, with Aero and Jack competing in Open Dog. (“Dog” in dog show jargon specifically means “male dog” and “bitch” is an ordinary word without any negative connotations.) Carol is in the laundry room even as I type, touching up Jack’s hairdo. Aero is next. (Dash’s turn was yesterday.)
The show is actually four consecutive one-day shows, and thus four opportunities to win points, with four “major wins” on the table. Aero has one major win and six points. He needs a second major win and another nine points to be declared a champion. Given that there are at least four points at stake each day, Aero could come home the champ we always knew he could be. In fact, although very unlikely, Jack could do the same thing, even though he has neither points nor major wins to his credit. He would have to grab all points all four days, which would be something of a grand slam for a dog who is about 15% larger than most judges would like him to be. Sure, we’d prefer Aero get the points, but we’re curious to see what Jack can do. He’s always been something of a “practice dog” in the past (I learned to handle in the show ring by showing Jack two years ago, and Carol practices grooming on him) but he’s never looked better and could do well, especially if Aero shies away from the judges, as he often does.
There is always a bichon frise grooming area somewhere in the vast cattle pens of the National Western Complex, and that’s where we’ll be. So if you’re in the Denver area and have some time on your hands, come see us. Watch for the blinding white off the dogs, or the glint off the top of my head. Early is better, and ring time for bichons is 9:30, unless I misrecall.
We still need effective “query by humming,” as the formidable David Stafford once put it. Carol and I don’t watch much TV, and what we watch consists mostly of Weather Channel forecasts. Every so often they’ll play a piece of music I like during a forecast, but they don’t say what it is. There’s supposedly a list online, but January wasn’t added to it until last night. All through January I heard a rousing piece that sounded like John Williams movie music, and vaguely familiar at that. I quickly memorized it, and whistled it for several people, to no avail. Finally, the list went live last night, and I discovered that the mystery song was in fact a John Williams piece, composed for the 1988 Summer Olympics. Amazon sells a DRM-free MP3 for 99c. In less than 90 seconds, I had it on disk and it was coming out my speakers. They had my dollar. Everybody’s happy.
Heh. That ain’t tricky. That’s the way you do it: You sell an unencumbered MP3. No, that ain’t tricky, that’s the way you do it: Get a dollar fer nuthin’; stampin’ bits is free!
Odd Lots
- Wow! The Authors’ Guild finally had a good idea a couple of weeks ago: Who Moved My Buy Button, a Web site that tracks Amazon’s “Buy” button for any given title. If the Buy button goes away (for example, if the book goes out of stock or if the publisher places it out of print–or if Amazon gets in another cage fight with a major publisher) you get an email to that effect. Don’t miss their “Buttonology” page, which explains how to interpret Buy button disruption by inspection. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- So what exactly is this, anyway? It looks like what used to happen to me when I tried to develop my own film (briefly) in 1966, and found these odd (and similar) little anomalies on my negatives. Dirt, or perhaps the edge of the film contacting the center. Nothing says he wasn’t using a film camera, but film is pretty uncommon these days. If I had to guess (and assuming it isn’t some flaw in the camera optics) I like the idea of a meteor passing through the ionized region of the atmosphere where the aurora display was happening. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- While we’re talking high-energy physics, I’m finding it remarkable how rapidly an apparently dead Sun came back to life, on or about January 1. We now have three significant sunspots on the visible face, including a genuine monster. (Here’s an animated GIF of spot 1045 growing.) This gives us a sunspot number of 71, the likes of which I haven’t seen in three or four years. I’ve been spinning the dials downstairs, and have heard openings on 18 MHz and even 21 MHz. Gonna get those wires shielded before the next solar minimum, fersure.
- Integrated reader/bookstore systems have made me a little bit nervous ever since the Kindle Orwell debacle last year, and the iPad, if anything, will be even more vulnerable to that sort of remote meddling. It’s not so much malfeasance by the system operators as their vulnerability to government corruption and coercion. Here’s a perspective from a French chap.
- Still wedged on VMWare Workstation, but Bp. Sam’l Bassett pointed me to a site providing lots of free VirtualBox VMs. The question of how trustworthy such downloadable images are is a good one, but they’re certainly one way to mess with a new OS without having to fuss with hard disk partitioning and installation.
- I know it’s really her name, and no disrespect is intended, but when I read a headline like: “Costa Rica Elects Chinchilla First Woman President” I don’t see what I’m supposed to see. Journalists used to be taught to avoid gaffes like this, and many other news organizations did. Including her first name would have helped.
- I kid you not: Pepsico is wrapping up a limited-edition, 8-week-only campaign for Mountain Dew Throwback, which contains Real Sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. I’m a diet soda guy and won’t partake, but that’s a quarter step in the right direction. (My guess: The ridiculous ethanol-as-fuel scam is making corn expensive enough so that HFCS is not the big win that it used to be.)
- Once again, XKCD scores big–and loud. (SNSFW.) (Thanks to Baron Waste for the link.)
An (Ebook) Fate Worse Than Piracy
I’ve had it in mind for some months now to conduct and publish an interview like this one with a backchannel correspondent of mine who calls himself The Jolly Pirate. That’s unlikely; Jolly didn’t like the idea much, and more to the point, he doesn’t pay much attention to pirated ebooks. He is not an ubercracker from the Scene and doesn’t want to be. He knows where the stuff is and he downloads its. He doesn’t upload at all, except for the uploading inherent in torrent downloading.
His motivation and modus operandi are interesting and I will describe them at greater length someday; from a height I’d describe him as a hoarder who downloads all sorts of things under the assumption that they may eventually be harder to come by. He’s read a few computer books downloaded from Usenet, all of them .chm files, and treats them like a sort of third-party help system for the technologies he’s interested in. The thing that makes me grin a little is this: He says he has over 50,000 ebook files on his hard drive, but he doesn’t own an ebook reader. He doesn’t read for fun and I get the impression that he doesn’t read much at all unless he has to. I asked him why he downloaded all those books, and his answer was simple and obvious: “Because it was easy.” Most of you have seen my entry for December 29, 2009. Jolly downloaded 10,000 ebooks in a couple of hours. That scares some authors and publishers a lot, and I’m still trying to get my head around the question. Tim O’Reilly said somewhere that piracy is like a progressive tax on success, and that’s a useful metaphor. I rarely see my own material in the pirate channels. That is not true of Steven King or Ms. Rowling.
And in truth, something else makes me worry more than piracy. This isn’t an original insight, though I don’t recall where I first read it (anybody?) but a major threat to success in writing today is the competition from books that have already been published. There are only so many hours in a life, and with most any popular print book available used but in good shape on ABEBooks for $5 or less, a given consumer never has to buy a new book at all, especially fiction. It’s less true in nonfiction covering emerging issues and technologies, but for last year’s news and mature technologies it’s operative: All the Windows XP books that the world needs have already been published, and you can get most of them from the penny sellers for the (slightly padded) cost of shipping.
My point: Existing books compete for reader chair-time with new books. An enormous number of books have been published in the past twenty years or so, and that’s not old enough for them to crumble into shreds. (Alas, my ’60s MM paperbacks are doing exactly that, reminding me constantly what “pulp” means.) They’re all still kicking around the used and unused remainder market, and will be for decades to come. All the arguing about ebook pricing that I’ve seen so far seems to ignore the fact that new books of either type compete with used print books, and ubiquitous Web access makes finding precisely what you want almost effortless.
Paying $15 for an ebook is a sort of impatience tax. Wait a few months, and used copies of the hardcover will be on ABEBooks for $5 or (probably) less, including shipping. Good books, too. If Big Media ever truly embraces ebooks, it will be as a means of defeating the Doctrine of First Sale and eliminating the used book market. (The legal issues there are still very much in play. Expect much agitation in coming years for new laws forbidding the resale of “used” electronic files.)
This shines some different light on the difficulties Google has had getting authors to sign on to the Google Books settlement. I’m not sure that all authors and (especially) publishers even want the orphan copyright issue to be settled. If it is, suddenly the Google scanning machine will drop what may eventually be hundreds of thousands of additional ebooks into the marketplace, all of them competing for quality chair time with whatever current authors are writing. That may explain why I’ve had so much trouble getting SF publishers to talk to me. People may not be reading less these days, but they’re certainly reading and re-reading things that already exist. The value of what I write now is correspondingly less.
When a pulp becomes an ebook, it becomes eternal. Don’t tell me about death due to storage or container format obsolescence. I still have SF copy I wrote using CP/M WordStar in 1979 and stored to 8″ floppies, now safely on a USB thumb drive in .rtf format. If USB ever becomes obsolete, all my files will follow me to whatever comes next–and will probably take five seconds or less to transfer.
There will always be a reliable if modest supply of book crazies and loyal fans who will pay top dollar for The Latest. Beyond that, market cruelties come into play that will make it a lot harder to break into the writing business for the forseeable future.
Piracy? What’s that again?
Odd Lots
- Stumbled across Atlas Obscura, which is a collection of pointers to peculiar places around the world, including a museum in Iceland housing the world’s largest collection of animal penises. Alas, they do not list Bubbly Creek, on the south side of Chicago, where the stockyards dumped untold quantities of animal blood and offal for 80-odd years, forming a layer of clotted blood up to three feet thick on the riverbed. Peculiar don’t quite capture it.
- Don’t know if I buy this, exactly, but there is some evidence that people lose weight just by living at higher altitudes. I certainly weigh less at 6600 feet than I did in Scottsdale at 1900, though strength training, shunning sugar, rationing grains, and eating lots more meat and dairy may have had something to do with it as well.
- AVG is at it again; I got a trojan warning today for Trojan Generic 16.AUZZ in the installer for the Pan newsreader, which I have used off and on for several months. The file has been in my installers directory since last September and never triggered an alert before. I don’t think it’s a threat, but it demonstrates the difficulties of signature-based virus detection.
- In case I haven’t mentioned it before: I’ve abandoned Winamp (after something like twelve years) for the VLC Media Player. It plays every audio and video format I’ve thrown at it (including some odd ones like mkv) except for MIDI. It never bitches about codecs and so far has never failed to play a playable file or disc. It even plays HD video, though the only example I have right now is some footage of me doing stand-up comedy with Terry Dullmaier at our 40th grade school reunion. Simple, sane interface with controls big enough to see. Free. What’s not to love?
- And the Gimp may become a lot more lovable within a year. Man, I’ve tried to love the product for years…and always failed. The 2.8 version, due in December, could be just the thing.
- Cool emerging space tech: Ionic mini-thrusters small enough to build several into a CubeSat.
- What is the term for those people who dress up in chicken suits and wave signs too damned close to the street near places like Wild Wings? (Lately it’s mostly been guys in Statue of Liberty suits hawking Liberty Tax Service.) Helluva way to make a living. (I keep thinking I’ll be wiping them off my windshield.)
Daywander
Not having much luck making Workstation 6 function, and two conversations and numerous emails with VMWare’s tech support people hasn’t helped. I install the product, I enter the serial number as requested, and get this error message. Has anybody else ever seen this? Or can anybody even explain it? I emailed the screenshot to VMWare, and that’s about the time they clammed up.
I hate to abandon Workstation entirely. VMWare’s snapshot system is far superior to that of VirtualBox, and I use it a lot. I’ll miss it. Boy.
And while I’m asking peculiar things, let me ask the multitudes here how you pronounce “iodine.” I have always said eye-oh-dyne, but Bob Thompson, who knows more than a little about chemistry (and certainly more than I) pronounces it eye-oh-deen. This lines up with the rest of the halogens; we don’t, after all, say “broh-myne.” So? Which is it?
I edited another half a chapter of FreePascal From Square One yesterday morning, and in laying out the edited material got up to page 136. The book I’m adapting it from is 800 pages long, but don’t look for anything that size. To be workable on Lulu, the book is going to have to stop at or before page 400. A lot of the material in Borland Pascal 7 From Square One just doesn’t apply anymore…who’s called the Borland Graphics Interface lately, or done text output by poking word values into the video display buffer? The BGI chapter was 100 pages all by itself, and when I slice out that and other things like overlays and DOS/BIOS calls, I’m really pulling 400 pages out of no more than 600 pages of useful material, maybe less. Should be done by June. I hope.
The issue of whether Amazon imposes DRM on Kindle publishers is complicated, and I’ll back away some from my statement to that effect on Monday, and will hold off until I try to get one of my own titles into the system. This article suggests that recent policy changes have made DRM optional. Having to face the DRM issue square-on has kept me putting off publishing on the Kindle for some time. As a very small publisher I’ve made this promise to my readers: No DRM of any kind, on anything, ever. I’m willing to forgo Kindle sales if the DRM decision is not my own, but from what I’m reading now, I think that won’t be the case.
As for Amazon caving, well, that’s more complex too. I see that Nancy Kress’s new book Steal Across the Sky is listed on the Amazon Web store, and her publisher, Tor, is one of Macmillan’s imprints. However, you can’t order it from Amazon at this time. (Third-party affiliates are offering it, but Amazon itself is not. Note the double dashes under “Amazon Price.”) Ditto Nancy’s Beggars and Choosers, another Tor book. Yesterday morning’s Wall Street Journal had a story explicitly stating that Amazon had conceded the price issue to Macmillan. But Amazon isn’t selling the books yet, so clearly the struggle goes on.
Off to church, to install an SX270 in place of a doddering old E-Machines box that is four times the size and probably a third the capability.
Ebooks: Wholesale/Retail vs. Commission
I’m guessing that by now, most of you have heard of Amazon’s little dustup with Macmillan, one of the world’s largest book publishers. As long as Kindle was the only significant online retailer for ebooks, Macmillan accepted Amazon’s sales terms, which set a ceiling of $9.99 on most ebook prices, at Amazon’s option. But the instant Apple popped up as a second significant ebook retailer, Macmillan cut a better deal with Apple, and demanded that Amazon match Apple’s terms, which include a higher price ceiling. Amazon responded by refusing to sell Macmillan’s titles.
Amazon caved yesterday, and agreed to reinstate Macmillan’s books at Macmillan’s higher prices. People posting in the comments sections of some news sites seem puzzled that a more competitive market would raise prices for consumers, but that’s just the way truly free markets work. Until Apple showed up with their iPad, Amazon had a monopsony relationship with ebook publishers, rather like WalMart has (still) a monopsony relationship with a multitude of small-to-middling goods manufacturers and wholesalers. In a competitive retail market, neither monopoly (one seller, many buyers) nor monopsony (one buyer, many sellers) dominate. There are lots of buyers and lots of sellers, and we quickly find out what the “real” price of a product is, as manufacturers and retailers jockey for the greatest market share among consumers.
That’s not, however, what I find interesting about the recent conflict. Look closer, and you’ll see two fundamentally different approaches to selling a product to consumers: Amazon is selling on the conventional wholesale/retail model, and Apple is selling on an agency model. Amazon wants to buy ebooks from publishers at a wholesale price and make money on the margin between that wholesale price and a retail price that it controls. This allows it to create occasional “loss leaders” to generate traffic, as conventional goods retailers have done as long as anyone remembers. Apple, by contrast, wants to sell ebooks at prices set by their publishers, and take a percentage of every sale.
Publishers like the agency model since it gives them more control over pricing, and does not train the public to expect all ebook prices to be $10 or less. How much better the agency model is for publishers and authors is unclear, and depends in part on how fungible you think books are, which is a very weird business that I’m still thinking about. It may also depend on how many players can participate on the publisher side. A B&M bookstore can only contain and manage so many physical books, and publishers play lots of dicey scarcity games to get more shelf space than their competitors. (“Stock our whole frontlist and we’ll give you an extra 2 points’ margin…”) An online ebook store’s capacity is essentially unlimited, and any number of publishers can play. If there are a million publishers and 999,900 of them sell products at lower prices than you do, your control of pricing is less than it was in the era when it was tough to get your books into stores and a relatively few large publishers dominated the market.
Nor does it end there. If you look even closer, Apple’s model starts to look familiar in another sense: It starts to look like a publisher paying authors a royalty. The royalty rate is insanely high by historical standards (70% or thereabouts) but there are no atoms to push and protect. Without atoms getting in the way, being a publisher becomes an entirely different challenge, and the difference between conventional publishing and self-publishing implodes to the process of contracting for services you need with people who have the skills you don’t have. As experience in that process becomes more common, being Macmillan gradually becomes less and less important. I wonder whether Macmillan understands that.
Most of all we need to remember: The ebook business is still in its infancy. Everything remains in play. The readers can only get better. People are doing weird things that seem to work, like giving away your older ebooks to develop a market for your newer ebooks. Lots more ideas will be tried, new technologies will appear, and older technologies will change and improve. Maybe Amazon’s crazy action against Macmillan had to happen, just to show everybody that such things won’t work. (Sure, it was obvious…in hindsight.)
Me, I’m with Apple…for now. Why? Because Apple’s business model smells more like a free market than Amazon’s–and more like a game I can compete in. That could change, and much of that decision will hinge on the nature of Apple’s ebook DRM. (We don’t know all the details yet.) Kindle’s DRM is mandatory–whether I as a publisher want it or not. In a sense, its purpose is not to protect the publishers or the authors from piracy so much as to protect Amazon from a freer market, in which consumers can move their books from device to device at will. Apple could adopt that same strategy, leaving us with two paranoid and incompatible ebook retailers and readers. Hey, that’s nothing that another five or six major ebook retailers couldn’t fix, and they’ll happen. Give ’em time.
