> It's strange to me that most ISPs/hosting
> companies still don't offer Postgres.

Heroku offers Rails application hosting on PostgreSQL only. 38K apps and growing... their setup is very slick.

Then again, I'm a big fan of Rails on PostgreSQL.

Hm, that is interesting. 1500 copies is more than I've ever sold, though... maybe someday...

> Not true: Tim's numbers are wrong, especially if you use a POD supplier.

I'm not familiar with the print-on-demand pricing... but, FWIW, we just printed up a small batch of books and after shipping, shrink-wrap, and all that it ended up being in the ballpark of what he was saying.

> did he have anything to say about Peter Cooper's assertion
> that a freely available e-book would promote hard copy sales?

Yup, he said:

We don't do it for all books because while there are some cases where free online exposure can help sell print books, there are also many cases where it seems to sell fewer books. A lot depends on whether a book is already visible or not.

and

"Free" should be seen as a strategic tool for publishing. Sometimes it helps; sometimes it hurts.

Pretty cool that he weighed in on this one.

...on the post is pretty interesting. Here's an excerpt:

If you were to self-publish, you will find that you might print, say, 1000 copies at $8 each, or 2000 copies at maybe $6 each. (It could be more. I'm not as close to book printing prices as I used to be.) So you're out $8-$12000 up front. So lets say you've guessed exactly right how many copies you will sell. You printed 1000 copies for $8K, and sold all 1000 for $30K to $40K (depending on where you set the price.) You made $22K, or maybe even $32K, versus the $19K you earned with APress.

He goes on to discuss the hassle of shipping, returns, credit card processing, storing the books, etc. All true, all good stuff.

For what it's worth, going through a small local publisher with my JavaCC book has worked out pretty well. We did a much smaller print run - 350 books - so the storage wasn't as much of a hassle. Definitely a niche market, though.

Well played.

> I'm currently in the Air Force

Thanks for serving!

Do they still have the recruiting slogan "why not Minot?"

Some of the other lists are more interesting - like the Combined Arms Center counterinsurgency list. It seems like those operations get a little more complicated than 'apply weapon x to target y'. Hearts and minds! What's the Rudyard Kipling quote?

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;

"The white man's burden"; that sounds offensive. But I bet Kipling was getting at more something along the lines of "The Western Civilization burden". Anyhow, "savage wars of peace" certainly hits the nail on the head.

...Chief of Staff's reading list. Short on fighter pilot stuff, long on strategy and counterinsurgency. They see the way things are going, no doubt about it.

> Thank god my van is blue.

I refer you to suspiciousvans.com. As the first image says, "Free Candy!"

...Roosevelt going on television to talk about the stock market crash. Those were the days!

Obligatory Onion: BREAKING: Democrats Hoping To Take Control Of Congress From Republican Minority In 2010

But what do you expect? After all, as Biden said, some of the guys he campaigned for are turkeys.

...at least in the Coast Guard are all done in print in uppercase. So you get:

2045 LTJG COPELAND RELIEVED THE WATCH. U/W AS BEFORE, C/S 290/6 KTS.

and all that sort of thing. Most folks' uppercase print letters seem look the same. At least they do after they're forced to rewrite a log for neatness :-)

> what the engineers say about the temperature
> and o-rings? let's launch!

I just finished reading a neat book about the Challenger (not the Columbia) disaster and other material failures - Why Things Break by Mark Eberhart. Some good technical discussion of Kevlar in there too. Nifty stuff!