Burning Man looks like a tentative near-future where robots work the menial crap for us and as we dip our toes in the waters of Culture-like leisure everyone experiments being a hippie and a DIYer artisan and a stoner and a furry and a badass craftsman all at once, and you know what? I'm glad it exists. Bring along the rabbit ears, I'll bring the swiss army knife, and let's see what we can make work.
Oh, good example. Y'all probably know that already, but Star Control 2 is now available freely under an open source license, just under the different name of Ur-Quan Masters due to trademark issues.
I almost want to believe he's deliberately teasing the authorities into increasing the surveillance around the embassy, at a time when that ongoing expense is causing angry murmurs the general public. That would be pretty clever.
Whenever this topic comes up, we end up discussing what publishers really do.
Every time, someone with some knowledge of how the publishing industry works turns up and explains how there is this long road between the author's draft and the book in your hands, made of editing, copy-editing, typesetting, cover design, marketing and more, and the publisher is the truck driver that sees the draft to the end of that road. That's correct.
But I've come to the conclusion that none of that is the one irreplaceable service publishers perform in the system.
All of the above can, to some extent, and for a fee, be performed just as well by independent contractors. (There are great independent editors out there, and aren't we all glad for that.)
The one important thing publishers do is: they take the loss on books that don't earn out.
Now hear me out.
I know how we, Slashdot readers, tend to think about those things. In our minds, if the book doesn't earn out (that is, it brings in less money than the publisher gave the author as an advance), then it's got to be someone's fault, right? Bad writer, bad publisher. Something.
Wrong.
The thing is, a successful book requires a lot of factors. Great writing doesn't suffice. The public is fickle. Yesterday, supernatural romance sold by the truckload, now it doesn't. GRRM was a great writer for decades before you even heard of him. Harry Potter didn't start hitting it big until three or four books into the series. Word of mouth matters, but only after the readership has exceeded a certain critical mass. And until then... someone has to take the loss.
Because, here's the thing. GRRM, Rowling, they're outliers. Many books -- most books, AFAIK -- don't quite earn out. Many deserve to, but don't, because that's not how the world works.
But they still got written, you still read some of them, you still loved some of them, and that only happened because someone, somewhere, was willing to pay an author to keep writing, and take the risk that the great book in their hands may not earn that money back.
And that, friends, is what publishers really do.
Goddammit Slashdot. That was "cp book.epub <your device>". That's what I get for not previewing, I guess.
The publisher does the funding, editing, copy-editing, typesetting, marketing, legal registration, cover design on the book, and that's not even the one most important role they perform in the system.
Amazon does cp book.epub .
Which one here is the middleman exactly?
I hate to state the obvious, but right now Amazon is attempting to muscle in a 43% markup just to do, basically, cp
I've tried a lot of desktops over the years and always returned to KDE as the most able to be useful when I need it to and stay the fuck out of the way the rest of the time. (Unity, despite its reputation, is good at that too.) But the love was no longer really there. Like a favorite old workhorse that you just no longer really ride for the pleasure of it alone.
So I've not kept track of KDE 5 developments, and honestly I expected to be way underwhelmed. It was, after all, supposed to be mainly a port of the same old thing to the new Qt 5.
But I just tried the live CD linked in the article and, uh, whoa. It looks so *tidy*. Full of that orderly neatness that Gnome, for all its faults, has generally been better at than KDE. And I find myself excited for the first time in a long while, and that's a very nice feeling to rediscover.
I really just wish desktops were capable of only turning on the discrete GPU when playing games, and relying on the CPU built-in one the rest of the time. (Or is it possible nowadays and I never found out?)
The open source Gallium3D driver for Southern Island Radeon GPUs has come a LONG way in the recent months. Given a 3.14+ kernel and the soon-to-be-released 10.2 Mesa libs, you can expect performance within 80% of that of the Catalyst driver, and it only keeps getting better. The stability is also pretty good. I love being able to flip smoothly between a full screen game and a chat window or a Web browser.
Turns out we are the Great Ancients from a million years ago that came from the cosmos to seed life. Whatever species ends up evolving there will dig into their past with wonder and trepidation to discover who we were. And then they'll find out about Honey Boo Boo. Ah, to be a fly on the wall...
It's a learn-as-you-go sort of deal. Don't start off with the end boss and you'll be okay. I would be pants-pissingly terrified in some of the situations described here, but some of the situations I've been in would make you at least a little queasy, I wager.
As an addendum to the press card thing: if you're working for or with any sort of official organisation that the locals would know of, find their logo, even a crappy small one ripped from a website, print it out on a large piece of paper, US Letter or so, along with the org's name in large bold letters, and tape that to the inside of your windshield. Does not open every door. But does open many doors.
White dwarf seeks red giant for binary relationship.
