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bl4kon Why do ebooks cost so much?

If I were to write a book, either technical or a novel, I would be tempted to hire a freelance copyrighter, editor and publicist, then list it on Amazon, Safari etc. myself.

You can find these people on Elance and similar sites, but there is an opportunity for a website that is a one-stop-shop to do all of this in one place (ie. find the various people, organize listing, sales etc.).

Anybody know if this already exists?

bl4kon How Much Does a Single Search Cost Google?

I would guess that in such a case the largest portion of cost would be bandwidth.

bl4kon Facebook Shares Hit $28.26 Per Share, That’s a $70+ Billion Valuation

Facebook is worth $2B

This is ridiculous! It is not sustainable!

Facebook is worth $5B

Oh, come on, its a social network!

Facebook is worth $10B

There is no way it can ever really be worth that much!

Facebook is worth $15B

Oh now this is just bubble bubble bubble bubble bubble!

Facebook is worth $27B

Oh ok, cmon now, you are just having us on, right!

Facebook is worth $50B

What just because it has more pageviews than Google doesn't mean it will make money!

Facebook is worth $75B

Pfffttt.. this stock is going to tank fast!

Facebook is worth $125B and is now a public company

No way this will last!

Facebook stock trading at $80, worth $200B

It is going to be awesome to watch everyone lose their money!

Facebook stock dropped 4% today to $450

Told ya it will drop!

aka. you can never be wrong or right in these threads

bl4kon Facebook Shares Hit $28.26 Per Share, That’s a $70+ Billion Valuation

Ye I think that is the difference. Most resources stocks have risk built into the price (from nationalization through to a drop in minerals demand) but Facebook hasn't done much wrong in the past 5-6 years.

bl4kon Facebook Shares Hit $28.26 Per Share, That’s a $70+ Billion Valuation

It means most non-tech people spend all day on the damn site, either on their laptops or on their phones.

For a lot of people today Facebook is the Internet

bl4kon Facebook Shares Hit $28.26 Per Share, That’s a $70+ Billion Valuation

You can't really treat Facebook stock in that way, for two reasons:

a) They aren't putting in financial performance to impress investors. They are growing the company.

b) Treat it more like a resources stock were they have large mining leases and rights, have started exploration but are 2-3 years away from actually mining anything.

bl4kon [dead]

The images are not originals. I think ZDNet scanned original photos

bl4kon Using Python and heat maps to determine the best place to aim on a dart board

Dart shots are not evenly distributed. You are more likely to get the height wrong then the width - this is because of how the dart travels.

Darts dip a lot in flight - they do not move side to side as much. As a dart player, I guesstimate that after only a few hours practice most people will be off 1.5cm or so in the vertical but only 0.75cm in the horizontal

Professional dart players are always aiming at 20. If they block the triple-twenty with their first or second dart, they then aim at triple-19.with some players preferring triple-18 since height-wise it is in similar range

bl4kon [dead]

It is obviously low-voltage halogen downlights, to the extent that this kid is either a paranoid schizophrenic or is trolling everybody.

I scanned through his blog (which is a good read) and couldn't find anything that somebody would kill him or make him disappear over.

I would be more interested in knowing why it took ZDNet 6 months to report one of their bloggers missing?

bl4kon PEP 3333 Accepted: WSGI standard for Python 3.x

Any other Python devs still going to stick with 2.x despite this? I know I will be, for the foreseeable future.

This was a big step for 3.0 adoption, but there is still a long way to go. It reminds me of PHP4 v PHP5, but with far less clear benefits (and far less support).

bl4kon Google's H.264 decision: It's all about YouTube costs

That is more accurate. In terms of hardware + software it is closest to the Sun storage appliances which are Solaris or Linux with ZFS plus management tools.

The Sun promotional literature[1] refers to 70%+ cost savings on their units over comparable systems from EMC (the old school market leader). It was the fastest growing product at Sun, as it allowed companies to cut down storage costs using a model similar to what Google pioneered with Big Table and GFS.

[1] http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/un...

bl4kon Google's H.264 decision: It's all about YouTube costs

> (does it count as commercial when they are not charging users for the video, but are monetizing the site with advertising?

Yes.

The license[1] mentions both 'free television' and 'renumeration from other sources'

[1] http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsS...

bl4kon So Who Really Owns Facebook? (Chart)

and everybody else this sloppy article missed

nice to have a catch-all for your mistakes

(btw the mistake they made is that they are taking pre-dilution percentage figures from 5-6 years ago and adding them to more recent percentage figures, such as Goldman, and then completely forgetting other investors - such as MSFT (preferred stock!), Accel (first VC - preferred stock!). If you add all of these percentages, you would get over 200% - article is completely innacurate)

bl4kon 50 Cent Tweets, Tiny Stock Soars

"Man, making money like this is sooo easy it should be illegal!"

"ah, Mr Cent.."

bl4kon Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome

I have been without flash for almost a year now and I can't remember the last time I had a problem playing a video on YouTube.

It has happen possibly twice.

bl4kon Steve's story - Google employee #13

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omid_Kordestani

bl4kon Ron Conway Explained

Make something that is noticed. They will find you.

6+ years ago I went from knowing nobody in the valley to almost everybody within a few days. Just generate buzz and build a good product.

Silicon Valley is tiny. You are only an email and a single intro away from almost everybody.

Ron shows up to the YC demo days, but you can definitely meet Ron and other angels without YC (it has been happening for years, after all). He invests very early and tracks most of the tech blogs.

bl4kon RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

Users shouldn't need to know what RSS is to use it just as they don't need to know what HTTP is to read a website or what SMTP is to send email.

The interface to using RSS has always been flawed, that is where the problem is.

bl4kon Twins’ Facebook Fight Rages On

I didn't say I agree with it - I said that is what you hear a lot of.

Zuck and Bill deserve absolute credit for their successes.

bl4kon Twins’ Facebook Fight Rages On

It seems you can't be successful, especially in tech/web, without a dozen people hanging onto your coattails claiming that you stole the idea or that you were lucky.

MySpace were written off as lucky spammers, Zuck a theif, Bill Gates stole MS-DOS, etc. etc.

bl4kon The Best Tech Writing of 2010

Yes, they are all in a race to the bottom, mimicking each other.

I wish one of the blogs would hire a good roster of tech writers and put out 2-3 good articles a day, instead of 10-15 gossipy and poorly written articles a day.

bl4kon The Best Tech Writing of 2010

Good list. I thought all of the usual tech blogs have been very weak and most good tech writing is coming from traditional sources or individual bloggers.

bl4kon A Day With an E-mail Scammer

and to think, if the scammer had just bothered to write a poem he may have gotten the $2000

bl4kon How Much Did It Cost AOL To Send Us Those CDs In The 90s? “A Lot,”

I found that AOL was nowhere near enough, wasn't 'true network' (I understood this at 10), was heavily criticized by the PC media because of this (which I also used to read) so I switched it off and discovered BBS's

The BBS's were the foundation of almost every person I have met in tech, every job, all dev, every startup I have been involved with and there is a very strong camaraderie amongst the early BBS hackers (most of us went on to become v early web hackers).

So I see from how inside AOL you think your theory might hold, but outside of it there was an entire larger network that was far more interesting

bl4kon What Microsoft gets for $2 billion

And if they canned online - all the pundits will be saying:

"Google is beating Microsoft because Microsoft DOESNT EVEN HAVE A MAPPING PRODUCT OR SEARCH ENGINE.. they do not see the FUTURE IS ONLINE.. blah blah blah.. "

This is Microsoft playing defense - and cheap relative to the profit machine they are defending

bl4kon Heroku founder Adam Wiggins: The Legacy of the Self-Made Man (2008)

Most of these guys were born and already famous before the steam engine patent - let alone the real industrial boon

The Wikipedia summary isn't wrong, it is just misleading. The inventions and innovations that lead to the industrial revolution were founded in the late 18C, but the real transformation was much later (although it did happen, comparatively, quickly)

It is a bit like saying that the 'Internet era' is from the 1950's, because that is when the integrated circuit was created

bl4kon How Allies Used Math Against German Tanks

or why to not put autoincrement id's into your webapp routes

bl4kon The Unwelcome Return of Platform Dependencies

There are some interesting points, but the wrong conclusion.

The conclusions and lead-in should have been that as with the desktop market, on the web do not trust the platform providers. reply

bl4kon Heroku founder Adam Wiggins: The Legacy of the Self-Made Man (2008)

Prior to the industrial revolution, status in most societies was based on one thing only: heredity. No matter how much you accomplished - or didn’t - you stayed in the same station of life.

Ye, this isn't really true. Lets take, for example, 18th century Naval officers from the UK:

* Captain Cook - discovered Australia, mapped the Pacific etc. Father was a farmer

* Horatio Nelson - Defeated the French, considered greatest Naval commander of all time. Father was a minister

* Arthur Philip - Commander during American Revolution, lead colonization of Australia. Father was a teacher.

It is a very common misconception that in old society it was impossible to move from the lower classes into the upper classes. The British Empire, the prototypical aristocracy, was largely shaped and developed by people who were raised in the lower classes. This is because the military, navy, their universities (eg. Isaac Newton), and many other parts of government and private societies were strict meritocracies.

The upper classes actually produced a very small number of notable people, outside of royalty (Charles Darwin, Churchill, Brunel (although his grandfather was a French farmer)

(Edit: "America became the first large-scale experiment of a society that could be called a meritocracy." - Citation needed. See above.)

bl4kon Ray Kurzweil: How My Predictions Are Faring (2010)

He is being very, very liberal with his own analysis.

If you read the predictions in context, you know that he predicted a future world where we are all wearing computers that we talk to. When he pulls each prediction out, he is able to justify it with a bit of a stretch.

btw he completely missed cloud computing - his predictions have users storing everything at home on large disk arrays.

(not sure how he missed it Ellison has been banging on about it for decades)