random bits

[cellio]

I just posted more hints for the music challenge.

A few days ago I read about a skydiver who was doing his first dive, with his instructor stapped to his back. The instructor had a heart attack on the way down. That's sad, but I must admit that my first question was: was the student's technique that scary? :-)

Real Live Preacher is taking an unusual approach to publishing a (paper book), essentially soliciting enough pre-orders to pay for the initial print run. That's probably not unusual for publishing houses, but I'm not used to seeing it from individuals. He's only looking for a bit over 400, so I figured that given his popularity he'd have that in days, but so far no. It's kind of sobering that even that low-sounding goal is a challenge. (It does suggest that the likes of unknowns like me wouldn't muster enough interest to publish on dead trees. Maybe most people don't read dead trees any more, but I still prefer them for many things.)

CNN might be using your bandwidth to publish (link from goldsquare). Keep that in mind the next time you watch something live and big.

For the locals: Temple Sinai has some interesting presentations open to the public coming up; the first (on February 18) is Christiane Amanpour, CNN's chief international correspondent. I'll post more about this in a few days, but if you want to go, drop me a note. This sounds like a neat series that I want to support, so unless I get flooded, I'm inclined to buy one ticket (for any of the presentations) for anyone I actually know who expresses interest.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The Octoshape thing looks like a good thing to me -- using a distributed, peer-to-peer method of transferring data all over the place without bogging down and bottlenecking any specific part? That's what the Internet was designed to do! That seems to me to be exactly the right way to move things like live streaming video across the Internet. Far, far more efficient, far, far more effective, far fewer bottlenecks, overall costs being lower, and people actually helping people.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

"Strangely, there isn't an uninstaller for the Mac version of the app. You have to manually delete the Octoshape folder."

Ehhh. Most well-behaved Mac applications are installed by copying them to /Applications and uninstalled by dragging them to the Trash. This took me a bit to get used to, but it's definitely nice to not have user apps scattering pieces of themselves all over my disk. :)

[hrj.livejournal.com]

soliciting enough pre-orders to pay for the initial print run

It's an old, established business model in publishing. I have any number of books from the 19th and early 20th centuries that were "published by subscription" and include an extensive list of all the subscribers whose advance purchase made the publication possible. It seems to have been particularly common for small-run academic publications or items published by established societies (who had a clearly identified pool of interested potential subscribers).