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BryanFazekas wrote: his books took 40+ copier paper boxes to move.
Wow!
I used old books for target practice with a .44 magnum. It's quite instructive. We got to see bullet paths through the thick books -- perfect bore through the front (looked like a drill did it) for a couple of inches then rips the back out with a huge hole after the bullet becomes deformed.
Very cool science. Since I had a lot of tech books stacked in front of each other we were able to "capture" the bullets and see how deformed they become.
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raddevus wrote: I think Angular is a big one that is to blame too. Every time I turn around Angular is a completely new release. Now .NET Core seems to be doing the same thing.
I blame marketing in general. Documentation has gone by the wayside in favor of getting out new, flashy releases to make a splash.
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milo-xml wrote: I blame marketing in general.
I agree. If it isn't new in the last 30 seconds then it is old.
If it is old, it cannot be good. 
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Books need more "intelligence".
More / different ways are needed for presenting "learning" content.
E-books only try to mimic real books and not much else.
"(I) am amazed to see myself here rather than there ... now rather than then".
― Blaise Pascal
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Gerry Schmitz wrote: Books need more "intelligence".
That's a very good point. They should allow reading and then interactive content too. That would be an amazing learning experience.
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Here;s my thoughts, as a tech author.
I'm currently working on a hard copy, print published book for Packt, so there are obviously books still being sold in enough volume that the publishers are still confident getting authors on board to write content.
However, MOST of the content I actually get paid to write comes in one of two forms.
1) Very short, quick learning books, typically only released as eBooks, that I get paid a one off for and the company hiring me get to keep all copyrights. These books typically are used for pure marketing purposes, and are often given away free. The daily build news letter from CP, often has a few linked in it. The purpose of these books is simple. For the reader, they are quick to consume, quick to learn from, and in the case of some publishers (That don't cater to developers, but to CEO's, CTO's etc) they are designed to get non techs to a level where they at least sort of understand what the techs are on about.
2) Paid blogging. Pure and simple. Most of the sites I blog for are media outlets, they make thier money from advertising, but people won't come to view the adverts unles there is suitable content for them to visit the site. An awfull lot of these sites, are happy to go for the lowest common denomitator they can, and often pick up citizen developers at half the price folks like me charge, who then write content that's only just enough plausible to look as though it's true fact.
For the "in print" books, I typically don't get paid, well not in the "truest sense", that is I don't get X amount per hour for writing Y, typically the publisher will make a guess at how many thier going to sell, and give me a slice of those royaties up front.
What then happens is I get none of the royalties from the sales until that amount exceeds what I was given upfront.
So, if I get say £5000 (Yes I'm in the UK... deal with it  ), but the book never makes any more than £2000 it sales, then I come out on top.
If I get £5000, and the book makes £10000, the I'll see another £5000.
Note that I picked those figures out the air, it's not typically a fixed portion of successive royalties, it's typically a single fixed pre payment, then a given percentage after that.
So I might make £5000 up front, but on £10k worth of sales the % might be lower and I might make only £2k, things are often stacked in favour of the publishing house for in print books.
So what's my actual point.
Quite simple.
Many tech authors don't do in print titles any more simply beacuse it's not worth thier while, The book I'm on with will only net me some nice income if it sells in excess of about 30,000 copies.
Since it's a .NET core 3 title, I and the publisher do expect it to sell quite a lot, as where hoping to release when DNC3 goes first public release.
In general though, writing in print books really doesn't bring in a huge amount these days, unless (as has beenpointed out) you have what's called a perpetual title, that continues to sell in absence of any particular technology or platform.
The money is to be made in short marketing focused titles and paid blogging, but beacuse of the lack of a royalty scheme with these titles, you generally have to spend more hours writing if you want to use it to provide a full time income.
Hopefully this has given you guys a little bit of an insight into the current state of the market from a writers point of view.
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OK, so I cloned the tiny 1TB disc on this lappy to a 2TB one (which is pretty much the smallest that's not a PITA for me), and got a huge boost in file-op speed because of the bigger cache and general "I'm a sh1tload better than that old cr@p disc you had before" element, and that's cool.
But the big thing is that I accidentally hovered over a username in the Lounge, and the user pop-up thingy popped up!\
I haven't seen them on this lappy, before, so I just assumed it was because I had, yet again, changed my default browser.
And this is a clone, remember, so it should behave exactly the same!
So I'm chuffed pink!
The next time I want to make a snarky remark write an intelligent comment about a the superbowl not being played in Australia, for example, I'll have more information on hand, to help perfect the snark confirm the appropriateness of what I write!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
modified 25-Jan-19 17:03pm.
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Nope.
For the difference SSDs make to what I do, they're not worth the loss of disc space (or the price for the space I need).
E.g. I booted this machine yesterday, because I installed a new disc. It won't be booted again until it absolutely has to be (read: only ever because of poorly-made windows updates), so boot-up and load-up times of apps don't bother me, and I'm maxed out on memory, so normal running/restarting apps wouldn't be much affected by an SSD.
SSDs are fine if you shut down your machine often and you don't need a lot of space, but they don't make too much difference, otherwise.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: But the big thing is that I accidentally hovered over a username in the Lounge, and the user pop-up thingy popped up!\
Mark_Wallace wrote: So I'm chuffed pink!
Actually, if you hover over your name, the user pop-up thingy shows you as 'chuffed blue'
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The chuffin' thing!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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On my nice fast machine running firefox, after a new page, I see a brief flash as the popup appears then disapears, then all hovers after that result in a tiny (what looks like) 1px black dot about 10px the to and left of the user name, which vanishes when I move away.
F5 refresh the page, get the flash again (Literally half a second or less) then black dot.
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That's what happened here, too. If I figure out what fixed it, I'll let you know.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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great stuff 
It's defo not a speed thing, beacuse I'm running on a 16 core 3.4gz w/20gb off of an SSD, this thing moves faster than I can think
That said, work got in the way so I never reached a conclusion, but my gut instinct tells me it might have been ghostery that was responsible.
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I don't have ghostery running on this machine -- thanks for reminding me!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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... turned the room into a faraday cage with no windows, air gapped the PC, scanned for bugs, opened a VM and you're safe from listeners.
Ah. No. No you aren't.[^] 
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Not my problem...
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Too expensive to do, just to spy on my machine. Also quite some machines here that might interfere
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Yet another much ado about very little warning about a highly implausible exploit, in my opinion.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Fun stuff. I only scanned it, but I couldn't find out what "nearby" meant. Are they talking feet or millimeters from the CPU?
Latest Article - A Concise Overview of Threads
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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That's really old news. When I soldered together my first computer, I took a simple cheap AM radio and could tune it to listen to the computer work. Sounds very much like an oldschool modem. If you think about what kind of a part AM radios use to receive electromagnetic waves...
HINT[^]
It would not work so well with modern computers because of the frequencies, but I guess the spies would use something better than a cheap little radio from Radio Shack.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I used to do that with calculators.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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In the 80s I worked in a top secret military installation with mainframe crt screens. They had a special fine wire mesh built into the glass. Apparently the old green text crt monitors gave off enough radiation that someone in a van parked outside could pick it up with sensors well enough to see the text.
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