View 681 Sunday July 3, 2011-1
- eBooks are a’comin
- Making contact with Eric
- High and low speed
- A need for thumbnails?
- Needed: A National Debate on the Legions
I still have not quite figured out how to get my gifs to work in the new WordPress Chaos Manor. I usually have fireworks, (well, OK, they are a bit old and perhaps hokey) and waving flags and the like for the Fourth. I probably won’t manage that tomorrow. However, those who miss them can go to last year’s Fourth http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q2/view629.html#Sunday where there will not only be fireworks but a short piece by Isaac Asimov on the meaning of the Star Spangled Banner with all four – four, not three – verses. And I will work on getting my little decorations to work. Rick Hellewell, who has been managing this transition for me with yeoman’s work and great patience, says he has thought of ways to do it. I will pore over that when I get caught up. Meanwhile, largely due to the near infinite patience of Eric Pobirs, we have got the Kindle edition of Fallen Angels out to Amazon. It’s not quite available yet, but it will be in a day or so. For those looking for a Kindle book to read I can recommend A Step Farther Out, and more and more of my books, both mine and in collaboration with Larry Niven, are coming to Kindle. Note that many of those books have been available in an eBook format for years, some even free, (both pirated and perfectly legal edition from Baen) but the early eBooks weren’t formatted well and don’t automatically transfer to Kindle. The new ones look a lot better. It has taken Eric a lot of work and experimentation to discover just what is going on, and how early eBook formats inserted strange codes and characters that affect the display. With great patience he has overcome most of that. When he’s finished with a book it looks great.
I will make this announcement again, but if you need a book properly formatted for Kindle and other eBook formats, I suggest you make contact with eric at Pobirs.com. He can start with a printed copy to be scanned, or an existing eBook that looks bad, or a word processing document. He’s at present doing most of Niven’s older books as well as working on mine. And since he’s a science fiction reader – addict might be a closer description – he understands the stories so he can catch things machines can’t.
The new Kindle and other eBook editions also have Afterword appreciations. I did a new Introduction to the latest edition of Step Farther Out. Fallen Angels has a brand new Afterword from Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn, on how we came to write this, how Mike Flynn got aboard, and an appreciation of fandom. Watch for it.
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It’s official. Amazon has sent a formal notice to all Amazon Associates in California terminating the contract arrangements whereby Associates get a small percentage of the sale price if someone buys a book by using a link provided by the associate. It’s not a lot of money, but it does add up: I was getting about $2,000 a year from the program, which at my age and energy level is pretty respectable. This means I am going to have to grind a bit harder, which means reminding you a bit more often that it would be a great idea to subscribe. Since the last thing I need is for visits to this site to be a painful experience, I’ll try to keep the appeals down to a non-irritating level. Incidentally, I will continue to put the associates link into recommendations or references here: this isn’t entirely cut and dried. I am also wondering if I can arrange for Amazon to send payments to my New York literary agent rather than directly to my bank account. That would cost me the agency fee, but that’s better than costing all of it. I don’t know how to do that, though, nor do I know anyone at Amazon I should suggest it to. I had lunch with Bezos and Bill Gates more than once back in the BYTE heyday, but that was a while ago, and I never did get to know anyone in the Amazon staff. Ah, well. I don’t suppose it would work anyway? That might be seen as some kind of evasion? Yet I don’t know how. Amazon’s position is that they are terminating all business connections with California, so that California has no hook to use to enforce sales taxes against Amazon, there being some federal laws on taxing Internet commerce. California gets around that by saying that Amazon does business in California through the Associates program. At this point I ought to go digging deeper, but just at the moment I am at the bottom of a dialup well, and surfing the Internet is painful.
This was of course part of the California budget balanced by showing line items receipts from the Easter Bunny. At least they may as well have been: the receipt estimates which made the budget balance seem based on thin air. The amount the Governor thinks he will get from Amazon is in fact less than what he will lose from the termination of the Associates program. He knows this by now, but I don’t think that matters.
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For those wondering, I will be doing a full article on Internet Access when there is no Wi-Fi or cable modem or other high speed access available. The AT&T direct telephone box – a small thing USB thing a bit larger than a large thumb drive – works and works quite well; but it also costs $50/gigabyte, and I have in three days used more than 400 megabytes. AT&T thoughtfully counts that for you. Some of that was spam, some is trading eBook copies back and forth as they are upgraded and reformatted, but much of it is just leakage. There are web sites that periodically update themselves. Adobe and Firefox keep sending out updates. Some spam is enormous. It’s astonishing how this stuff eats up bandwidth. More on that another time, but what I have been doing is connecting the AT&T thumber when I need to do browsing and otherwise being connected by dialup. Dialup works, if you are patient, but alas the new WordPress format here takes a good deal longer to download than the old FrontPage site did – and I haven’t been inserting any pictures at all. From my mail I would estimate that I have fewer than a hundred readers who still use dialup with any frequency – I could be off on that, it’s a guess – but I am not writing them off. The old FrontPage editor used to count the page size and at the bottom it would tell me how many seconds it estimated that the page would take to download at 56K. (That tells you a bit about how old FrontPage is…). WordPress doesn’t do that. It assumes you’re Connected. But as I say I have not forgotten the dialup users.
The old FrontPage did an automatic thumbnail of a picture and put that in the text; it also inserted an automatic link to the actual picture which was stored elsewhere. Those who clicked on the thumbnail got the picture; those on slow systems didn’t have to. I wish there were some simple way to do that with WordPress and I’ll keep looking for a method; that way we can have a separate Category for Images and Pictures, and I can put stuff in there, with a thumbnail and link in View or Mail. We’re still developing this place, and suggestions are still welcome. I am not publishing a lot of the commentary on the site because we keep developing; but I read it all.
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National Debate on the Legions
It is time for a national debate on the military: how big do we need it? What are our military objectives and goals? Do we go abroad seeking monsters to slay, or are we the friends of liberty everywhere but guardians only of our own? If guardians of our own, what are the treats we must guard against? Who are our potential enemies and how stable are they? Where abroad do our national interests lie?
These are not trivial questions. They are not politically easy, either, since the needs of the services are different. It is much easier to build a large Army from cadre than greatly to expand a professional Navy. (The Caine Mutiny had some revelations about that.) The Air Force has to decide just what its role is now that SAC no longer exists, and we are not faced with 26,000 launchable nuclear warheads. The Army can’t be reduced simply to cadre. What is the proper size and role of the Marine Corps? These are not just political questions although they will be answered by politicians.
One problem is that we don’t have many who can debate these questions. As Kagan said long ago in his comments on the Peloponnesian War, if you seek peace you must keep that peace. Or as Appius Claudius put it, if you would have peace, be thou then prepared for war. Of course most of those who will be debating these matters will not have heard of Appius Claudius, or Plutarch, or Thucydides, and if they vaguely remember that people with those names existed they will not have read about them, much less have read them. There was a time when we could assume some minimum familiarity with the History of Western Civilization among all “educated” people, which is to say, all college graduates and most high school graduates. Now education costs a great deal more than it did back then, but few know as much as was routinely known by the class dullard in a decent university. We expected our Senators to be familiar with keeping the peace, and what a Pyrrhic victory was. Indeed we expected anyone who put himself up as a candidate for Congress to have some familiarity with the basic documents and ideas in the development of Western Civilization. Now – well, not so much, despite the enormous costs of our education systems.
And yet: we can’t afford what we are doing. We can’t afford to take a meat axe to the Legions, either. If we are to remain a Republic we must discuss these issues, which means that the debates must start, and those who do know some history will have to spoon feed it to the many who don’t – and worse, to those who have been persuaded that they know things they do not know. We have far too many who seem to have majored in self-esteem while in fact learning little that is estimable.
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