I did mention AOL, as part of the "Eternal September" of Usenet (so tangentially, but still acknowledging it was there) but yeah, I did skip over some of the others. CompuSERVE was something I thought was really cool at the time, but there was no way my parents would pay those hourly charges for me...
I self-publish my novels, and I've had steady if very low sales year after year (certainly not enough to live on) and I have friends who have chosen the small independent publisher route and have not been happy with the results at all.
One of my friends sold ten (!!) novels in the 1990s to a small publisher, but they sold in low volume and never earned out their advance. When her publisher dropped her, she wanted to republish them herself. The cost to buy back the rights exceeded all the money she had ever earned from the publisher for the entire series.
I guess what I'm saying is this: anecdotes are not data. Some will find success with the big publishers; many will not. Some will find success self-publishing; many will not. And some will find success with small publishers, but again... this is rare.
Success in writing is just really really hard. No matter what route you choose, luck will play a significant factor. The quality of your writing will also play a big role. Writing really well, exceptionally well, is probably the hardest thing of all.
I think it would be very unlikely for the web and html to arise in the current political climate, yes. It only came to be in the first place because of a massive amount of government investment that was an artifact of the space race in the late 1960s and early 70s. For a time, all the major tech companies were trying to build their own walled garden alternatives to the Internet (Microsoft with MSN, Apple with eWorld, AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, etc.) and they only failed because the Internet grew faster than any one of them could.
The confusion and disconnect comes from the fact that the Metaverse, by definition, cannot ever exist. Zuckerberg is chasing a fantasy.
I wrote in more detail about it here [1], but the basic gist is:
1. A real "Metaverse" that isn't just another video game would require every tech company to agree on a single standard for a MMO world, and
2. There are zero financial reasons why any other company would agree to a) wait for a standard to be agreed upon and b) cede the majority of their profits to the owner of this singular Metaverse.
Therefore, a real Metaverse can never happen. Which makes it even sillier that Mark Zuckerberg continues to go all-in on this vision.
I think the bitmap being shown in MacPaint implied that you were supposed to create your own clip art from scratch. Which would technically be possible, if you were already a good artist.
But the real weakness, at the time, was in the final step--printing. Apple only had its Imagewriter series of dot matrix printers, and there was no support for vector graphics in any case. So you could print things, but they wouldn't look very professional.
A few years later, when Apple licensed Adobe's vector font software and built their first laser printer, that's when everything changed.
You've got it right. I was going to label the inputs in the transistors in the second animation, but it made the diagram rather crowded, so I left it out.
The diagrams are simplified because they leave out things like connections to ground, attached resistors that mitigate the total current, etc. But I wanted to convey, as simply as possible, how transistors worked and how gates could be made very simply out of a small number of transistors.
The actual CMOS chips in use by ARM (and still in use today) complicate things more, because you have different types of silicon (NMOS and PMOS) on the same substrate, so the transistors work slightly differently and you can simplify making things like NAND gates, which themselves can be combined to make all other types of gates. For this article, I didn't want to get that deep into the woods, though. :)
EDIT: It looks so easy in that video! I'm not sure why I had so many problems opening the door, but I did. Maybe I'll try it again. Maybe I'll just wait a few more years to see if the game gets better first, though.
I suspect that the rationale for adding more and more complicated systems is to increase the sunk cost fallacy for existing players, who will have invested increasing amounts of time into learning how they all work. (And perhaps, to make everything seem less like a video game and more like a "real life simulation").
There is no way that a new player would do anything but bounce right off this game, but perhaps that is by design.
I had even less luck than this with the elevator. I couldn't open the door! Apparently it's unlike every other video game in existence, where door opening is a matter of a) walking up to the door, or at worst b) walking up to the door and hitting a button. But in Star Citizen, someone apparently coded an elaborate "door opening simulator" that requires you to switch modes and active your arm and do something complicated. I tried reading all the button prompts, and hit all the buttons, and I was able to open the door once, but then I was sent to another lobby with another elevator door and that one I couldn't open.
I was an original backer. Years ago I was able to get to the hangar and fly my basic ship around and shoot aliens and asteroids. Today I'm confounded by doors. I expect that when I try the game again in a few years, I'll probably have to read tutorials about how to make my character breathe and blink his eyelids.
In a similar vein, I watched My Thai Bride on a recommendation from a friend, and it also stuck in my head for a long time. It's about an older British man who flies to Thailand in search of a wife, but it handles the entire situation with honesty and sensitivity. It sounds weird, but I learned a lot about geopolitical forces from this film.
I can honestly say that I love all the writing work I do. Every article I wrote for Ars Technica was a labor of love, even though I got paid. My novels are as well.
I still have a day job (although I did write full-time for Ars for a couple of years) so this is a luxury I can afford. But I’m still happy to be able to do it.
I would also posit that the only way to be successful as a writer is to write about things you love. If you try to chase popular topics or genres without loving them, this cynicism will show in your writing and it won’t be much fun to read.
I'm a writer. What you've said here is basically correct, but I disagree with your conclusion.
In 2009 I took basically the same path that Howey is proposing here. I started self-publishing on Amazon in 2011 and I've written five novels so far, and am working on a sixth.
Obviously I did not experience anywhere near the success that Howey did. This may be due to luck, but I've read Wool and it's also a much better novel than anything I've written (so far!) So it's not always about luck. An amazingly good novel can sometimes generate its own luck.
But my lack of success hasn't dissuaded me and I don't consider the journey I took in becoming a writer to have been wasted. On the contrary, it's been amazing every step of the way. I've learned so many things, met so many wonderful people, and even sold a couple of thousand books along the way, which isn't much, but it's not nothing either.
And at the same time, I've been writing non-fiction articles for Ars Technica, which has been considerably more successful for me. (An example would be my article on the history of OS/2, or my history of the Amiga computer). These articles have been read and enjoyed by orders of magnitude more people, which is very satisfying.
I guess what I'm saying is that there are more possibilities for being a writer than being a famous fiction author picked up by a major publishing house. There are all kinds of paths for writers to take.
Success is never guaranteed, and if you want to be a writer you have to be realistic about this. But if you really want to be a writer, nothing can stop you. In fact, that's kind of the only prerequisite for becoming one. If you feel compelled to write, regardless of any success or rewards, you will keep doing it. At the very least, you will become a better writer. And if you become a better writer, it's almost inevitable that, at some point, somebody will notice.
Quote: "self-publishing well is expensive (four, five digits easily)"
This is basically correct, although it depends on the definition of "well". You can get a halfway decent cover for $100-$500, and you can get a halfway decent copy editor for about $500-$1000. Tools like Scrivener can handle all the ebook and paper edition formatting for you, with built-in templates, so that's another $100 or so for the tooling, but you can reuse this for future books. Publishing to Amazon and other places (like Smashwords) is free, and this includes print-on-demand paperback copies as well.
What it does take is a lot of time for learning how to use all the tools and to navigate the many options available for covers, editing, etc.
As far as marketing expenses go, there are no good ways to spend money to sell books. I think you're correct that nobody knows how to do it. If you don't win the lottery and get featured on a celebrity's book club, how is anyone supposed to ever know that you even released a book?
If you really want to fall down the rabbit hole, NCommander did a thirteen-hour stream where he successfully (!!) installed OS/2 1.0 in a virtual machine (using PCem) and then upgraded, in-place, every single version after that, ending with OS/2 4.5. Sometimes the crazy custom color scheme migrated over, sometimes it didn't. Some early OS/2 apps worked after upgrading, but many of them didn't. The lengths he went through to make the upgrades work at all were beyond heroic and veered into the insane.
They weren't owned by Activision-- Activision was only the publisher for Destiny, and never acquired the studio. When the publishing agreement came up for renewal, Bungie and Activision agreed to go their separate ways, for their own reasons. It's likely that Bungie wanted more control and more independence from the partnership.
Bungie's aversion to being owned stems from their Microsoft days, when they yearned to be free from having to make Halo sequels.
However, the reality is that game development is expensive. Destiny doesn't have a monthly subscription fee, so the income for the studio drops dramatically between paid content expansions. It's tough to keep that going without outside support, given the cost of creating said content.
(Obligatory disclaimer: I work for a division of Activision, but these opinions are solely my own)
Hello, author here! You’re right that I didn’t mention many other products in the broader PDA market. The article was about the Newton, and believe it or not, there are still word count limits for online articles. Discussing other products would have taken away from the central story. The hint about Palm was meant to get people interested in finding out more about similar devices.
I don't think so. OpenDoc was a document sharing service in classic Mac OS, similar in some ways to Microsoft's OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) but somewhat more advanced. Back then, some folks thought that applications were going to become more like components that interacted with each other to make a kind of "super-application", but the use case ended up being just dropping an Excel spreadsheet in Word.
Newton had lots of ways to share information between applications running on NewtonOS, but designed to fit the much smaller memory footprint of the device.
I believe the only things the Newton and OpenDoc had in common were that Steve Jobs killed both of them as cost-cutting measures.