Re: [ubuntu-uk] Using VPN in Ubuntu to connect to BT FON or Openzone
Thanks for that – I was aware that there were some VPN clients in the repos. What I was really after was anyone with experience of actually connecting with one – I suppose it must be similar to the instructions given for the Windows version on the BT website From: Matthew Daubney Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2010 8:39 PM To: UK Ubuntu Talk Subject: Re: [ubuntu-uk] Using VPN in Ubuntu to connect to BT FON or Openzone On 10 Nov 2010, at 20:33, Gordon Burgess-Parker wrote: BT have a version of Cisco VPN for Windows only – is there anyone on the list who has used any VPN client in Ubuntu to connect to BT wireless hotspots? You can get cisco vpn for Linux. It's called VPNC in the repos (I believe) -Matt Daubney -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/ -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
[ubuntu-uk] The economics of books
I ought to point out here that I am an author. My original thing - a non-fiction, non-IT, 4-CD audiobook has NEVER been available as a printed book, since my publisher only does CDs (50 years ago tapes, and these days, MP3s as well as CDs, with tapes having finally gone about 5 years ago.) My second thing was conceived as a book, and I took the decision early on to self-publish. The reasons for this were: - It's aimed at a very small niche, and was never going to attract shelf space in the likes of Waterstones - The audio-book, and heavy publicity for that had allowed me (with the approval of, and indeed encouragement from, my publisher) to set up my own website with an opt-in mailing list for future announcements. This currently stands at about 3,000 names. - With the likes of Lulu.com, I could do everything as a PDF, but get a proper ISBN number, and have them do the deals with Amazon and WHSmiths (both of whom list my book on-line, but WHS don't carry in-store), in a way that gave me a far higher revenue share than I would have done had I used a conventional publisher. - The cost of hiring my own editor to work with me over the space of about six months, was about £5,000. I had to pay for that out of pocket. - Lulu, like a few other publishers, have server space and printing facilities inside Amazon's UK warehouse. This means that Amazon don't actually store copies of my book in any way other than on a fileserver. If you ordered today, for delivery tomorrow, it would be printed in-house on-demand. THIS is the key technology piece, by the way, that has transformed the backend of publishing for nice products. - AND THIS IS IMPORTANT. The revenue stream to me is NOT primarily about selling books. It's about the consultancy work and training courses I run, for which my book has been instrumental in establishing credibility and getting clients. (It's, as I've said before, very, very, niche.) However, the price at which I choose to have my publisher sell the book is entirely down to me. I have a cost price per print, but could, if I wanted, set a sale price of one penny above the cost price if I believed that the I also sell my book as a (non-DRM) PDF, from my website. I price that PDF to maximise my profit. It turns out that the price point that does that is about DOUBLE the price of the paperback version the same customer could get from Amazon. The difference is - they get the PDF by return email, the moment Paypal's servers confirm payment to mine (which is, in round terms, in real time as far as the customer is concerned.) As you might imagine, the website to do this (which runs on DAPPER, which gives you an idea of how long that server has been sitting there!) costs me, in round terms NOTHING. It has been up and running for several years, and sits on my home ADSL line (which has a static IP block, so I guess I do pay a bit more for my ADSL than a standard contract would be.) It runs on a Via-500 box, so equivalent to a Celeron 500, with an old hard disk. Here is where things get truly bizarre. I sell about twice as many ebook copies as I do paper copies, despite the difference in price... ... arguably, I sell more BECAUSE of the difference in price. The big cost is in AdWords. Yes, marketing is about 90% of the ongoing budget, with the production costs having been paid off about three years ago. The other 10% is a rough and ready allowance for the marginal cost of my book-keeper importing the transactions into our accounts software :-) So, why did I insist on zero-DRM. 1: Because I don't like DRM. I think that the e-version of something should be BETTER than the physical. 2: Because of how I make my money... it's not about book sales, it's about spin-off business that that generates. This is increasingly true for fiction authors as well, where book-signing and conference-slot fees can be big, if you can write a best-seller. It's ALWAYS been true for non-fiction, as far as I can tell. Mark -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
[ubuntu-uk] Special bugs, and Live CDs. Help with this Bug please?
I use a lot of Live CDs, the Desktop editions. Mostly I distribute them in various ways. The quantities are sometimes quite large. Also I am active on various forums, acting in an outreach way, to give a profile to GNU/Linux, particularly Ubuntu. I am not a developer but I am an active advocate and helper and supporter of Ubuntu newcomers. I am retired, so this is close to a full time occupation. :-) Live CDs are frozen in time, a snapshot of the amazing forward speed of GNU/Linux development. While bugs in an installed system are likely to be washed away by the flux of updates, any bug in a Live CD is going to stay there, in the plastic disc, awaiting use, becoming irrelevant only when history decides. I got burned by a nasty bug in the live CD of 10.10 which has the effect of wiping your whole hard drive if you should be so unlucky to choose a particular install option relating to choosing a *partition* (not the whole drive!). Seen from a Developers point of view this 'frozen' bug is hardly relevant. I mentioned it in the Mint forums for their RC version, because unlike Ubuntu, Mint still have the opportunity to fix it before final release. The information received little attention, including one response that said such as 'the bug only affects two people, it is not so important, anyway people should have backups'. A bit harsh, I thought. I was using a machine specifically for tests. It had a couple of hard drives, and multibooted several versions of Ubuntu, and Windows. In a test machine data is not an issue, I just reinstall of course. Reinstalling Windows was a real pain. I did have an image, but would you like to guess where it was? in a *data* partition well away from the Windows partition, but on that drive. With macabre humour I could see that this might be one way to get rid of Windows.., ( :-) ) although I suspect it might muddy the Ubuntu waters and reputation a bit. This bug will 100 per cent affect anybody who choses the option I did. Your drive will be wiped. Data partitions, Windows if you use it, and other distributions co-existing. Gone. The blessing is that few people will choose that particular option. That is a good thing because I fear for the wider reputation of Ubuntu if it affected many people. It has in its title, Windows partitions, but it does not discriminate, it will wipe all partitions. How can we ensure this bug is fixed and not carried forward to the next release? If you think you can help, please see Bug #659106 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/659106 tia -- alan cocks Ubuntu user #10391 Linux user #360648 -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Book costs (was Re: e-books without Adobe Digital Editions)
On Wed, 2010-11-10 at 18:28 +, Will Bickerstaff wrote: On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Glen Mehn glen.m...@oba.co.uk wrote: snip The bank analogy doesn't exactly make sense as banks are replacing something expensive for them (employees, time, and physical space) with something very scalable and well-understood (web apps). Books switching to ebook is replacing something well-understood and dirt cheap (printing/distribution) with something not so well understood (three major competing formats, a dizzying array of DRM options or not, personal fears in a declining industry, no standard) So a second hand 10 year old half decent machine is going to set us back circa £250,000 (Not cheap). Believe it or not, the equipment is actually going to need to occupy some physical space. Likewise our finished products are also going to need to occupy physical space until they are distributed. Space is space, whether you a bank or a printer, in fact as a printer your probably going to need more than a bank. Then we have energy use, some 33kW, Maintenance Work and operators, so there's your employees and time which I don't think materially differ too much from banks either. There's also a ton of other work that you'd need to account for whether it be another energy consumer or direct labour, think loading/unloading materials packaging for despatch, order taking and processing staff facilities etc. So actually, I think the bank analogy works very well. In my opinion, there are probably bigger savings for printers than banks. I don't think I fully agree with you. As far as the bank is concerned, whether you go through a branch or the internet, you are still using the same services and they are still making money the same way, by basically allowing you to store your own money in their bank accounts or by lending you money. Money is already a line item in a database so what internet means for them is the ability to present those line items online rather than on a piece of paper. They can therefore streamline those processes and use less resources to deliver them but in essence they don't change their business model. For a publisher, the traditional business model is based on acquiring the rights to reproduce a text, producing physical items out of this text, shifting those books to distributors and selling the physical objects. Most of the cost is in the distribution and the value is in the physical object so that's what you pay for. Switching to digital means that this business model doesn't work anymore because the distribution and copy become very cheap and anybody can do it, not just them. So the value no longer is in the distribution and a physical product, it is in the artistic creation performed by the author and they don't know how to monetise that. So in order to keep the same business model, they have to artificially restrict the ability to distribute and copy by using DRM. In addition to this, it means a major change in how they produce the book: they have to retrofit a digital workflow on top of a traditional industrial workflow. So yes there are some potential cost savings but there is also a massive change in business model and that's where they have a problem. Cheers, Bruno -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Book costs (was Re: e-books without Adobe Digital Editions)
On Thu, 2010-11-11 at 21:12 +, Bruno Girin wrote: For a publisher, the traditional business model is based on acquiring the rights to reproduce a text, producing physical items out of this text, shifting those books to distributors and selling the physical objects. Most of the cost is in the distribution ... Incorrect. Most of the cost is in the non-physical stuff: editing, typesetting, marketing, and other forms of production. Regards, Tyler -- I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous ideas. -- Johann Hari -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
