It is interesting watching how quickly news delivery is changing. The first thing that jumps out at me about the Associated Press' change in strategy is that they are moving towards a free or nearly free pay structure that will supported more and more by ad revenue than fees charged to various newspaper outlets. The other part is that they have recognized the need to get their product delivered digitally and are quickly transitioning from analog distribition to digital. In many ways it feels like the AP doesn't need the newspaper at all to distribute content or to gather ad revenue, so I guess the revenue sharing is just icing on the cake until traditional newspapers die off.
I subscribe to the notion that too many authors on a book will probably make for a bad book, but some advice and encouragement along the way could probably help. After reading this article on WEBooks, it's not very clear to me what side of the spectrum this web service is (perhaps if covers the entire spectrum). Despite whatever this article says about everybody being an author via this service, it doesn't seem to me that is what this service does. It looks like the works are vetted by self declared experts and the participants on this site decide what gets published and what does not. Those that are not selected to be published can “self publish”. I guess this yet another avenue for first time writers, but given the throughput quoted in this article, I'm not sure how different this is from a traditional publisher other than it's wrapped in the novel cloak of being on the web and “crowdsourced.” I do like the idea, though, of aspiring authors forming a community for mutual support.
And so the debate rages on. I think the comments to this article are most telling. I wonder, though, if this fails, will it seriously hurt Dell?
I'm not sure I buy the second laptop argument. I have a laptop as a secondary computer to my big powerful PC. I don't carry this laptop around the house though. Rather it sits next to the big PC and I multi-task on two computers. I've been this way since grad school — one PC to game on and the other PC to run my life (e-mail, Internet, shopping, pay bills …etc) — although in grad school, I was running numerical simulations on both computers. Having the two greatly increased my productivity. Lately, though, I've had to use my powerful PC to watch videos because playing hi-res videos requires a lot of processing power and memory.
Either way, I still think 10 -12-in with full functionality at ~$500 is the better way to go than a wimpy mini. Thinner and lighter should be the vector rather than a small footprint.
It kinda tough for me to call someone who plays Bejeweled and does crossword puzzles online a “gamer.” But, I guess it depends on how you want to spin the data …
More Rambling 