I would add that the popularity of the original machine and the vast library of games built off of each other, and the result is a large community with love and nostalgia for the C64. That in turn perpetuates modern projects, newcomers to the scene, and new generations of community here for their own reasons.
"Retro" exists independently of "nostalgia:" it's a broad cultural category that encompasses fashion, technology, and new reasons to appreciate old things. I would recommend Commodore-adjacent stuff—VICE, TheC64, Ultimate 64 in a new case, MEGA65, refurbished machines with new accessories and adapters—to people with a variety of interests that have never seen an original Commodore.
CenturyLink, major telecom in 37 US states. DNS requests for all nonexistent domains go to a server that delivers a dumb "search" page to web requests. They're currently the sole fiber-to-the-home provider in my neighborhood, and Comcast is the only broadband alternative.
The article doesn't directly address (or takes as read) the ways reading is supposed to make you a better writer. Depth is better than breadth because a deep read is how you internalize how language communicates ideas.
The argument for breadth, especially the kind of breadth that says "read trash as well as classics," assumes at least a deep enough reading to understand how a piece of writing works or doesn't work. Understanding how Dan Brown novels are bad--and how they're good--can be illuminating. The article seems to be arguing that this idea is overrated, and that giving that kind of attention to bad writing (or just many kinds of writing) is counterproductive.
I "read" constantly. I just read this article and many comments here. But I almost never read in a mode that would supposedly improve my writing. The advice to read more in that mode makes sense. Letting all kinds of garbage wash over me uncritically does not.
Lots of great advice in these comments. Adding a few bits based on my limited experience writing for O'Reilly:
E-books are important. They're more than half the unit sales in my case. Look for good e-book royalty rates. Someone mentioned 50% and I have no idea if that's realistic for tech books, but it should certainly be much higher than print. Some tech publishers participate in all-access online libraries, and you get royalties from these too when anyone accesses your book.
Toolchain is important. MS Word intake may mean you'll have less control over quality in post production. O'Reilly can do DocBook/AsciiDoc end to end, and can even push author-submitted ebook updates after launch. Of course if you prefer MS Word and staying hands off in post then great. But I'm always grateful for text markup in a git repo, enough that I'd consider it a big plus when picking from multiple publishers.
When you pick a publisher, make sure that you like their books and would be proud to have a year or two of your own work sitting next to them. Based on stories I've heard from author friends, there seems to be a correlation between production values and author happiness. Typesetting, paper quality, error rates, etc. are all things I care about anyway, and they're also a proxy for other parts of the experience like editorial and technical support. There are big publishers I wouldn't even consider because their catalog is so poor.
Once you start writing, don't stop. Find a steady pace and stick to it. Treat each chapter like a magazine article that's due at the end of the month. The biggest pain for my first book was writing for five months, pausing for two (weekends went to the day job for a bit), then feeling guilty about pausing, procrastinating, and nearly burning out from the stress. The work won't burn you out, the guilt will, so manage the guilt.
My editors were all good people willing to chat, answer questions, and connect me with resources. None of my editors gave me writing feedback. I don't know what's typical in this regard, but I felt quite on my own when it came to drafting and editing. I had mixed feelings about this at first: I was hoping to learn more about writing from an opinionated editor, as with magazine writing or fiction (I imagine). My editors were all good about pestering me for new material on a regular basis, which is a valuable contribution, and we had some good project planning discussions at the beginning.
Keep expectations very low for marketing help from the publisher, especially for niche titles, beyond the publisher brand itself and the occasional full-catalog ebook sale. Ask about marketing channels run by the publisher, such as companion videos, live streaming events, and publisher booths at conferences. Plan to self-promote online, and don't be shy about it. You're writing this book so people will read it, and they can't read it if they don't know about it.
Not sure if this is controversial, but personally I would trade some or all of the advance for a higher royalty. The advance doesn't come close to paying for my time, which means it doesn't shift the risk or up-front production costs to the publisher in a meaningful way. The case where I deliver a completed manuscript but the advance doesn't pay out is one I want to avoid: I want as many people as possible to read my book! If it's a failed investment for the publisher, it's a failed investment for me, even with the advance. One not insignificant advantage of an advance is that it usually pays based on drafting milestones, so it's a nice motivator, but that's merely psychological.
Will second the "look for good rates on e-books" People often underestimate income from ebooks, but it's huge. I was offered a $5,000 advance with 10% of ebook sales, or no advance with 25% of ebook sales, and it was one of the best decisions of my life to take 25% with no advance. For the past year, I've received an average monthly royalty check of $3k (albeit before taxes, which I have to pay quarterly), with most of the income from ebooks. Not only do I earn a higher royalty rate for them, but the "wholesale" price from the publisher for print books is smaller than you think it would be (not shelf price), and my ebook/print book sales are about half and half.
I also get a few hundred dollars a month from licensing it out through Safari -- each page read through the platform earns me money, which they calculate through some wizardry (all revenue, divided by all page reads, times the page reads your book got, times 25%). So really think hard about the royalty rates for online access, licensing (the book's been purchased by five international translators, and each one is another $500-$1000 for me, on top of 5% of the revenue from foreign translation sales). Those things really add up.
They sent a notification email to every customer asking them to change their password. The email includes the user's current password.
I know this because I received such an email-- intended for someone else who accidentally used my email address for their account. So not only is Ubisoft storing raw passwords and sending them via email, they're not verifying email addresses during account creation.
No way, really? According to the article they claim to "encrypt" the passwords (they actually mean hash). Any way you could post the contents of the email (minus the personal details)?
Ah, glad to have that clarified. The username in the misdelivered email I received looked very much like an attempt at a memorable password, not a username. Thanks!
Avoiding names is polite and professional because there is potential for doubt in any situation, and one report by an injured party can inflate or distort the truth. This is hard to see when you are the injured party, but that's why these are social norms, to give guidance for appropriate behavior in emotionally charged situations.
One of the benefits of there being a company involved is the company can take responsibility for the imperfect acts of its employees. Blaming a bad author experience on a publisher is entirely appropriate. Connecting the names of individuals to a disgruntled report in the public record is usually not.
Disclaimer: I'm a satisfied O'Reilly author. I'm considering self-publishing for my next project, but not because of my experiences with a publisher. For my (non-design-oriented) tech book, O'Reilly did far better by me than other major publishers did by other authors I know.
I couldn't get /Applications/Xcode.app/.../usr/bin/gcc to work for me today. It could not access stdlib includes and such. I got the Xcode preferences installer of the command-line tools to work, and that put a gcc in /usr/bin/ that worked completely. I don't know what's different between the two, but that seems to be the official way to do it.
Kudos to Apple for the self-contained command-line tools package download. Hopefully that'll continue with another update for 10.8.
I agree this behavior of full-screen mode is counterproductive on multi-monitor set-ups, and it's a serious issue if Apple is encouraging app developers to rely on this behavior instead of providing more useful window layouts. It's a violation of metaphor: "full screen mode" is actually "dedicated space mode," which isn't what multi-monitor users expect or want.
From personal experience, I suspect this feature is intended to make Spaces more accessible to novice users on laptops without external monitors, a common case. I never got the hang of Spaces originally, but once I started using full-screen mode while portable, my laptop got immensely more useful. For me, this was a gateway into the rest of Spaces, and now I maintain 3 desktop spaces and 1 full-screen app, and switch between them and Mission Control with trackpad gestures. Heck, I might even start using Dashboard, since it's sitting right there. (Ok, probably not.) It's a gradual introduction to an advanced feature.
Apple routinely cuts off its long tail as a streamlining measure, sometimes for UX reasons, sometimes for engineering reasons. They shouldn't always get away with it. At least in this case the intent seems reasonable, even if the side effect isn't.
