Notices by Jens Finkhäuser 🌻 (jens@social.finkhaeuser.de)

@dosnostalgic Ah, I only had the VGA version.

@tagomago That was with the real thing. I kept a 486 as my home server until about 2006 or so, but then I lost a disk and learned a lesson from that.

Before retiring it, I booted into DOS, and used VGACopy/386 to create images of all remaining floppies, most of which were just RAR archives full of stuff.

I took me a bit to understand that it was just creating literal copies of the disk, so mounting the images worked really easily.

Nowadays, those images are sitting on the newer home server.

@tagomago I did that years ago with vgacopy.

https://contrachrome.com/comic/page01/

#contra #chrome #google #beevil #surveillancecapitalism #surveillance

Scott McCloud, the comic artist that was contracted to "document" the launch of Google Chrome back in the day has an updated comic, expressing how Chrome is ... well read it for yourself.

https://contrachrome.com/comic/page01/

There is also a PDF (English): https://contrachrome.com/ContraChrome_en.pdf

#contra #chrome #google #beevil #surveillancecapitalism #surveillance

I should have added these details in the OP, but didn't give it the time it needed.

@dosnostalgic I have TIE Fighter on disk, yes.

@DeveloperMemes I made a conscious decision not to touch Java around 2005, and have broken that only rarely and briefly. So, no.

@tagomago @christian_zerfass If you're a small publisher, a distributor will take as much of your margins as Amazon, give or take, i.e. too much to make a living.

@tagomago @christian_zerfass I mean, we're talking about what a fixed price gives smaller entrants into the market. That's the whole context.

We're talking publishers here with less than a handful of staff. Which means they have to generate a hundred+ thousand/year for salary alone. Small print runs are in the hundreds, usually, rarely the lower thousands. At EUR 15 a pop or so, it's rare for a single book to bring in more than 10k in sales. Also, a print run...

@tagomago @christian_zerfass ... doesn't necessarily sell out in the year it's printed. Maybe.

So you have to look towards 10+ unique books published a year to get even close to breaking even. Which is next to impossible to manage for a team of 2-3.

This has two direct results: a) most small publishing houses are side businesses, because they cannot function otherwise. And b) literally every cent counts.

Distributors that take in the tens of percentage...

@tagomago @christian_zerfass Well, speaking as someone who's been a small time publisher a few times, that's wishful thinking.

But it's possible it's different from locality to locality. In Germany, it's pretty easy to get orders directly from points of sale.

@tagomago @christian_zerfass I'm looking at this from the publisher's angle. If you can set a higher price on Amazon, you can absorb their ridiculous fees better than if you can't.

@tagomago @christian_zerfass Actually, it's worse than nothing. It actively prevents smaller shops from finding ways to make their stuff more attractive than that of big retailers. The law is insidious; it preaches equal chances for all, but equal chances always benefit those with the better market position. In effect, it protects the quasi monopolies of the large stores by pretending fairness.

@tagomago @christian_zerfass Except the German law protects big retailers from innovation by smaller shops. Something like a Humble Bundle, for example, is illegal in Germany.

The price of a book must remain the same, irrespective of where it's sold. You can't discount it by packaging it with something else. Which means you can only improve your margins on the buying side, i.e. big retailers who buy in bulk can get margins small shops cannot.

It's a scam.