Our 3+ hour interview with free_electron

[ddavidebor]

Free_electron just ignore them.

They're the usual fan boy club of free computer.

You may or may not agree with them, they don't care and they will broke your balls at every moment possible.

[timb]

The alternative formats are here already, but by not using them (and using Word instead) you contribute to the problem. You don't need to make anything, you just need to help make it the new standard by using it!

It doesn't change anything ! My editor wants Ms Word. You convince THEM to adopt something else and i will follow.

I am NOT going to fight that battle.
Not in my interest. I know word , they want word : path of least resistance for me. Anything else is more work and learning curve for me.

is that really too hard to grasp ?

I bet if you asked they would take RTF and/or PDF. Hell, mine would take a plain text file hand formatted in Markdown Syntax if I told him that's the way I was going send the drafts from now on.

The path of least resistance for me is focusing on my writing, without letting the tools get in my way. My publisher has hundreds of people on staff that know how to lay out a book a lot better than I do (despite my background in graphics design).

From what you mentioned earlier, you take care of most of your own layout. Have you ever tried writing in a newer Word Processor designed for writing? Something like iA Writer, OmniWriter, Ulysses, Mellel or Scrivener? You could then do your layout in Word or something even better like InDesign.

Learning to use Scrivener has been a bit challenging for me as well, so I get where you're coming from. I am finding the payoff to be very nice as I get over that hump!

Edit: Just to make my position crystal clear, I'm not a FOSS advocate, I don't run Linux (as my day to day OS anyway) and the majority of the software I use is commercial. In fact, my issue wasn't even with his comments about Open Source and I never really held the position it was. Talk about getting butt hurt, hey Pot, this is the Kettle calling...

[free_electron]

i took a look at some of the programs you suggested:

Ia writer : quote" format your documents without taking your hands from the keyboard. Don’t click — write to format" This thing ain't wysiwyg. game over. i don't do command line crap. I used to do stuff like that in wordperfect. It's 2014 , 25 years later. The world has moved on.
Omniwriter. What the hell is with the changing backgrounds and keyboard clickety noises !
Ulysses. Wysiwyg ?

And for all of the above : Speelchekerr ? syntax checker ? Thesaurus ?  Wysywig ? insertion of graphics ? page headers, footers, headings ?styles ? tables ? image subscripts ? , cross references ?

Scrivener seems like a convoluted way of working. everything is fragmented. corkboard, 500 toolpanels. brrr... not my style.

Mellel : Now we're talking ! this one deserves my full attention !
You see the end result as you are working on it. that is what i want.

I don't leave formatting of a page to the editor. if i scale an image and place it at a precise point i don't want them to muck about with it , moving to another page.
I frequently write sentences like : "Resistor R9 in the image above is used to set the gain of the opamp." if the pre-press guys then start moving the image all hell breaks loose. it suddenly no longer is the image above ....
i will not write "Resistor R9 in the figure 27 is used to set the gain of the opamp." . i know what will happen then. they will rearranges pages so that you have to flip a page forward and backward playing pingpong between figure and text. When writing i always have the document open in double page view, just like you will have the book in front of you. It is all carefully laid out so that you don't have to flip pages back and forward.

[AlfBaz]

It is all carefully laid out so that you don't have to flip pages back and forward.

There are 2 schools of thought on this and which camp you sit in depends on your posing preferences

When sitting somewhere in public, you can sit there holding the book in one hand, thoughtfully holding your chin... or you can hold the book in one hand holding a page tentatively as you turn the page back and forth you gracefully cock your head back and forth with a studious gaze. The latter, some say, projects a greater sense of intelligence.

Of course this is all moot if you are reading a tablet, in which case excessive page turning makes it appear you are playing Fruit Ninja

[hanndoddi]

Thx for a good show very fun to listen to

[timb]

i took a look at some of the programs you suggested:

Ia writer : quote" format your documents without taking your hands from the keyboard. Don’t click — write to format" This thing ain't wysiwyg. game over. i don't do command line crap. I used to do stuff like that in wordperfect. It's 2014 , 25 years later. The world has moved on.
Omniwriter. What the hell is with the changing backgrounds and keyboard clickety noises !
Ulysses. Wysiwyg ?

And for all of the above : Speelchekerr ? syntax checker ? Thesaurus ?  Wysywig ? insertion of graphics ? page headers, footers, headings ?styles ? tables ? image subscripts ? , cross references ?

Scrivener seems like a convoluted way of working. everything is fragmented. corkboard, 500 toolpanels. brrr... not my style.

Mellel : Now we're talking ! this one deserves my full attention !
You see the end result as you are working on it. that is what i want.

I don't leave formatting of a page to the editor. if i scale an image and place it at a precise point i don't want them to muck about with it , moving to another page.
I frequently write sentences like : "Resistor R9 in the image above is used to set the gain of the opamp." if the pre-press guys then start moving the image all hell breaks loose. it suddenly no longer is the image above ....
i will not write "Resistor R9 in the figure 27 is used to set the gain of the opamp." . i know what will happen then. they will rearranges pages so that you have to flip a page forward and backward playing pingpong between figure and text. When writing i always have the document open in double page view, just like you will have the book in front of you. It is all carefully laid out so that you don't have to flip pages back and forward.

Scrivener takes some getting used to, but it's fully customizable. You can ignore the corkboard for your uses, it's basically a way to take your outline items and visualize them as notecards you can rearrange.

Here's a few of my favorite features:





This doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of how customizable it all is. You really need to dedicate an afternoon to watching some videos and reading the manual, just as you would with any other tool. Anyway, glad Mellel caught your eye!

As for formatting, you can tweak things all you want in your Word Processor but it's still going to look different after it goes to press, but I guess you're just trying to get as close as possible? How do you handle the various eBook formats that each render differently?

What I do is just add comments in the text: [Make sure Fig. 15-3 is on on the same page as paragraph ^82. -T] Then my editor makes sure it's taken care of for on each subsequent format.

[senso]

Great stories, have to listen to it a few more times.
I think Vincent needs a friend, when he started talking, get out of the way, them man wants to talk!
If you have the time, another session or two would be very welcome.

Come on, stop with the OSS wars..
I also use windows and linux, the most recent crap that I'm putting with is that Chrome/Chromium don't play youtube videos, but firebox does that perfectly, on Ubuntu 12.04 with Gnome 3.something..
Or the Debian installer(1.2Gb or something around that), keept asking to connect to an WiFi network(and didn't pass after that, scrap debian of the ideas lol)....

Or that the last time I tried to use CMake with open CV in a codebase of around 500Mbytes of source it crapped out, everything compiled, openCv naahhh, let me throw errors like mad.

Or the freaking fact that it keeps me asking the keyring password even after allowing everybody to access it(only one account setup...).

I can keep the rest of the night writing about stupid things like this..
Yeah windows is bad, I had a 3 years windows 7 install that worked perfectly, decided to do a clean install so I know that the paid invoice(probably this is the wrong term) program would work with out a problem, and because Altium doesn't run in linux, nor does AvrStudio, or MPLab, or SolidWorks, or a lot of other crappy programs that I use everyday.

[NiHaoMike]

I just have Windows XP in a VirtualBox. It has been several years since I last used it, but it's there just in case. There's little reason to dual boot nowadays when there's free and good virtualization software. Main exception is if you're dealing with direct hardware access, but Xen can apparently support that as well.

[timb]

You'd think that Chrome/Chromium should be able to play YouTube videos just fine since, you know, Google owns both YouTube and Chrome! You'd be wrong... 

Awhile back Google decided to drop all support for h.264 in favor of the "fully open" video codec they're trying to push, WebM. This is weird because they still include Flash, which *does* support h.264, so it's clearly just a political move on their part. Flash has some issues under non-Windows OSes but fortunately YouTube does support WebM, so you should be able to get videos to work by opting-in to the HTML5 Trial: https://www.youtube.com/html5

[Zbig]

Does anyone know how to put a user on an "Ignore" list? I couldn't find it anywhere.

[timb]

Does anyone know how to put a user on an "Ignore" list? I couldn't find it anywhere.

Normally, if you click on a user's profile there's an option under "Add to Buddy List" for "Add to Ignore List" but it seems to be missing on this forum. Maybe it's best to just ignore their posts by not reading them?

@free_electron: You didn't talk a lot about your work on Hard Drives. Can you tell us if things are are starting to plateau in terms of technical advancements? What do you think the upper limits of magnetic drive capacity are? Is it all about read/write speed now and not so much about improved storage capacity?

[Zbig]

@free_electron: You didn't talk a lot about your work on Hard Drives. Can you tell us if things are are starting to plateau in terms of technical advancements? What do you think the upper limits of magnetic drive capacity are? Is it all about read/write speed now and not so much about improved storage capacity?

HGST has just unveiled world's first Helium-filled drives:
http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/F8B3820BADAD9E6588257C160032F257/$file/HeliumProductSummary_final.pdf

[c4757p]

That must be good for our literally unlimited helium supply.

[free_electron]

i have to be very careful what i disclose about that.

Not a secret:  there exists a 1.2 Terabyte single platter ! laptop (2.5 inch form factor) drive
Laptop drives can have 3 platters. Desktop platters are triple the surface size and can have 4 or 5 platters.
the end is nowhere near in sight.

now, add to this :That single platter 1.2 terabyte drive dates back to 2007 .... which is 7 years ago.

and that's all im gonna say about that.

[timb]

@free_electron: You didn't talk a lot about your work on Hard Drives. Can you tell us if things are are starting to plateau in terms of technical advancements? What do you think the upper limits of magnetic drive capacity are? Is it all about read/write speed now and not so much about improved storage capacity?

HGST has just unveiled world's first Helium-filled drives:
http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/F8B3820BADAD9E6588257C160032F257/$file/HeliumProductSummary_final.pdf

Huh. That's really cool!

So as I understand it, you couldn't just vacuum seal a hard drive because the heads float on a tiny cushion of air across the surface of the platter, right? I've always wondered how exactly this worked, because the heads don't move (well, they do but any significant amount) so it can't have anything to do with Bernoulli's Law.

Sealing the drive with a less dense gas is pretty ingenious and I wonder why it hasn't been done up until now?

[Zbig]

Sealing the drive with a less dense gas is pretty ingenious and I wonder why it hasn't been done up until now?

I think at least one of the technical obstacles was the requirement for a drive to survive the ambient pressure changes. That's why almost (?) all current drives aren't really sealed - there's a breather filter.

[Zbig]

i have to be very careful what i disclose about that.

Not a secret:  there exists a 1.2 Terabyte single platter ! laptop (2.5 inch form factor) drive
Laptop drives can have 3 platters. Desktop platters are triple the surface size and can have 4 or 5 platters.
the end is nowhere near in sight.

now, add to this :That single platter 1.2 terabyte drive dates back to 2007 .... which is 7 years ago.

and that's all im gonna say about that.

Hmm... I wonder, after they finally do release 2.5" drives greater than 1GB, whether Drobo will raise the price of their Drobo Mini or lower the price of the 5D...

[rolycat]

Does anyone know how to put a user on an "Ignore" list? I couldn't find it anywhere.

It's fairly well hidden, but possible:

If you move your mouse cursor over the "Profile" category at the top and then click the "Forum Profile" subcategory, you'll be taken to a new page. In that page, if you move your cursor over the "Modify Profile" category, there's a subcategory called "Buddies/Ignore List"

Moving the mouse over "Buddies/Ignore List" reveals a further subcategory called "Edit Ignore List". Adding users to that list prevents them from sending you private messages and hides their forum posts.

[timb]

Sealing the drive with a less dense gas is pretty ingenious and I wonder why it hasn't been done up until now?

I think at least one of the technical obstacles was the requirement for a drive to survive the ambient pressure changes. That's why almost (?) all current drives aren't really sealed - there's a breather filter.

Yeah, that's actually the first thing I thought when I saw your link to the helium drive, "How does this handle the pressure differential from elevation and temperature changes?"

A quick Google search didn't yield immediate data on helium's thermal properties, but I didn't look very hard.

[timb]

i have to be very careful what i disclose about that.

Not a secret:  there exists a 1.2 Terabyte single platter ! laptop (2.5 inch form factor) drive
Laptop drives can have 3 platters. Desktop platters are triple the surface size and can have 4 or 5 platters.
the end is nowhere near in sight.

now, add to this :That single platter 1.2 terabyte drive dates back to 2007 .... which is 7 years ago.

and that's all im gonna say about that.

I understand you can't reveal specifics and need to watch your words carefully.

What about reliability? It seems when I was still in IT a few years back that 1TB+ drives had the worst reliability of anything I've ever seen, especially some specific 1.5TB units when they first came out. Is this something inherent to having a high data density or were they just growing pains that have been since corrected?

I need some new drives for my DROBO and was thinking about stuffing it full of 2TB ones, but past reliability issues have me kind of gun shy.

[NiHaoMike]

If helium availability/cost becomes an issue, maybe they could use hydrogen? It's flammable but the computer industry has accepted highly flammable lithium batteries for 20 years or so.

[senso]

Problem is that hydrogen is very, very small it can even escape through the metal crystalline structure(causing hydrogen embrittlement), and even helium can escape, through a lot of seals, can't really see those drives living for 5 ou 6 years.

[Switching Power]

When will you be back on free_electron? 3 hours is to short

[SeanB]

Problem is that hydrogen is very, very small it can even escape through the metal crystalline structure(causing hydrogen embrittlement), and even helium can escape, through a lot of seals, can't really see those drives living for 5 ou 6 years.

Considering that a Nitrogen/Helium mix is a standard leak test mixture for sealed hermetic refrigeration systems that can find a leak of under 1g per year you will find it hard to make a seal other than a welded one that will contain Helium for long periods.

[creyc]

I just want to reiterate what many have already said.  This episode was amazing and despite the extended runtime, probably my favorite AmpHour episode to date.  And now, Forrest Mims??  You guys are setting the bar too high my friends!

Your efforts are much appreciated!