Welcome to Brendon Davis

More evidence of stick-in-the-mud mentality

Autor brendon | 05.02.2010 | Category Rant, eBook

In a recent article on Wired Magazine, several publishing houses have complained about the pricing structure of Amazon eBooks. Regardless of the fact that a lack of distribution costs warrant a lower retail price; to protect book shops publishers want to artificially increase the price of eBooks.

Cheap MP3 downloads have been available for years now and I still can’t throw a stone in a shopping centre without hitting a music shop or two. I don’t see how the sale of books is any different, not to mention the increased selling capacity of a global store front.

CISCO QoS for Dummies

Autor brendon | 05.02.2010 | Category Comms, TechStuff

Hey, for all those out there who have as much trouble with the CISCO QoS implementation as I do…. Here are 4 no so easy steps to configure.

SVCHost failures

Autor brendon | 29.01.2010 | Category Rant

Ever had a server that you really didn’t want to rebuild which could not run svchost.exe without half a dozen services failing?? A Neat little article over at HP shows how to spawn a problematic SVCHost services in its own process tree.  Short Answer:

1. net stop <service_name>
2. sc config <service_name> type=own
3. net start <service_name>

Now this doesn’t fix the problem but at least a single dodgy service doesn’t affect the stability of other critical services.

<Update 29-01-10> I forgot to mention that you can view what services are listining on each process using the command ‘tasklist /svc’ </Update>

Massive Book Sales lost by people using ‘Book Loan’ scheme

Autor brendon | 27.01.2010 | Category Rant, eBook

I love this, with the proliferation of eBooks someone has looked into the state of book distribution, sales and ownership as the RIAA would. They have raised a very important point. Book publishers are losing billions of dollars every year due to the practice of ‘book lending’. Society has become blasé to the questionable practice of loaning books from a library. A single book is purchased from a distributor and then without royalty or fee, read multiple times by people. Consider for a moment, the poor artists writers. They get no additional revenue from multiple readings their work. If this were music, it would be argued as illegal!

Someone decided to do an RIAA style study of online sharing of books. In response, Eric Hellman has done up an awesome article about the implications of physical book loaning. Consider the fact that as few books are released in digital format, a physical book must b purchased to create the digital version. Almost sounds like the same thing a library does… (almost)

My personal opinion is still the same, make the content available for people at an appropriate price and most will do the right thing by you. Publishers should embrace the change because there is NO WAY they can stop it.