April 12, 2009 by Clair Button.

Being antiquated isn’t all that bad.
Everyone says the economy is terrible, but if you are already retired and learned early how to live within your means, it might be an opportunity to invest or buy something you couldn’t have afforded a year ago. On the other hand, why change your habits and spend money you wouldn’t have spent before the economy turned terrible? What do you need that badly anyway? When you are retired, the odds of amortizing out a major purchase over the long-term aren’t that good.

If you amuse yourself by writing and running a publishing business, you probably find it is a struggle to balance the costs of maintaining the business and the limited income of book sales. But to keep going, you may have to stuff a little more money in Bill Gates’ pockets when your ancient computer (running on Windows 95 or 98) doesn’t seem to work well anymore. The problem is, current versions of software won’t work on our technological artifacts. There is no such thing as Viagra for old computers.

But wait! There is hope for old technology (and old cheapskates) after all! The techno-geeks of the world are out there creating new magic. If you pay attention to computer geeks at all, you may have heard of the Windows alternatives, Unix and Linux. Sounds like a foreign language with good reason. They have a reputation of being obscure, difficult, and arcane command-line-driven software packages. Who has enough time and energy left to learn a foreign language at my age? Not many of us. The geeks know this. But there are some kind and charitable geeks out there, because they have worked hard to show mercy toward us simpletons.

I just cleaned the dust out of a computer so ancient that I expected to find a mummy when I scraped the dirt off the fan blades of the power unit. I inserted an extra memory chip from a second ancient pile of techno-rubble, put the Ubuntu Linux CD into the CD reader, and voila! I walked away and twenty minutes later, the operating system software had completely installed itself, along with free office software, internet browser, photo editing software, and a number of other things.

What shocked me was how simple and easy this was compared to the number of times I’ve had to repair my old Windows system and software. I didn’t have to search for drivers for each part. I didn’t have to re-boot the computer twenty times and re-install each piece of program software. The result is an old computer raised from the dead, operating just as effectively as my brand-new laptop. Want to save money to keep yourself in business? Try this! Linux has arrived at the point where it can literally threaten the evil empire of Microsoft! (Stock market traders had better look to their investments.)

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July 6, 2008 by Clair Button.

The people who worked in the auto factories where I grew up had a saying about buying a new model of car, regardless of which company brought one out. “Give ‘em a couple years to get the bugs worked out.” Despite the engineers’ best efforts, new car owners always found problems with any new design. The workers knew better than to have too much faith in the company efforts to road-test the new products.

Apparently, the same can be said for computer operating system software. You might think it would be a simple matter to find solutions to software security holes as they are discovered, and provide refinements and new features by building on the existing base of program design, but this is not the case for Microsoft’s newest Vista operating system. About two years ago, Microsoft rolled out a huge publicity advertising campaign for what amounted to a software “Edsel.” Those folks who “upgraded” to the new software on their old computers were instantly disappointed and wanted their old operating systems back. Vista ran slower than Windows XP, required more memory, wouldn’t install or run many old software programs, and no longer supported the drivers for old printers, fax machines, or other peripherals, even though they ran just fine with XP.

Judging by the online discussion forums, the only people who have anything good to say about Vista are those who routinely spend large sums of money to upgrade to the newest and best hardware, just to play the latest computer games, and even they have problems with it.

After two years, Microsoft, in the historic tradition of other monopoly giants, has stopped sales of their better previous product on new computers (with exceptions for underpowered computers), and institutionalized planned obsolescence. However, the dissatisfaction with Vista is causing many former customers to convert to the minority product, Linux, long considered to be a difficult, “geeky” operating system to learn and install. My own experience with Vista, even on a new, well-equipped computer, is that it takes a lot of knowledge, experimentation, and constant technical work, just to make certain things work. If you are not a serious computer geek, experienced in software repairs and work-arounds, STAY AWAY from Vista. It is such a pain in the butt, that I am thinking of looking into the Linux operating system myself.

The unofficial word on the street is that even Microsoft knows they have produced a lemon, and they may speed up the release of yet another new operating system “upgrade” originally scheduled for sometime in 2010.

I upgraded my computer because my old one had begun to reach the limits of what its hardware configuration could do with the types of software programs I wanted to run. Serious photo editing and publishing software could sometimes cause it to slow to the point where I could go out and mow the lawn between saving a file and resuming work on a document. Luckily I have enough hobby interest, patience, and technical experience to find ways to make Vista accept my old printer sharing device and network peripherals, but it took me a lot of hours to do that. Most people would have thrown the stuff into the trash and gone out to buy new “Vista-compatible” hardware. But even supposedly compatible equipment and drivers may not operate well, and Vista may block or lose the drivers. Microsoft Vista deserves its own “Lemon Law.”

The bottom line is that if you can still do everything you need to do on the equipment you have, and it ain’t broke, think many times before trading it in on something that may only force you to upgrade a whole lot of other stuff. New isn’t necessarily better or more functional.

Clair Button is the author of the Thomas Kreuger Mystery Series, and occasionally makes attempts at humor.

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February 20, 2008 by Clair Button.

What are BISAC codes?

As I was working with one member of our Writers Guild of Eastern Oregon to design her website as a standard and model for our group, she asked the question, “What are BISAC codes?” It was one piece of information I believed we should include in the data about her books. Why? Because my first publisher told me that was industry standard data, and necessary.

When I self published later (don’t even ask about that #@*&% subsidy press publisher), I continued to follow that advice because I did a little research and discovered the purpose of the codes.

BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) codes are a “standard used by many companies throughout the supply chain to categorize books based on topical content.”

The codes are often required for participation in many publishing industry databases, which may seem obscure to those of us involved only in writing. However, you can understand it more clearly if you realize that those codes provide your local bookstore manager a means to categorize, store, and decide how to display your book. Without your knowing it, those codes may be incorporated in the bar code on the book cover.

BISAC codes are established and controlled by the Book Industry Study Group, Inc. (BISG), the industry’s leading trade association for policy, standards and research. Membership consists of publishers, manufacturers, suppliers, wholesalers, retailers, librarians and others engaged in the business of print and electronic media. The BISG mission “is to create a more informed, empowered, and efficient industry supply chain.”

When you think about participating in the book industry as a publisher, recognize that electronic standards, efficiency, and reducing the operating costs of your suppliers, distributors, and retail outlets are part of your mission, too. Take the time to look up and list your own BISAC codes.

BISAC Subject Headings List A-J

BISAC Subject Headings List K-Z:

Roadmap to book identifiers:

http://www.bisg.org/what-we-do-18-32-roadmap-of-identifiers.php

Article by Clair Button, Writers Guild of Eastern Oregon, www.wgeo.org

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