Miguel Simon <> simon@ou.edu> > wrote:
Hi RK…
Robert Krten wrote:
I’m having some doubts about my ability to market the new book.
The short story is that I’ve contacted QSSL’s VP of marketing, Dave
Curley, and frankly have not been very thrilled with the response
(or, more specifically, lack thereof).
Did you use to work at QSSL?
On contract for a few years, a few years ago…
I’ve talked with Dan Dodge, and he is looking into the third party
situation. Unfortunately, Dan’s been away for a while and just got
back a few days ago, and prolly has a pile of work waiting for him.
Do you know Dan Dodge personaly?
Yup.
In order to make the book be worthwhile, I’d need to have some kind
of marketing channel to get the message out. Currently, about three
people in total have contacted me about it (you are number four > 
> ).
I wonder if you could contact some universities, and perhaps they can
use QNX + your book to teach a real-time-embedded OS class with it?
I’ve had grief with Universities. Their bookstores tend to buy
100 books, and then return 97 of them. Some may be slightly
damaged, and I have to charge them for that, adjust the discount
schedules – it’s a warehousing/inventory nightmare.
So, the educational program has been discontinued, and the university
bookstores are now treated same as any other distributor – returns
only allowed for damaged books.
QNX News was great for third parties, but QSSL has decided for their
own reasons not to continue with it – hey, it’s their business
decision, not mine > > “The little guy is dead” is still, unfortunately,
very much the case with QSSL’s marketing department. I see some hope
that that will change, but it’s getting to the point of too little
too late.
In short, unless I can get some kind of help from QSSL’s marketing
department, it doesn’t look very promising (let alone writing about
the IDE which I know nothing about – and I hate writing about stuff
that I know nothing about > > ).
So… show of hands of everyone who wants the book? I’d need to see
several hundred hands in order to break even.
Humm… I gather that you will not publish your book? I am willing to
buy your book even in manuscript form. At least that would be money for
a beer and a pizza! 0$0
I might still publish it – I have about 200 pages done, so there’s a fair
bit invested in it. It’s a tradeoff between throwing good money after
bad; where do you cut your losses?
There are also some technical reasons why I’ve switched to freeBSD;
Is there a market for freeBSD? I guess that if you publish a book,
there is a market…
FreeBSD is for my own amusement. Contract work will still be done on
whatever non-Windoze O/S the customer chooses >
the fact that it supports >4GB file size, MPEG movie players, schematic
capture packages, etc, etc. In short, I personally need a desktop
O/S that is up-to-date with the modern drivers and applications.
Some of this is definitely outside of QSSL’s market – they’re not a
desktop-O/S company, and that’s fine, but I need a desktop O/S and
I don’t want to be running several operating systems (learning one
and learning it well is enough of a challenge). I’ve just spent the
last two days freeBSD-ifying my machines. Mostly the time was spent
copying data from QNX partitions via FTP to freeBSD partitions.
Some more days will be spent porting my QNX applications (caller ID,
SMDR, full-text-retrieval, spam AEF system, etc) and figuring out
things like POP3 mail, HTTP/PHP servers and the like.
Do people use freeBSD for serious business?
Tons of webservers are FreeBSD based, for example…
you probably already know this but check out
http://www.pegasosppc.com/operating_systems.php
thats one of the phinixi developers babys, as you can see
theres rtp nearly finished porting (ask Dan about it)
and your current play thing freeBSD and netBSD in the early stages,
in the meantime you might get some milage out of the openBSD port
for your books, the Aros is the free open Amiga 3.1 OS boots fine
and getting there, wereas the main AmigaLike OS, runs compliant
amiga apps fine im told MUI PPC native as it GUI, i dont have 1 yet
so not first hand info, is the MorphOS.
ask on the http://www.moobunny.com were Greenboy and the gang
will perhaps read your plight regarding getting backing for your
books, and how knows perhaps a deal can be made for your cooperation
with the phinixi/MorphOS comercial projects, iv always thought
its good to include a reference book with your new Hardware
as per the old Commodore Amiga A1000/500/2000/2500/3000/3500/600/1200/C32/4000
------- ---- - - - - - - - - - LOL
the basic idea as aways and i told Dan that he should have done something
simlar (take a look at any old amiga manual and u find that its simple
page 1 this is the amiga (peg/Morph/free*/whatever) workbench, do this
to start your first app, basic simple click this do that ect,
by page 6 or 7 your getting into more advanced detail as regards
the average longer time user that can grasp cli/shell, your giving them
a quick reference and a practical type this to acheave that type
of thing perhaps that fist book always has a scimatic of the motherboard
on the back few pages and that got used by a hell of a lot of people
starting out on thier HW/SW hacking, that book in effect was an
intro to the amiga (in our case it would be the Peg or the OS).
then the good stuff started to happen, several books became available
that continued the basic intro book that was shiped with every HW/SW
bundle.
in your case the hardware guys are all amiga boys so they will
already know the format and the drawings for their hw backpage, you
know rtp and BSD and the other like os’s i forget weather you use(ed)
an amiga for anything (other than play and kick it about LOL)
but these books would idealy follow the old RKM manuals.
you would need to adapt the format for which topic your covering
hardware (under the HW guys advice/guidance) RTP your prefered
choice i assume, or the other OS that can/will run of the Peg
and other currently unreleased projects of the future.
basicly as regards RTP it should have beem like this,
1, we know you can do all this great stuff with Photon
but weres the fully compileable code, weres the ready compiled
exe to run.
2 relying on 3rd partys to hopefully write and release fully working
and consistant code when thier trying to leaarn it as they go
is not realistic.
the amiga RKMs (rom kerel manuals, in this case the amiga OS)
did a really simple thing.
i got a cd with every conceavable GUI trick both in executable form
AND in fully compilable code (later ones have a compiler and
fully documented OS3.9 C updates).
so in the case of amiga it would be this is how you make a cli command
that can open a Photon window and display yes/ on clickable buttons (wedgets)
open a cli, type
requestchoice “yes” “no”
will give you a 2 button gadget (wedget)the the GUI desktop, click
1 of them and the requestchoice cli app will have the click result
returned to the cli for more processing of you so wished,theres
a little self test for you later in the book.
take a look in the CD/wereever/requestchoice or requesttext
dirs and look at how the gadget is make and adapt it to your needs
as required in your future projects.
the basic premise is that you get a short example of how to
do a posific thing, you get a recompiled app to click on run
AND you get a fully compileable source code to try for yourself
and hopefully begin by cut&past several bits together produce
your own masterpeaces that if your a seasoned other OS developer
it becomes almost childsPlay to see how this OS under whatever
related book your doing with Phx/Morph relates/changes what you
already know.
if qnxRTP had collected all the inhouse/home pet working test
snippets of code as relates to Photon,and followed the amiga RKM way
we might have had a far better uptake on porting to Photon rather
than straight Xphoton coding as i had tryed to stress even before
the first public release, i guess the people that used amiga’s
and the were used to the way it works didnt hear or understand me,
i know i do have a way of overtyping everything, but i leave it
to greenboy and other tec writters to clean up my basic ideas,
hope u got this txt , its important, NO REALLY it IS.
anyway rob, have a chat with GB and see if the buys can find
a place for you on the team,its werth a few rounds at least,
and you do like the OS’s on/coming to Peg*.
sorry for the below:
GB, if your reading this check the phinixi email logs
and see my current 81.97.25.56 IP note that i cant get in
and the pass wasn’t put back in/or wrongly when Phx core/wiki
moved servers i assume.
please slap the pass i sent in that log and ill try again
sometime tomorrow, or tell me were you will be tomorrow/friday
and ill try and get some time on IRC or something, no direct
email out for me at the mo, but u can try sending to pop@the-ip-above,
if iv managed it as a temp thing there should be a email server
going and letting pop3/smtp in/out for a day or so.
ill repoll now, its 3.5am thurs your time now
I’ll still run a QNX 6 box for contract work, but it will be the
exception rather than the rule. Contract work on QNX 6 has been
almost nonexistant. Again, this is IMHO a direct result of QSSL’s
marketing department’s lack of interest in 3rd parties and “the
little guy.” I have no plans to be a “big guy” – I’m happy doing
what I’m doing.
So, sorry for the rant, but you asked >
Oh well…, perhaps one day we meet and I’ll buy you a beer! (I do not
drink, so you’ll have to tell me which beer to buy!)
Cheers,
-RK
–
[If replying via email, you’ll need to click on the URL that’s emailed to you
afterwards to forward the email to me – spam filters and all that] Robert
Krten, PDP minicomputer collector > http://www.parse.com/~pdp8/
Paul May, Manchester, UK,
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