use Perl

• merlyn's yatch (Score:1)

  by echo (2881)

  What's a yatch anyway? It's a well known fact that Merlyn has a yack. Some people go as far as to say that the yack is the cause of Merlyn's celibacy, but I don't think that's the reason.
  • Re:merlyn's yatch (Score:1)

    by xenchu (4746)

    Gah! That should be yacht. I have no knowledge of yaks, but obviously know dyslexia.
  • Re:merlyn's yatch (Score:1)

    by chaoticset (2105)

    It's actually a phonetic reference to the Monty Python sketch about a man named Raymond Luxury Yacht, whose name is mispronounced as 'yacht and then 'yatch', at which point he angrily corrects the interviewer as follows:

    It's pronounced 'throat warbler mangrove'!

    --
    
    ------------------------------
    You are what you think.
• Author Rates (Score:1)

  by chromatic (983)

  He is an author with a hot book, so it follows he makes lots of money, right?

  As a rough calculation, figure the author earns $25 or $30 per page. (That's likely a little low, as far as median figures go, but it has a nice averagey feel otherwise.) A good author can produce four finished, well-edited pages per day. Figure in the time spent proofreading after delivering the final manuscript as well as the time between advance payments and royalty payments too.

  It takes a supremely popular technical bo
• The sad case for technical writing (Score:2)

  by merlyn (47)

  Even having helped with ten wildly popular books [stonehenge.com] (counting major editions), I'm pretty sure my total royalties divided into my total time spent puts me at around minimum wage for every book. And I'm lucky: most people never even see money after their initial advance (which never exceeds $5K for O'Reilly books).

  Also consider that the typical royalty contract puts 10% of the wholesale cost of the book into the collective author's hands, and a lot of books are co-written. Yes, I make about a dollar, pre-ta

  --
  

  • Randal L. Schwartz
  • Stonehenge