It really saddened me the current state of Humble Bundle.
Originally, it was really really good.
Original software, books and co.
It was adding added value, like the bundling of music or assets, the promise to have "drm free" executable, and as much as possible, games and software running on linux or at least downloadable.
All of that, really for the price you wanted and valued the pack.
Now, it is mostly abusing of its previously marketing image to sell you for indecent price what are abandonware or deprecated content.
Most game are provided as single use steam or origin license keys. If you pay what you want, you can usually only get a garbage subset of the content, otherwise you kind of need to pay the "fixed" price to have the content that is advertised.
I don't know about games but some of their book bundles are still quite good, especially (on the technical side) the ones from O'Reilly, No Starch Press, and Apress.
They also have occasional Manga/Graphic novel bundles which are nice as well.
I've almost bought some of the book bundles, but then realized that all or almost all of the books in the bundle were also on O'Reilly online learning. I've got a great deal on that [1] and the Bundle books were all books that I would not need long term and so losing access to them if I ever cancel O'Reilly was not a problem.
[1] Way back when it was Safari Library they had a variety of plans. They wanted to switch to a single unlimited plan. Those of us on the cheaper limited plans were grandfathered in. To encourage us to voluntarily switch to the new plan they offered it to us for $200/year for as long as we kept our accounts active, which was 1/2 the current price for new subscribers. Now it is $500/year for new subscribers, but still $200/year for those of us who accepted their offer.
Does O'Reilly learning have non O'Reilly books as well? And do you still have the coupons system that Safari did, that allowed you to download entire books? $500 is a bit high but may still be worth it for me if these are available.
I don't understand your point either. We may have both failed, or you may have failed to communicate the significance of your preferences to us.
Reminding you that it's very simple to donate directly to the EFF seems like a rational response to someone who has the desire to donate to the EFF directly.
It seemed snarky to me to tell me to donate to EFF right after I had said that I would prefer to donate to EFF, like I didn't know it was possible do donate to a charity.
Humble Bundles are not the right way to support a charity -- they're the right way to support IGN. It used to be possible to minimize/remove the amount Humble got, but that time has long since passed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Humble Bundles are not the right way to support a charity -- they're the right way to support IGN
There are actually people who buy the bundles to get the ebooks. If there are more than 2 or 3 ebooks in the bundle that they would have otherwise bought from the publisher or at retail then the bundle costs them less.
That the bundle also includes a small donation to a charity and several other books is just a bonus.
Sure, and I have no problem with people that just want a bundle of goods. But the charity angle is just disingenuous given how much Humble takes for itself.
Majority of charities are inefficiently managed. Don't believe me go look up 10 charities you know of and check their finance. Sometime for every 1 dollar you donate, 70-90cts are used to pay for their admin. Humble bundle offers values that hard to get by elsewhere. I have now always donate 50% to Humble Bundle and 50% to publisher. If I wish to donate to charities, I donate directly knowing exactly which charities I donated and how those money being used. Giving money to legit business are way better than charities in vast cases. Business is sustainable. Majority are audited and offer things/services we need/want. Charities....well they offer ONLY sympathy as their product trailed by lots of questionable administration costs.
Julia Evans stuff is great. Really enjoyed her Networking work.
How Linux Works is also very interesting, used to for interview prep as I found some places were asking questions about internals rather than how I go about doing things
If you really enjoy them, buy them or find a way to donate to the author(s).
If you want to support the charities, donate directly.
Humble Bundle doesn't make sense to books. It only makes sense for a few games where you can really get a good offer, for lets say, a game and the main DLCs, but such promotional campaigns rarely happen.
What's the problem here? You're getting a nice bundle of DRM-free ebooks at a favorable price that the publisher, if not the author, are okay with. And it's all done with a few clicks. What does piracy add or solve in this situation? Nearly all arguments I've seen in favor of piracy are either stands against DRM or a "service quality" issue, neither of which apply here.
In this particular case the bundle is full of useless and outdated books, the few interesting ones require that you buy the higher tier available.
And given that the purpose of HB is to get money donated to charity, it's not an efficient way of achieving that because they get a very small fraction of what we pay.
Hence why I said you'd better off pirating, evaluate the book value, and if needed buy the book to support the authors.
And if charity is also important because they earn more money.
The "higher tier" ($40) is still cheaper than probably any 2 of the books direct from their publishers, even on sale/discount. The next highest tier ($30) is cheaper than most of the books singularly from their publisher and only missing out of one (very well recommended) book. I personally already had LPI, Devops for the Desperate, Absolute FreeBSD, Absolute OpenBSD, The GNU Make book and STILL picked up the bundle at the $30 tier because it's a huge value AND some of it goes to EFF which is probably the best "charity" I could support if I had to choose one.
Suggesting you should pirate these books because you think they're outdated is just 'splaining away being too cheap/frugal to pay for things that you want.
"The Linux Programming Interface" is excellent, and very thorough (1500 pages!).
But it's already 12 years old. Are there important innovations in Linux and its APIs from the last 12 years that would be interesting to learn, and how ?
> Are there important innovations in Linux and its APIs from the last 12 years that would be interesting to learn, and how ?
From a kernel API/ABI point of view (which is the focus of "The Linux Programming Interface"), the most important one would probably be io_uring (https://kernel.dk/io_uring.pdf).
Apologies, and you're right; I wasn't familiar with the book discussed and looking at the theme of the books in the bundle assumed that the book in question was discussing the Linux OS.
With the current state of advertising/spyware/malware, it will be a cold day in hell before I let a commercial product directly interface with my brain. ever.
Tangential to the content, but what are everyone's recommended Linux books? I'm personally looking for (slightly) deeper stuff, as the basics of user space are something I'm comfortable with. I feel like I'm in a weird middle ground where there are a million intro books and a good amount of deep books, but it's hard to know what's right.
A lot of the books here seem like they might miss my use case by a bit, but again, I'm not sure.
UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook is very appealing.
I bought the No Starch Press Linux bundle in 2019.
There are only a couple of books in this one that weren't on the 2019 one. It's a shame that they don't allow to just buy the difference if you bought a similar bundle in the past. But I guess their agreements must forbid that.
While I definitely won't be picking up the entire bundle, the titles "How Linux Works" and "Practical Linux Forensics" pique my interest... Has anyone read them and have any thoughts about them?
I read an earlier edition of How Linux Works and definitely enjoyed it. Code examples were pretty sparse and it focused more on how the different concepts fit together, and I think only one or two parts were dense enough to be any trouble to read at all. Overall I felt like I actually understood how my system worked a lot better than before reading it.
“Linux” indeed… I know for a fact that Absolute OpenBSD, The Book of PF, and Designing BSD Rootkits are great. Tempted to pick up the bundle to read FreeBSD Device Drivers, The Book of GIMP, Absolute FreeBSD, and The Book of Inkscape.
Half of the "Linux" books are about BSDs, or open source applications that are not specific for Linux. They seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel there.
That’s how bundling economics work. The additional marginal cost of providing you those books is zero, particularly if you never download them.
The way I see it, you're getting the Linux Programming Interface on sale (it's usually $60-$80 as an eBook), and the rest are thrown in to sweeten the deal.
Is it available legally online somewhere or are you referring to a bootleg copy? I now own a copy (thanks to this bundle), but if it's up online somewhere, I'd love to know about it because it would be handy to be able to link to it from PR comments and such.
Originally, it was really really good.
Original software, books and co. It was adding added value, like the bundling of music or assets, the promise to have "drm free" executable, and as much as possible, games and software running on linux or at least downloadable. All of that, really for the price you wanted and valued the pack.
Now, it is mostly abusing of its previously marketing image to sell you for indecent price what are abandonware or deprecated content.
Most game are provided as single use steam or origin license keys. If you pay what you want, you can usually only get a garbage subset of the content, otherwise you kind of need to pay the "fixed" price to have the content that is advertised.