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So not ALLOWING Flash, even when Adobe does all the work is being good? How about FORCING publishers to sell their content at a 30 percent loss on the App Store, that is being good?

How long has it taken for Adobe to publish Flash for Android? For ever. And it is sub-par, to say the least.

And Flash is still not on the Xoom yet.

And about the 30%, how much does a bookstore keep per sold book? It is about 50% (heard it on a recent show form Leo Laporte's TWiT.tv ) . Also an interesting read on publishing industry is http://www.fonerbooks.com/

With Apple, Amazon and now Google, authors are finally allowed to sell directly to their readers.

Back to Flash, I block Flash on both FFox and Chrome on my Linuxes. And Sure as hell I will not install it on my rooted nook color. So if I had an iThing, I would not want Flash on it.

Sure, most of Flash problems is due to awful Flash developers. But always bad developers go in hand with bad tools that allow small flash banners to max your CPU.

It is a hard day when on Slashdot someone praises Flash, a platform that has a history of being very unfriendly to *nix systems.

And don't make me call good'ole RMS on you, or he'll chase you all the way to your Starbucks with an EMACS manual while chanting "who needs Flash? Flash is not GNU/Free Software!".

Peace.

Authors can't (generally speaking, I suppose some poets and spoken-word types could) go on tour and perform their craft for a live audience.

Sure they can. It's called "a reading".

"tough shit, start waiting tables and give up the writing thing if you're not popular?"

And that is different from the current business model how exactly? Sure, it ain't as bad as in music industry, but still...

Unless you are selling at least tens of thousands of each book - you're not going to be making a living from writing alone.
At 10% royalty a $20 hard copy owned by a publisher and a $2 self-published, self-marketed e-book make the same amount of money per book for the author.
Granted, minus the advance, promotion and various other services that the publisher would provide. Also, minus any copyright limitations.

If anything, authors need to demand a larger piece of a smaller cake for the e-versions of their books.
Most of the publisher's costs are non-existent for e-books, just as most of the risk. Author would probably be better off self-publishing through amazon.

Foner claims they can profitably sell a 168-page print-on-demand book for $14.95.

That depends very much on the terms of your contract. *I* for example, have never given up any rights to my software. My employers have always had a non-exclusive right to use and distribute the software, but I have always retained my full rights to it. Also, a great many book authors work under distribution contracts in which they give away all distribution rights to the publisher. The author has absolutely no right to do anything with the book until after the VERY long contract has ended.

The basic rights are the same for any thing your write, be it a novel or source code. Both are covered under 17 U.S.C. 101, the Federal Copyright Act. The details are in the contract you sign. I should point out that I am referring to US copyright law, other countries are, I am sure, different.

For a more information about book contracts you can read an interesting perspective on the subject of book contracts, below:

http://www.fonerbooks.com/contract.htm

I used to be in the troubleshoot everything camp, now I am firmly in the copy the user's crap and re-image camp.

I also found this PC boot failure flowchart to be of immense help.

http://www.fonerbooks.com/poster.pdf

Beyond that my procedures stuff is pretty high level, stating what is required and letting the operations folks implement it how they like.

The nitty gritty stuff I have had to write has been pretty specific i.e. DISA compliant CentOS box running Snort, and that's because the DISA and NSA docs for Linux aren't current to RHEL 5.2 and the guy who's Snort install doc we were using died.

http://www.internetsecurityguru.com/

However I am thinking a Wiki would be sufficient for most folks needs, I like Mediawiki, it was one of three packages that came with my webhost, and it has been easy to use.

I work on the teach a man to fish theory most of the time, and ask my analysts and other coworkers to come to me after Google not before. But as a rule of Thumb if you had to find the answer to a non trivial problem through Google it might be a good idea to copy and paste it into the internal wiki rather than rely on you remembering your search terms, you being at work, and your internet connection being up the next time it breaks.

As AKAImBatman said above, you can use the drives via USB with a simple adapter. Copy win98 directly and place back in notebook, then install.
USB Adapter

Jonah HEX

1. Take the hard drives out and stick them in a USB Shell. Voila, instant backup/portable storage solution!

2. Take the memory chips and sell them on ebay as upgrades.

3. Rip the screens out and use them to create a Head Mounted Display in your home Virtual Reality project. (Yay for 90's thinking! ;-))

4. Unsolder the parts and use them for home hardware projects.

5. I'm running out of ideas. Maybe use the shell to stuff something geeky inside? Like a Commodore 64 Laptop?

6. Last but not least, cobble the best and/or compatible parts together to create one or two functional laptops. Load an OS in development (e.g. JNode) and use it for portable Operating System development. Alternatively, use it for an educational experience by building Linux from Scratch.

maybe because they don't have a majority of the market, even this computerworld article critical of the move and claiming monopolistic tactics says they have 15% of the market

The publisher of record for a book is the entity that owns the ISBN number. citing http://www.fonerbooks.com/2006/08/isbn.html a Self publishing blog, I'm pretty sure you could find it somewhere deep in the depths of this ISO 2108:2005 http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_ics/catalogue_detail_ics.htm?csnumber=36563 but you have to pay to get it.

So for Harvard Coop to own the rights to these ISBN numbers they would need to be the publishers of the books as well. It would be amazing, but I doubt that the Harvard bookstore writes, prints, and publishes all there own teaching materials.

Here's the list of ISBN numbers that Crimsonreading.org has collected, http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxZykg0guofL1VaDsFRbwHg from an initial look at the list and the ISBN numbers they do not look as though they all come from the same publisher.

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number if you want to break down the ISBN to Country, Group(language), Publisher, and then individual title numbers.

My long experience in the computer business was full of UPS breaking things, though granted, they were usually packed improperly.

Yeah, unfortunately, gamers these days are from an entirely different generation than those of 10 - 20 years ago.

With MTV and flashy graphics and an emphasis on getting a quick hit, it seems like entertainment requiring "investment" is falling from our culture. Sports games are designed to have mere 5 minute quarters, there are FPS that allow you to jump in get 10 kills and bail, and many good television shows containing a consistent storyline (rather than the flavor-of-the-week variety) don't end up being so successful (running jokes/themes aside).

It's likewise no surprise that the old computer game staples (adventure games, text games, those ASCII RPGs) are becoming increasingly less popular.

But perhaps there is hope. Books (something I deem to be a yardstick for people's interest in imaginative entertainment and attention-span -- as true or not as it may be) have been selling increasingly more.

People say that books are a dying medium, but perhaps some life remains with the success of Harry Potter and perhaps the frequent coupling of Hollywood blockbusters with current novels.

But I guess we'll have to see if games start taking a new route, themselves.