ISBNs are owned by the publisher... as in if you want an ISBN, you have to buy one either direct from the issuing organization or from a reseller who bundles the ISBN with some sort of self-publishing package... e.g. you can get your own for your book by buying a package from iuniverse or lulubooks.
The "coop" doesn't own jack shit with respect to ISBNs.on any publications it doesn't own or license the copyright to, and simply buying the books for resale doesn't give it that right any more than you as a customer have a right to claim it.
It can require its customers not to take notes, but asserting ownership of IP it does not own gives it nothing but substantial legal exposure from multi-billion dollar publishing companies who don't care where people buy their books from.
I don't know where it's getting its legal advice, but I'd say they should find an attorney that didn't get his license to practice out of a CrackerJack box.
a reverse-engineered version with 10-100 times the power from well outside the effective range of a.45 pistol or 5.56mm M-16 round? This isn't rocket science.
I've got several gigs of e-mail going back to 1999, part of which is in multiple layers of folders.
If I could import them automatically to a Linux mail client without turning the file structure into an unusuable mess, I would already have moved to Thunderbird or Evolution. I tried that script that's allegedly supposed to handle importing mail folders, it blew up. Luckily, I was moving a copy of my directory tree.
At this point, it's a lot less hassle to simply run VMware Server on my Debian box and run Windows so I can get to my e-mail, I figure moving the mailboxes manually and recreating the folders would take a full workweek.
It's a "good enough" solution, but I'd rather run a Linux Eudora, which would require Qualcomm to get its thumb out of its ass with respect to finding a Linux developer.
As for whether anyone else uses Eudora or not, ask the people who've posted on the Penelope wiki.
Could you provide enough info for a google? And another example or two? As an American, I've got reason to wonder about what kind of stupidity the Bush Administration is releasing into the world in our names.
I don't think I'll be reading anything else by him, paper, legal download, or illegal download unless I get word that it's so outrageously stupid that I can't resist. But only if it's a posting on a publically available website.
It's ironic that the author of books like "A Step Further Out" in a business which is about giving people a look into possible futures, he hysterically denounces someone who is actively trying to create a future worth living in, apparently, because he himself is incapable of finding an attorney capable of writing a legitimate DMCA takedown letter.
The Pournelle I grew up respecting would have found the information online himself and Scribd would have pulled his content offsite.
Too bad Pournelle lost sight of what science fiction is all about. I read it as a fun way to get insight into possible futures, some of which I'd like to live in, some I'd like to avoid. Pournelle, like Harlan Ellison has gone from cutting-edge to part of a dying past, and all the people who used to respect him can do for him now is stay out of their way as they lurche towards the tar pits and hope they don't manage to take the entire genre of science fiction along with them. If SF becomes fundamentally irrelevant to modern readers' experience, nobody's going to buy it no matter how much or how little DRM is attached to it and whether or not it's available on BitTorrent or not.
I write the kind of computer how-to articles Pournelle built a good part of his professional reputation on as I have for the last 20 years, I get paid by publishers in the usual way and not by the EFF, and I've got NO sympathy for his viewpoints.
Anyone doing DMCA takedown notices on my behalf for materials copyrighted in my name without my permission had better have a good lawyer. SFWA's assumption that all of their writers want rogue copyright agents using lawbots making bogus claims of representation is abysmally stupid, and all Pournelle's blathering in their defense can't make it otherwise. Not everyone uses the same business model for writing writers from the old days used to.
If Pournelle can't figure this out and responds to people trying to make new business models consistent with the digital age work, why the hell is he still writing SF? The answer, of course, is that a writer who's recycling the same old ideas from a generation ago and has built up an audience can keep on selling "product as usual" to the same bunch of readers. Well, I won't be reading any more of that, obsolescence can be catching and I don't want to pick up any of his. Hint: He's a Vista user. No, I am not kidding.
The stuff I write for money these days is how-tos on making Linux work, the areas I write about is where "point and click" and "plug and play" don't work yet. I write about that instead of about Windows because I think Open Source is where the future is, and I started the Linux learning curve 3 years ago back when it was a lot more painful than it is today because I saw where things were going.
I've done a lot of my SF reading from the Baen Free Library and as a result, Baen has gotten about $100 of my money. "The first taste is always free"... and if one has read 6 books in a series, it's worth buying the 7th book in order to find out NOW what happens in next. While Pournelle could try this himself and make his writing more profitable, if he has nothing left to say worth reading, he probably shouldn't bother.
The most interesting thing about the discussion on Boing-Boing is that the people who are writing cutting-edge SF are the people slamming the SFWA hardest. And it's clear from Pournelle's article that he doesn't even understand why.
The cruellest irony is that while Pournelle waxes hysterical about his work being 'stolen', he hasn't figured out that it isn't worth stealing for anyone who wants to read books that might provide insight into the future. That article of his tells me more than I wanted to know about what he has to say. And
All Hollywood has in terms of politicians is whatever $23,177,938 in campaign contributions will buy.
Of course, politicians come amazingly cheap, if former Senator Fritz "Hollywood" Hollings is a slashdotter, perhaps he can tell us how much Hollywood bought him for.
Of course, the $23M was for 2006 alone, in the last Presidential election year, they spent $43M.
Space industrialization and a solar power satellites will expand greatly resource availability (possibly to the point where for the first time, ending poverty worldwide will be possible) and minimize the impact of power generation and industrial use on Earth's biosphere.
Done on a serious scale, it'll create millions of jobs, and that could be hundreds of millions once things really take off.
"Jim Zemlin (executive director for the Linux Foundation) gave a talk at LinuxWorld saying that the open source community should stop poking fun at Microsoft.
the Linux Foundation needs a new executive director.
The best way to prove that this is an unworkable and stupid concept is to let NYC fall flat on its face trying to implement it, which should stop any place else in the US from trying it.
Their options are essentially to enforce it fully and fairly against everybody and experience a sudden collapse in their tourist trade and a whole lot of angry local taxpayers with camphones as well or to lose in (ultimately) Federal court against an anti-discrimination selective law-enforcement based lawsuit where the plaintiffs are funded by every major camera vendor in or out of the USA.
The NYC city government looks like a bunch of retards (more so than usual, I mean) and anybody from DHS who publically supports it looks like a jackass, and yet another chunk of "feelgood" horseshit security theater gets exposed as a bad, stupid idea that even the average American citizen is going to spot as such.
I've already been hearing about the "greentech" bubble.
VCs for various reasons (mainly, the upward transfer of wealth in the Bush-era economy) have record amounts of cash to spend and they're no more clued than they were when they funded pets.com and boo.com . The usual result is a bunch of overvalued tech startups which will collapse shortly after discovering that there is either no realistic business model or that the dozen startups that got funded before any given VC invests in a new tech area already ate that company's lunch for it.
I figured as someone who writes tech articles for money that Linux was going to be the "next big thing" 5 years ago and started running Linux full-time 3 years ago with Windows virtualization, then via Win4Lin, now via VMware Server. New article markets aside, it's the best computer-related decision I've ever made. Even Windoze runs better on a VM than it ever did with control of an actual computer. I take for granted stability, reliability, security, and speed I never imagined possible in a native Windows environment
Desktop Linux has vastly improved in the last 3 years, to the point where with some handholding, it's ready for high-end Windows users. There's still work to be done, when it's to the point where manual configuration of configuration files is practically never necessary for common tasks (e.g. running a UPS, powersaving on the desktop), writing scripts is NEVER necesary for common tasks, and driver availability can be taken for granted, it's ready for the average user.
With a major vendor selling Linux, things are finally at the point where somebody has to step up and solve these problems. Dell is big enough to push manufaturers on drivers.
We're looking at the finish line in the "get Linux ready" race and the start of real platform wars.
MS has been trying to break up the Linux scene for years because they've seen this, too. Perhaps instead of trying to FUD Linux to death, they should have spent the money building a reliable / stable / secure XP replacement, probably based on a proprietary *nix and running a bundled XP in emulation.
I think MS should attack Chinese pirates with the kind of enthusiasm that even the R/MPAA would consider over the top and take then out by any means necessary.
Of course, I'm a Linux advocate and think that the highest and best purpose for MS is to provide us with entertainment, and if they send goon squads into China, the results will indeed be entertaining.
. . . and anyone who's used the crap that comes in floppy drive boxes knows why the way to go with HD diagnostic and other "floppy-only" images is to transform them into CDs that play on anything. . . there are too many business niches where portability really isn't an asset (how many articles have you read about important business/government databases disappearing because some moron took them out of an office on a laptop?) but low cost, easy maintenance, and easy customizing are assets to make it reasonable that the desktop will go away in the next decade timeframe.
Put this with "the mainframe is disappearing" and "paperless office" and "we'll all have flying cars in the 21st Century (where's mine?) predictions. Get the name of the "'One researcher predicts it will be five to seven years before only the "die-hard" desktop users are left.'" and don't take anything else he says seriously.
Because what I want to do with a PC is run a Linux desktop and use VMware Server with a Windows guest so I can run my legacy apps without hassle. (WINE fails the "no hassle" test)
And it hardly takes a high-end PC to do this, I had that setup working with a Duron 900.
The discussion as a whole simply demonstrates that there's no "one-size-fits-all" in computing.
Computers and operating systems are tools, use the ones that fit the jobs you intend to do.
Even good things can be used for evil purposes, examples include the "coalition of the losers" among the Linux community, Novell, Linspire, and Xandros who've made deals with Microsoft.
Suffice it to say that my next upgrade is going to be an extra 2G DDR2 instead of 1G, and I just might buy 4G and unplug the 2x512 installed. The limit is what my motherboard will take, not financial this time. The price of DDR2 has dropped to less than half what it was since Vista was introduced.
Thank you, Bill Gates for the help in upgrading my Debian box!!!
Slashdot Mirror
ISBNs are owned by the publisher... as in if you want an ISBN, you have to buy one either direct from the issuing organization or from a reseller who bundles the ISBN with some sort of self-publishing package... e.g. you can get your own for your book by buying a package from iuniverse or lulubooks.
The "coop" doesn't own jack shit with respect to ISBNs.on any publications it doesn't own or license the copyright to, and simply buying the books for resale doesn't give it that right any more than you as a customer have a right to claim it.
It can require its customers not to take notes, but asserting ownership of IP it does not own gives it nothing but substantial legal exposure from multi-billion dollar publishing companies who don't care where people buy their books from.
I don't know where it's getting its legal advice, but I'd say they should find an attorney that didn't get his license to practice out of a CrackerJack box.
a reverse-engineered version with 10-100 times the power from well outside the effective range of a .45 pistol or 5.56mm M-16 round? This isn't rocket science.
Imagine cutting shapes from foot-thick steel plate practically instantaneously.Or cutting I-beams to length in a small fraction of a second.
While the battlefield uses are sort of obvious, its civilian uses might wind up more profitable in the long run, assuming there is one.
I've got several gigs of e-mail going back to 1999, part of which is in multiple layers of folders.
If I could import them automatically to a Linux mail client without turning the file structure into an unusuable mess, I would already have moved to Thunderbird or Evolution. I tried that script that's allegedly supposed to handle importing mail folders, it blew up. Luckily, I was moving a copy of my directory tree.
At this point, it's a lot less hassle to simply run VMware Server on my Debian box and run Windows so I can get to my e-mail, I figure moving the mailboxes manually and recreating the folders would take a full workweek.
It's a "good enough" solution, but I'd rather run a Linux Eudora, which would require Qualcomm to get its thumb out of its ass with respect to finding a Linux developer.
As for whether anyone else uses Eudora or not, ask the people who've posted on the Penelope wiki.
creating something like apt for Solaris to deal with installation problems once and for all?
[nothing else to say, Slashdot insists on text here]
Could you provide enough info for a google? And another example or two? As an American, I've got reason to wonder about what kind of stupidity the Bush Administration is releasing into the world in our names.
I don't think I'll be reading anything else by him, paper, legal download, or illegal download unless I get word that it's so outrageously stupid that I can't resist. But only if it's a posting on a publically available website.
It's ironic that the author of books like "A Step Further Out" in a business which is about giving people a look into possible futures, he hysterically denounces someone who is actively trying to create a future worth living in, apparently, because he himself is incapable of finding an attorney capable of writing a legitimate DMCA takedown letter.
The Pournelle I grew up respecting would have found the information online himself and Scribd would have pulled his content offsite.
Too bad Pournelle lost sight of what science fiction is all about. I read it as a fun way to get insight into possible futures, some of which I'd like to live in, some I'd like to avoid. Pournelle, like Harlan Ellison has gone from cutting-edge to part of a dying past, and all the people who used to respect him can do for him now is stay out of their way as they lurche towards the tar pits and hope they don't manage to take the entire genre of science fiction along with them. If SF becomes fundamentally irrelevant to modern readers' experience, nobody's going to buy it no matter how much or how little DRM is attached to it and whether or not it's available on BitTorrent or not.
I write the kind of computer how-to articles Pournelle built a good part of his professional reputation on as I have for the last 20 years, I get paid by publishers in the usual way and not by the EFF, and I've got NO sympathy for his viewpoints.
Anyone doing DMCA takedown notices on my behalf for materials copyrighted in my name without my permission had better have a good lawyer. SFWA's assumption that all of their writers want rogue copyright agents using lawbots making bogus claims of representation is abysmally stupid, and all Pournelle's blathering in their defense can't make it otherwise. Not everyone uses the same business model for writing writers from the old days used to.
If Pournelle can't figure this out and responds to people trying to make new business models consistent with the digital age work, why the hell is he still writing SF? The answer, of course, is that a writer who's recycling the same old ideas from a generation ago and has built up an audience can keep on selling "product as usual" to the same bunch of readers. Well, I won't be reading any more of that, obsolescence can be catching and I don't want to pick up any of his. Hint: He's a Vista user. No, I am not kidding.
The stuff I write for money these days is how-tos on making Linux work, the areas I write about is where "point and click" and "plug and play" don't work yet. I write about that instead of about Windows because I think Open Source is where the future is, and I started the Linux learning curve 3 years ago back when it was a lot more painful than it is today because I saw where things were going.
I've done a lot of my SF reading from the Baen Free Library and as a result, Baen has gotten about $100 of my money. "The first taste is always free"... and if one has read 6 books in a series, it's worth buying the 7th book in order to find out NOW what happens in next. While Pournelle could try this himself and make his writing more profitable, if he has nothing left to say worth reading, he probably shouldn't bother.
The most interesting thing about the discussion on Boing-Boing is that the people who are writing cutting-edge SF are the people slamming the SFWA hardest. And it's clear from Pournelle's article that he doesn't even understand why.
The cruellest irony is that while Pournelle waxes hysterical about his work being 'stolen', he hasn't figured out that it isn't worth stealing for anyone who wants to read books that might provide insight into the future. That article of his tells me more than I wanted to know about what he has to say. And
government.
All Hollywood has in terms of politicians is whatever $23,177,938 in campaign contributions will buy.
Of course, politicians come amazingly cheap, if former Senator Fritz "Hollywood" Hollings is a slashdotter, perhaps he can tell us how much Hollywood bought him for.
Of course, the $23M was for 2006 alone, in the last Presidential election year, they spent $43M.
Space industrialization and a solar power satellites will expand greatly resource availability (possibly to the point where for the first time, ending poverty worldwide will be possible) and minimize the impact of power generation and industrial use on Earth's biosphere.
Done on a serious scale, it'll create millions of jobs, and that could be hundreds of millions once things really take off.
the Linux Foundation needs a new executive director.
if their satellite connections spontaneously went down.
The best way to prove that this is an unworkable and stupid concept is to let NYC fall flat on its face trying to implement it, which should stop any place else in the US from trying it.
Their options are essentially to enforce it fully and fairly against everybody and experience a sudden collapse in their tourist trade and a whole lot of angry local taxpayers with camphones as well or to lose in (ultimately) Federal court against an anti-discrimination selective law-enforcement based lawsuit where the plaintiffs are funded by every major camera vendor in or out of the USA.
The NYC city government looks like a bunch of retards (more so than usual, I mean) and anybody from DHS who publically supports it looks like a jackass, and yet another chunk of "feelgood" horseshit security theater gets exposed as a bad, stupid idea that even the average American citizen is going to spot as such.
What's the downside?
I've already been hearing about the "greentech" bubble.
VCs for various reasons (mainly, the upward transfer of wealth in the Bush-era economy) have record amounts of cash to spend and they're no more clued than they were when they funded pets.com and boo.com . The usual result is a bunch of overvalued tech startups which will collapse shortly after discovering that there is either no realistic business model or that the dozen startups that got funded before any given VC invests in a new tech area already ate that company's lunch for it.
Find out how to do it here.
Looks like a PITA, but a possible one if you really know what you're doing.
who's afraid he'll have to learn Linux.
I figured as someone who writes tech articles for money that Linux was going to be the "next big thing" 5 years ago and started running Linux full-time 3 years ago with Windows virtualization, then via Win4Lin, now via VMware Server. New article markets aside, it's the best computer-related decision I've ever made. Even Windoze runs better on a VM than it ever did with control of an actual computer. I take for granted stability, reliability, security, and speed I never imagined possible in a native Windows environment
Desktop Linux has vastly improved in the last 3 years, to the point where with some handholding, it's ready for high-end Windows users. There's still work to be done, when it's to the point where manual configuration of configuration files is practically never necessary for common tasks (e.g. running a UPS, powersaving on the desktop), writing scripts is NEVER necesary for common tasks, and driver availability can be taken for granted, it's ready for the average user.
With a major vendor selling Linux, things are finally at the point where somebody has to step up and solve these problems. Dell is big enough to push manufaturers on drivers.
We're looking at the finish line in the "get Linux ready" race and the start of real platform wars.
MS has been trying to break up the Linux scene for years because they've seen this, too. Perhaps instead of trying to FUD Linux to death, they should have spent the money building a reliable / stable / secure XP replacement, probably based on a proprietary *nix and running a bundled XP in emulation.
It's too late for them now.
I think MS should attack Chinese pirates with the kind of enthusiasm that even the R/MPAA would consider over the top and take then out by any means necessary.
Of course, I'm a Linux advocate and think that the highest and best purpose for MS is to provide us with entertainment, and if they send goon squads into China, the results will indeed be entertaining.
. . . and anyone who's used the crap that comes in floppy drive boxes knows why the way to go with HD diagnostic and other "floppy-only" images is to transform them into CDs that play on anything. . . there are too many business niches where portability really isn't an asset (how many articles have you read about important business/government databases disappearing because some moron took them out of an office on a laptop?) but low cost, easy maintenance, and easy customizing are assets to make it reasonable that the desktop will go away in the next decade timeframe.
Put this with "the mainframe is disappearing" and "paperless office" and "we'll all have flying cars in the 21st Century (where's mine?) predictions. Get the name of the "'One researcher predicts it will be five to seven years before only the "die-hard" desktop users are left.'" and don't take anything else he says seriously.
Because what I want to do with a PC is run a Linux desktop and use VMware Server with a Windows guest so I can run my legacy apps without hassle. (WINE fails the "no hassle" test)
And it hardly takes a high-end PC to do this, I had that setup working with a Duron 900.
The discussion as a whole simply demonstrates that there's no "one-size-fits-all" in computing.
Computers and operating systems are tools, use the ones that fit the jobs you intend to do.
Why are your uncles and aunts interested in marrying you?
occupation redundant?
EARTH TO NDPTAL851. You are on an information technology site. We automate data handling for a living.
What happens to you when they automate burger-flipping?
Even good things can be used for evil purposes, examples include the "coalition of the losers" among the Linux community, Novell, Linspire, and Xandros who've made deals with Microsoft.
Simply enjoy the irony.
Any chance of unplugging Xandros developers from Debian repository access?
2G (1Gx2 dual channel kit) DDR2 starting at $60 at newegg.
Suffice it to say that my next upgrade is going to be an extra 2G DDR2 instead of 1G, and I just might buy 4G and unplug the 2x512 installed. The limit is what my motherboard will take, not financial this time. The price of DDR2 has dropped to less than half what it was since Vista was introduced.
Thank you, Bill Gates for the help in upgrading my Debian box!!!
calls into question that ability of a company to get anything right.
Regulation D isn't THAT hard to comply with.