Those who use online teaching resources provided by publishers (problems for exams and homeworks) have no choice. Of course the contents of the book is modified in such a way that the previous, or international editions are useless. Only the version matching the most recent edition is available and the professor can't change it. For offline resources like solution guides, there are copyright-based restrictions, but I'm not familiar with them only aware of existence of such issue, so I'm not going to comment. DRM on paper books at work.
Books are expensive, and not only Ugandans suffer from it. Publisher's greed bites also people in "developed" countries. Do you think that books in US are cheap? Then you have never tried to buy academic books. A single book can costs much more than many US families or 4 or 5 spend weekly for food. On top of it many publishers publish new releases every semester with minor changes in the problems, and forbid professors from using older editions to kill used books market.
If I had to chose one project for killing which I would hate Google, it would be Google Notebook. With browser plugin it was one of the best tools for doing online and offline research I have ever used. They claimed that it could be replaced by Google Docs, but GD is nowhere close to the functionality and convenience Notebook offered. Another project I missed was Google Reader, however I found Feedly to be a decent replacement.
For projects that have been virtually killed by Google's "improvements", my personal number one are Google Groups. Started as Deja's Usenet archive, but over the years has been turned into unusable and annoying as hell post browser, with all the amazing search functionality gone. Google Maps is also turning into unusable, bloated piece of junk. So far I still can revert to the old interface, but once this option is gone, I will have to look for other online mapping solutions.
Hi,
This is an Albanian virus. As you know we are not so technical
advanced as in the West. We therefore ask you to delete all your
files on your harddisk manually and send this email to all your
friends.
Thanks for helping us,
The Albanian Hackers
When I saw it many years ago it looked like a good joke
Slashdot Mirror
Those who use online teaching resources provided by publishers (problems for exams and homeworks) have no choice. Of course the contents of the book is modified in such a way that the previous, or international editions are useless. Only the version matching the most recent edition is available and the professor can't change it. For offline resources like solution guides, there are copyright-based restrictions, but I'm not familiar with them only aware of existence of such issue, so I'm not going to comment.
DRM on paper books at work.
Books are expensive, and not only Ugandans suffer from it. Publisher's greed bites also people in "developed" countries. Do you think that books in US are cheap? Then you have never tried to buy academic books. A single book can costs much more than many US families or 4 or 5 spend weekly for food. On top of it many publishers publish new releases every semester with minor changes in the problems, and forbid professors from using older editions to kill used books market.
If I had to chose one project for killing which I would hate Google, it would be Google Notebook. With browser plugin it was one of the best tools for doing online and offline research I have ever used. They claimed that it could be replaced by Google Docs, but GD is nowhere close to the functionality and convenience Notebook offered. Another project I missed was Google Reader, however I found Feedly to be a decent replacement.
For projects that have been virtually killed by Google's "improvements", my personal number one are Google Groups. Started as Deja's Usenet archive, but over the years has been turned into unusable and annoying as hell post browser, with all the amazing search functionality gone.
Google Maps is also turning into unusable, bloated piece of junk. So far I still can revert to the old interface, but once this option is gone, I will have to look for other online mapping solutions.
Hi,
This is an Albanian virus. As you know we are not so technical
advanced as in the West. We therefore ask you to delete all your
files on your harddisk manually and send this email to all your
friends.
Thanks for helping us,
The Albanian Hackers
When I saw it many years ago it looked like a good joke