If you read the VSTi page, you'll see that it's actually worse than that. All students attending the university are charged for all books each year.
No I'm not making it up:
Publishers are guaranteed 100% market penetration at partner schools who opt to implement the Vital Source system. Purchase of all included titles is mandated by the universities.[...]Publishers receive a mandated, preset fee for every student for every title chosen by professors. Because the service is a global curriculum application, the fee comes in from each student each of the four years of their studies, regardless of whether they are taking that course that year.
Read it and weep. You wouldn't be charged for reading over someone's shoulder. If you were another student at the same school, then you've already paid. If you're a visitor then the student is breaking the DMCA by allowing you to read over their shoulder and is subject to the full penalty of the law.
That's Vitalbooks v-i-t-a-l-b-o-o-k-s. So vitamins having nothing to do with it, But "vital" as in alive? You are absolutely right in pointing out that even for the suckers who think that paying a yearly fee for the right to read slightly edited text is a good idea, the technology will be dead in short order and the "books" useless...
For publishers, the core concept of the VSTi solution hinges on the concept that static content is no longer sold to students for a one-time payment; continually updated information is now licensed to students for a recurring, yearly fee. Students license books from year to year, with the opportunity to continue those licenses throughout their professional lives as continuing education.
Beyond this, they explicitly state that part of their goal is to eliminate the used coursebook trade. If you allow a friend visiting from another college to read something from the VitalBook installed on your laptop (say you think it might help him with something he's studying...) then you've violated the DMCA and are subject to fines of up to $500,000!/P.
The explicit intent of the creators of this system is to deny you the opportunity to buy a paper copy. Paper copies would mean competition with used copies amd diminish these exciting new revenue streams...
Getting into and paying for college are major events for most students. Many schools have required courses, as do many departmental major programs. Most courses have required reading lists. Given these realities, sutdents do not have the choice to not buy what their professors are pushing. This is almost certainly why this technology is being introduced for textbooks and not novels. Sometimes when an idea sucks, people buy it anyway, because they have, or preceive themselves as having, limited choice... can you say MICROSOFT?
By this logic, if it can be called that, computers should have only one OS. Guess which one that would be...
This "rights by restrictions" ideology is offensive to me. I don't have rights because criminals are jailed! Criminals are jailed because they violate laws which are genreated in a highly complex process sometimes addressing "rights" and sometimes addressing the wants and needs of influential groups. I support the universal declaration of Human Rights and the Constitution of the United States -- both documents addressing "rights" -- the Constitution says "We hold these truths to be self-evident" not "we hold these circumstances dependant on the threat of deprivation of rights..."
Getting back on topic: If you know anything at all about the development of Linux, then you'll recognize that this idea of enforcement is silly. You're welcome to go ahead and release your own distribution (Totalitarian Linux, perhaps?) that "enforces" whatever you want and the GPL ensures that your users and developers are quite free to ignore your restrictions.
well, if you read it again, I think you'll find that it says that the upcoming test won't use lasers that can blast anything... but that the operational system most certainly would.
I wouldn't categorize this so much as a debris tracking system as a test of a debris targeting system which is an another animal entirely.
Environmentalism is a good non-specific term.
You are concerened about maintaining a useful orbital environment. You don;t need an "ology" Multiple fields such as astronomy, physics, chemistry and geology are probabaly necessary for the maintenance of the near-earth environment...
I have only really seen this "inherent problem" when visitng porn sites. As I am more interested in other things, this isn't a mjor problem. I have never seen a frame-bomb or popup-bomb when browsing/., for example.
You could use your browsers GUI prefs dialog to disable java and javascript just prior to accessing your porn or sleazy commercial sites and then restart 'em when you move on to other pursuits...
MacOS, this is going away once OSX comes out. The problem here is that it only runs on the Macintosh Platform, the most recent PowerPC Macs that is. The old 68K Macs can't run it, and there are no plans to port it to the WINTEL platform like BeOS was ported. All I see OSX as is just yet another BSD Unix hack. Might as well use BSD on PC systems then, you may not have that Aqua interface, but at least you can have multiple platforms BSD can run on and have the scalability that Mac hardware lacks.
With all due respect, you don't know what the fsck you're talking about.
Darwin (the BSD hack underlying Mac OSX) has already been ported to intel hardware.
New OSX-capable Macs can be bought for as little as $800 and there is a large base of fanatically loyal Mac users who will purchase new hardware, if they haven't already, to make the upgrade.
The issue of interface is not a trivial one to the people who use Macs, and the quartz layer is a powerful technology that will be highly useful to the graphic artists who have always been a core Mac constituency.
MacOS isn't "going away" anytime soon.
The stuff about "the scalability that Mac hardware lacks" is just bizarre. Do you mean that the OS lacks scalability, or the hardware?
You can cluster Macs...
And you can run linux on Mac hardware (LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog Linux, Debian, SuSE Linux)-- are you saying Linux isn't scalable?
Umm, whatever.
It's probably a good idea to do a little research on this stuff before you spread misinformation, unless you want to look dumb and piss off Mac users.
Maybe it is updated and up-to-date... But that doesn't mean it's very useful, user friendly or efficiently organized.
A critique in the piece was that people always stress the strengths of their OS of choice and the weaknesses of rival systems.
The fact that you had no problem setting up PPP doesn't negate the reality that many people find this rather difficult. The fact that OpenBSD is a great OS with all sorts of neato characteristics doesn't negate certain suckiness that roughens the user experience.
Here we have some creative people devising a system to remove some of that suckiness - I don't think "my fab OS is perfect" or "OpenBSD is GOOD ENOUGH" is a particularly constructive response...
You're satying that people who have paid to get a certain level of public exposure will be unhappy to receive wider exposure? As if they bought a classified ad in a local paper and found that it ran in all the local papers at no additional cost? I'm having a hard time seeing the injury there.
If you've been following the stories about ECHELON, then you know that they can and do touch people in Canada on a regular basis...
But why wouldn't you want your mail read by an organization founded by a self-hating transvestite homosexual who spent most of his professional life blackmailing the polititians to whom he supposedly reported?
I don't think Cringely was trying to say that the FBI secretly dreams of shutting down the internet - but Carnivore means they *could* and they could also do every nasty intervention in between like cutting off a site, webring or user. If past abuses by the FBI don't make you a little concerned about this level of unsupervised control, you're either very underinformed, a true believer in the virtues of totalitarianism, or an idiot.
Apple is based in the United States, a nation burdened by a little document called the constitution... I was taught that all the legal bullcrap in the world can't invalidate that document and its amendments - Do the legal sh!tmeisters in Cupertino have some new take on this burdensome old set of documents? Really the world would be a better place if these pigf@ckers who claim to practice law would just retire from contact with rest of the species!
Is this a good thing, or is it an unfortunate imposition of the depersonalizing aspects of technology onto an unsuspecting culture?
OR? "good Thing" OR "imposition"? What a copletely F_cked dichotomy!
The arogance and cultural elitism behind this phrasing is fairly mind-blowing. How is this complex social behaviour being "imposed"? Are there legal penalties for non-compliance? Financial incentives for participation? Physical threats? What sinister conspiracy might be behind the imposition of "depersonalizing aspects of technology" on unsuspecting vicitims? And just what is so depersonalizing about the written word anyway? Is Slashdot a "depersonalizing" technology being imposed on us by a sinister hidden conspiracy
I respectfully suggest that a little thoughtful analysis of the assumptions underlying this post are in order.
Take the Christiam God, for example - most Christians say that He is omnipotent but weird and therefore often resorts to magic-like activity to achieve His purposes. "He works in mysterious ways.." So you get burning bushes, rivers of blood, pillars of fire, healing by touch, loaves and fishes...etc.
Why would an Omnipotent being resort to this kind of stuff? Why not just "make it so"? Christians tend to cobble together all manner of bizzare answers to this problem, often focusing on "the problem of free will" etc. They also avoid the issue of why an omnipotent being would require strange and unpleasant behaviour like ethnic cleansing and genocide and biological strategies like eugenics from His people...
The God in this book sounds even stranger! Wipe out many species as part of the Plan? With a big rock?
An omnipotent being could do better
Gods are typically described as engaging in truly bizzare behaviour, a great deal of which could be described as magical or reproducible by very advanced technology.
For rocks as weapons, see also Niven & Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye...
There's a moment in the final conference when they notice that every large and small feature on the alien homeworld is either circular or a fragment of a cricle....
See the bottom of the page at http://halo.bungie.com/press/It STILL says "Coming soon for Windows and Mac OS" IS this just a Bungie oversight? Or is there arrival at Redmond more likely to be something like Durandal's seizure by the pfhor?
In the letter at Bungie.com, ONI is explicitly promised promised for the Mac...
And HALO is explicitly NOT promised for any platform. Given the introduction and Demo of HALO at MACWORLD NY last year and the endless praise heaped on Bungie by Steve Jobs, I think this is a very bad sign
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the VSTi page, you'll see that it's actually worse than that. All students attending the university are charged for all books each year.
No I'm not making it up:
Publishers are guaranteed 100% market penetration at partner schools who opt to implement the Vital Source system. Purchase of all included titles is mandated by the universities.[...]Publishers receive a mandated, preset fee for every student for every title chosen by professors. Because the service is a global curriculum application, the fee comes in from each student each of the four years of their studies, regardless of whether they are taking that course that year.
Read it and weep. You wouldn't be charged for reading over someone's shoulder. If you were another student at the same school, then you've already paid. If you're a visitor then the student is breaking the DMCA by allowing you to read over their shoulder and is subject to the full penalty of the law.
What might be better names?
Mortalbooks?
Terminalbooks?
Deadbooks?
Stiffbooks?
Do omedbooks?
Deadbooks?
That's not what the VitalBook creators say:
[from their website:]
For publishers, the core concept of the VSTi solution hinges on the concept that static content is no longer sold to students for a one-time payment; continually updated information is now licensed to students for a recurring, yearly fee. Students license books from year to year, with the opportunity to continue those licenses throughout their professional lives as continuing education.
Beyond this, they explicitly state that part of their goal is to eliminate the used coursebook trade. If you allow a friend visiting from another college to read something from the VitalBook installed on your laptop (say you think it might help him with something he's studying...) then you've violated the DMCA and are subject to fines of up to $500,000!/P.
The explicit intent of the creators of this system is to deny you the opportunity to buy a paper copy. Paper copies would mean competition with used copies amd diminish these exciting new revenue streams...
Getting into and paying for college are major events for most students. Many schools have required courses, as do many departmental major programs. Most courses have required reading lists. Given these realities, sutdents do not have the choice to not buy what their professors are pushing. This is almost certainly why this technology is being introduced for textbooks and not novels. Sometimes when an idea sucks, people buy it anyway, because they have, or preceive themselves as having, limited choice... can you say MICROSOFT?
Not if you look at the comparable view: Windows Visual History
By this logic, if it can be called that, computers should have only one OS. Guess which one that would be...
This "rights by restrictions" ideology is offensive to me. I don't have rights because criminals are jailed! Criminals are jailed because they violate laws which are genreated in a highly complex process sometimes addressing "rights" and sometimes addressing the wants and needs of influential groups. I support the universal declaration of Human Rights and the Constitution of the United States -- both documents addressing "rights" -- the Constitution says "We hold these truths to be self-evident" not "we hold these circumstances dependant on the threat of deprivation of rights..."
Getting back on topic: If you know anything at all about the development of Linux, then you'll recognize that this idea of enforcement is silly. You're welcome to go ahead and release your own distribution (Totalitarian Linux, perhaps?) that "enforces" whatever you want and the GPL ensures that your users and developers are quite free to ignore your restrictions.
well, if you read it again, I think you'll find that it says that the upcoming test won't use lasers that can blast anything... but that the operational system most certainly would.
I wouldn't categorize this so much as a debris tracking system as a test of a debris targeting system which is an another animal entirely.
Too much?
I was not aware that this concept was applicable here
Environmentalism is a good non-specific term. You are concerened about maintaining a useful orbital environment. You don;t need an "ology" Multiple fields such as astronomy, physics, chemistry and geology are probabaly necessary for the maintenance of the near-earth environment...
Megahertz sells & Joe Q. Public doesn't know what Altivec is.
The average consumer of Mac G4s is a graphic artist who is well aware of exactly what apps and plug-ins are Altivec enabled -- and Apple knows this.
Thanks for pointing this out. I missed the original story and this has to be one of the coolest things going...
I have only really seen this "inherent problem" when visitng porn sites. As I am more interested in other things, this isn't a mjor problem. I have never seen a frame-bomb or popup-bomb when browsing /., for example.
You could use your browsers GUI prefs dialog to disable java and javascript just prior to accessing your porn or sleazy commercial sites and then restart 'em when you move on to other pursuits...
Just a thought and YMMV...
Cable wrote:
MacOS, this is going away once OSX comes out. The problem here is that it only runs on the Macintosh Platform, the most recent PowerPC Macs that is. The old 68K Macs can't run it, and there are no plans to port it to the WINTEL platform like BeOS was ported. All I see OSX as is just yet another BSD Unix hack. Might as well use BSD on PC systems then, you may not have that Aqua interface, but at least you can have multiple platforms BSD can run on and have the scalability that Mac hardware lacks.
With all due respect, you don't know what the fsck you're talking about.
Darwin (the BSD hack underlying Mac OSX) has already been ported to intel hardware.
New OSX-capable Macs can be bought for as little as $800 and there is a large base of fanatically loyal Mac users who will purchase new hardware, if they haven't already, to make the upgrade.
The issue of interface is not a trivial one to the people who use Macs, and the quartz layer is a powerful technology that will be highly useful to the graphic artists who have always been a core Mac constituency.
MacOS isn't "going away" anytime soon.
The stuff about "the scalability that Mac hardware lacks" is just bizarre. Do you mean that the OS lacks scalability, or the hardware?
You can cluster Macs...
And you can run linux on Mac hardware (LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog Linux, Debian, SuSE Linux)-- are you saying Linux isn't scalable?
Umm, whatever.
It's probably a good idea to do a little research on this stuff before you spread misinformation, unless you want to look dumb and piss off Mac users.
If it's easy to use incorrectly, it's a sucky implementation.
"the documentation is always update and accurate"
Maybe it is updated and up-to-date... But that doesn't mean it's very useful, user friendly or efficiently organized.
A critique in the piece was that people always stress the strengths of their OS of choice and the weaknesses of rival systems.
The fact that you had no problem setting up PPP doesn't negate the reality that many people find this rather difficult. The fact that OpenBSD is a great OS with all sorts of neato characteristics doesn't negate certain suckiness that roughens the user experience.
Here we have some creative people devising a system to remove some of that suckiness - I don't think "my fab OS is perfect" or "OpenBSD is GOOD ENOUGH" is a particularly constructive response...
I'm not sure I follow your argument...
You're satying that people who have paid to get a certain level of public exposure will be unhappy to receive wider exposure? As if they bought a classified ad in a local paper and found that it ran in all the local papers at no additional cost? I'm having a hard time seeing the injury there.
If you've been following the stories about ECHELON, then you know that they can and do touch people in Canada on a regular basis...
But why wouldn't you want your mail read by an organization founded by a self-hating transvestite homosexual who spent most of his professional life blackmailing the polititians to whom he supposedly reported?
I don't think Cringely was trying to say that the FBI secretly dreams of shutting down the internet - but Carnivore means they *could* and they could also do every nasty intervention in between like cutting off a site, webring or user. If past abuses by the FBI don't make you a little concerned about this level of unsupervised control, you're either very underinformed, a true believer in the virtues of totalitarianism, or an idiot.
Apple is based in the United States, a nation burdened by a little document called the constitution... I was taught that all the legal bullcrap in the world can't invalidate that document and its amendments - Do the legal sh!tmeisters in Cupertino have some new take on this burdensome old set of documents? Really the world would be a better place if these pigf@ckers who claim to practice law would just retire from contact with rest of the species!
OR? "good Thing" OR "imposition"? What a copletely F_cked dichotomy!
The arogance and cultural elitism behind this phrasing is fairly mind-blowing. How is this complex social behaviour being "imposed"? Are there legal penalties for non-compliance? Financial incentives for participation? Physical threats? What sinister conspiracy might be behind the imposition of "depersonalizing aspects of technology" on unsuspecting vicitims? And just what is so depersonalizing about the written word anyway? Is Slashdot a "depersonalizing" technology being imposed on us by a sinister hidden conspiracy
I respectfully suggest that a little thoughtful analysis of the assumptions underlying this post are in order.Obviously the problem is in defining God.
Take the Christiam God, for example - most Christians say that He is omnipotent but weird and therefore often resorts to magic-like activity to achieve His purposes. "He works in mysterious ways.." So you get burning bushes, rivers of blood, pillars of fire, healing by touch, loaves and fishes...etc.
Why would an Omnipotent being resort to this kind of stuff? Why not just "make it so"? Christians tend to cobble together all manner of bizzare answers to this problem, often focusing on "the problem of free will" etc. They also avoid the issue of why an omnipotent being would require strange and unpleasant behaviour like ethnic cleansing and genocide and biological strategies like eugenics from His people...
The God in this book sounds even stranger! Wipe out many species as part of the Plan? With a big rock?
An omnipotent being could do better
Gods are typically described as engaging in truly bizzare behaviour, a great deal of which could be described as magical or reproducible by very advanced technology.
For rocks as weapons, see also Niven & Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye...
There's a moment in the final conference when they notice that every large and small feature on the alien homeworld is either circular or a fragment of a cricle....See the bottom of the page at http://halo.bungie.com/press/It STILL says "Coming soon for Windows and Mac OS" IS this just a Bungie oversight? Or is there arrival at Redmond more likely to be something like Durandal's seizure by the pfhor?
In the letter at Bungie.com, ONI is explicitly promised promised for the Mac...
And HALO is explicitly NOT promised for any platform. Given the introduction and Demo of HALO at MACWORLD NY last year and the endless praise heaped on Bungie by Steve Jobs, I think this is a very bad sign
I am a Mac user and I am PISSED!
Bungie's Letter to Fans