This is why I copied the text from the email into Word and printed out a copy as a paper letter, too. It goes into the envelope, a stamp goes on the envelope, and off it goes to my congresscritter's address tomorrow. Took me maybe two minutes to do, plus the time I took printing it out and signing it and sticking it in the envelope (which I also printed out. God I love my new inkjet printer!). I can drop it in the mail on Monday, and off it goes.
Then, given that Windows won't even install without a valid serial number, how is it even possible to have an unpatchable pirated system at all? Even the times I've pirated Windows at one time or another, the pirate version always came with a serial number.
I downloaded the patch to Win XP against Sasser, and it never even asked me for a CD key. (Which, given that I don't know where mine has gotten to now, is a good thing.)
People who are recommending the Zaurus and other expensive PDAs are missing the point...if I read the original post correctly, the poster was looking for something fairly minimalist and cheap.
I have an old Clie T415 that I bought toward the end of the 415's useful life. I've never had cause to regret it.
The variety of software available for the Palm PDA platform can read ebooks in just about any format commercially available today save for.LIT (and I've never found anything in.LIT that I wanted to read on my PDA that I couldn't either get some other way) and.PDF (well, technically you can get a PDF reader for Palm, but I think the conduit requires Windows and anyway, a PDF is in no real sense an "ebook"; it's a dehydrated paper book). With a 64-meg or 128-meg Memory Stick, you can store a whole library in your pocket. And the 415 has a high-res monochrome LCD display that displays books very well and is easy on the battery life--and a rechargeable battery, too. And the brushed-metal aluminum case seems to me to be a lot sturdier than the plastic cases of other PDAs. Finally, as far as Linux and OS X compatibility are concerned, it works like a charm with jpilot.
Plus, you should be able to get it really cheap on eBay about now.
Will there ever be a DVD distro of Knoppix or some similar Linux that can be downloaded & burned? With all the extra space available on a DVD, there'd be room to put some really awesome apps on there...sort of a complete Linux machine in a can. And when you consider people are bittorrenting entire seasons of TV shows over on Suprnova and Animesuki, it doesn't seem like size would be that much of a problem...
They may well have spent a lot more on their machines back then.
The key word here is, say it with me, de-pre-ci-a-tion--the accounting process by which an asset's value declines over time. The machines may have cost more when they were bought, but they're not worth that much now.
...Sigma Designs has a Linux DVD player, for use with its Netstream 2000 mpeg decoder card. I've used it. It's still in beta, could be better, but it works.
...the Baen bound-into-hardcover CDROMs would make a great addition to any library. Best of all, since they're freely copyable, all it would cost would be a CDROM blank...and they could be easily replaced if anyone broke or lost them.
I've actually taken to putting all five of them (available via BitTorrent at this website), three Blackmask.com public domain book CDROMs, and the free works of Cory Doctorow on a single DVD+ROM and handing it out to folks who have DVD drives.
Of course, you don't need software to write an epistolary novel...or even an e-pistolary novel.
There was a rather fun gaming product that came out a couple years back called De Profundis, which involved roleplaying by writing letters back and forth. Sadly, it came out shortly before Hogshead went out of the gaming business, so it's not widely available anymore.
Hear, hear...I'd like to use iSilo to read it, myself...but there's just no easy way that I know of to get the stuff out of PDF without munging it in the process.
The thing is, tracking down the authors (or, rather, their rights-holders) can be an impossible task for just one work. And what if all of the survivors of the author don't know which one of them has the rights? Or even if any of them have the rights?
What if even the records of who owns the rights have been lost? It's almost a self-referential problem...in the era before computers, not only works but the legal documents about the works were stored as paper. And paper can get misplaced, or eaten by insects, or destroyed in fires, floods, etc. What happens to a work that there is no way even to find out who owns it anymore?
Multiply that by the tens or hundreds of thousands of works out there that are lying fallow, and you begin to see that it's not just "a lot of work." It's an immense, totally impossible amount of work. It's akin to the Augean Stables of Greek myth.
Thus, just as Hercules creatively rerouted a river through those stables to clean them out, Kahle and the co-plaintiffs are hoping to make the problem of finding the rights-holders for abandoned works irrelevant.
They're not even talking about stuff that people are still publishing and making money off of. If they're doing that, then they know who the rights holders are, and the rights holders care enough about the stuff to keep it available. They're talking about the stuff that's lying fallow and not benefiting anybody.
To me, this seems like a pretty good compromise between the Mickey Mouse contingent and the Information Wants to Be Free contingent, if it goes through. Let Disney keep Mickey...let people who care about their works keep them. But let us have the stuff that nobody else wants anymore.
I'm sure that there will be some sort of well-reasoned and fair mechanism for determining what's been abandoned and what hasn't. I don't think it'll be arbitrary. I do think that it will do us a world of good to make sure this information does not get lost.
It's interesting, but it's hardly new. It seems to be a big-budget form of the "tokusatsu" Japanese special-effects film genre--the same genre that brought us Power Rangers.
If you're interested in checking out what the original version of some of the Power Rangers shows look like, or in looking into the more mature Kamen Rider series, there are quite a few digital fansubbers out there who have started putting the series out--for instance, TV Nihon, which has a lot of stuff up on BitTorrent. Also, there are badly-subtitled pirate DVD sets selling on eBay...
When TiVo tracks anonymous usage statistics, and uses them to reveal what the most-watched commercials are, or how often people re-watched Janet's boob, that's a bad thing.
But when a Linux app tracks anonymous usage statistics and uses them to reveal how often people install particular packages, that's a good thing?
I'd be happy if subtitled films became more popular (and who knows, what with the college anime fandom generation growing up and becoming money-spenders, perhaps they are) but I'm still hesitant to believe that they're gaining widespread acceptance on the strength of just a few isolated examples. Passion is such a hit partly because of who made it and partly because of the controversy surrounding it. Crouching Tiger had mass appeal based on containing story elements for both men and women to swoon over, and was made by a director whose prior (English) projects had been well-received in the art-house set. Life is Beautiful I haven't seen, but it may just have been a good enough movie to succeed in spite of being subtitled.
Until every Jackie Chan movie that comes out is released in its original format instead of rescored and hack-dubbed, I'm hesitant that just any movie--especially one bearing the stigma of being a cartoon--can be a hit that way.
Crouching Tiger (and, to a certain extent, Iron Monkey which was also released subbed) was a bit of a fluke, even if you don't subscribe to the argument that it was a live-action movie and not a CARTOON, which is "kid stuff". Crouching Tiger had a kind of mass appeal, particularly to the "artsy" crowd, which unfortunately Mononoke didn't. Once Upon a Time, well, people already know what to expect from Rodriguez, due in no small part to all the English movies he's made (as well as the Spanish).
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This is why I copied the text from the email into Word and printed out a copy as a paper letter, too. It goes into the envelope, a stamp goes on the envelope, and off it goes to my congresscritter's address tomorrow. Took me maybe two minutes to do, plus the time I took printing it out and signing it and sticking it in the envelope (which I also printed out. God I love my new inkjet printer!). I can drop it in the mail on Monday, and off it goes.
I wonder...should I write to my Senators, too?
Then, given that Windows won't even install without a valid serial number, how is it even possible to have an unpatchable pirated system at all? Even the times I've pirated Windows at one time or another, the pirate version always came with a serial number.
I downloaded the patch to Win XP against Sasser, and it never even asked me for a CD key. (Which, given that I don't know where mine has gotten to now, is a good thing.)
Wrong.
Clie T415.
People who are recommending the Zaurus and other expensive PDAs are missing the point...if I read the original post correctly, the poster was looking for something fairly minimalist and cheap.
.LIT (and I've never found anything in .LIT that I wanted to read on my PDA that I couldn't either get some other way) and .PDF (well, technically you can get a PDF reader for Palm, but I think the conduit requires Windows and anyway, a PDF is in no real sense an "ebook"; it's a dehydrated paper book). With a 64-meg or 128-meg Memory Stick, you can store a whole library in your pocket. And the 415 has a high-res monochrome LCD display that displays books very well and is easy on the battery life--and a rechargeable battery, too. And the brushed-metal aluminum case seems to me to be a lot sturdier than the plastic cases of other PDAs. Finally, as far as Linux and OS X compatibility are concerned, it works like a charm with jpilot.
I have an old Clie T415 that I bought toward the end of the 415's useful life. I've never had cause to regret it.
The variety of software available for the Palm PDA platform can read ebooks in just about any format commercially available today save for
Plus, you should be able to get it really cheap on eBay about now.
To download? I'd like to spend a couple days or so pulling it down via BT and then burn it a few times. Be fun to take places.
Well...no, actually; that's why I asked.
Will there ever be a DVD distro of Knoppix or some similar Linux that can be downloaded & burned? With all the extra space available on a DVD, there'd be room to put some really awesome apps on there...sort of a complete Linux machine in a can. And when you consider people are bittorrenting entire seasons of TV shows over on Suprnova and Animesuki, it doesn't seem like size would be that much of a problem...
They may well have spent a lot more on their machines back then.
The key word here is, say it with me, de-pre-ci-a-tion--the accounting process by which an asset's value declines over time. The machines may have cost more when they were bought, but they're not worth that much now.
...Sigma Designs has a Linux DVD player, for use with its Netstream 2000 mpeg decoder card. I've used it. It's still in beta, could be better, but it works.
Nota bene: I think you mean "unlike other proprietary codecs such as..."
...the Baen bound-into-hardcover CDROMs would make a great addition to any library. Best of all, since they're freely copyable, all it would cost would be a CDROM blank...and they could be easily replaced if anyone broke or lost them.
I've actually taken to putting all five of them (available via BitTorrent at this website), three Blackmask.com public domain book CDROMs, and the free works of Cory Doctorow on a single DVD+ROM and handing it out to folks who have DVD drives.
Of course, you don't need software to write an epistolary novel...or even an e-pistolary novel.
There was a rather fun gaming product that came out a couple years back called De Profundis , which involved roleplaying by writing letters back and forth. Sadly, it came out shortly before Hogshead went out of the gaming business, so it's not widely available anymore.
Hear, hear...I'd like to use iSilo to read it, myself...but there's just no easy way that I know of to get the stuff out of PDF without munging it in the process.
ITYM "cease and desist stone tablet."
What about "I'm willing to pay for it...but nobody is selling it, because nobody even knows who owns it anymore"?
You make it sound so banal.
The thing is, tracking down the authors (or, rather, their rights-holders) can be an impossible task for just one work. And what if all of the survivors of the author don't know which one of them has the rights? Or even if any of them have the rights?
What if even the records of who owns the rights have been lost? It's almost a self-referential problem...in the era before computers, not only works but the legal documents about the works were stored as paper. And paper can get misplaced, or eaten by insects, or destroyed in fires, floods, etc. What happens to a work that there is no way even to find out who owns it anymore?
Multiply that by the tens or hundreds of thousands of works out there that are lying fallow, and you begin to see that it's not just "a lot of work." It's an immense, totally impossible amount of work. It's akin to the Augean Stables of Greek myth.
Thus, just as Hercules creatively rerouted a river through those stables to clean them out, Kahle and the co-plaintiffs are hoping to make the problem of finding the rights-holders for abandoned works irrelevant.
They're not even talking about stuff that people are still publishing and making money off of. If they're doing that, then they know who the rights holders are, and the rights holders care enough about the stuff to keep it available. They're talking about the stuff that's lying fallow and not benefiting anybody.
To me, this seems like a pretty good compromise between the Mickey Mouse contingent and the Information Wants to Be Free contingent, if it goes through. Let Disney keep Mickey...let people who care about their works keep them. But let us have the stuff that nobody else wants anymore.
I'm sure that there will be some sort of well-reasoned and fair mechanism for determining what's been abandoned and what hasn't. I don't think it'll be arbitrary. I do think that it will do us a world of good to make sure this information does not get lost.
Well, I'm sure it hasn't been implemented in a site yet either...
"I know this, this is a Linux system!"
(Had to be said.)
It's interesting, but it's hardly new. It seems to be a big-budget form of the "tokusatsu" Japanese special-effects film genre--the same genre that brought us Power Rangers.
If you're interested in checking out what the original version of some of the Power Rangers shows look like, or in looking into the more mature Kamen Rider series, there are quite a few digital fansubbers out there who have started putting the series out--for instance, TV Nihon, which has a lot of stuff up on BitTorrent. Also, there are badly-subtitled pirate DVD sets selling on eBay...
...let me get this straight.
When TiVo tracks anonymous usage statistics, and uses them to reveal what the most-watched commercials are, or how often people re-watched Janet's boob, that's a bad thing.
But when a Linux app tracks anonymous usage statistics and uses them to reveal how often people install particular packages, that's a good thing?
From what I've heard, "Voldemort" more closely translates to "thief of life".
In this corner, SCO executive and self-proclaimed owner of all things that have ever been touched by or influenced by UNIX...Darl McBride!
In this corner, renowned Open Source zealot and gun nut Eric Raymond!
May the best man win!
I'd be happy if subtitled films became more popular (and who knows, what with the college anime fandom generation growing up and becoming money-spenders, perhaps they are) but I'm still hesitant to believe that they're gaining widespread acceptance on the strength of just a few isolated examples. Passion is such a hit partly because of who made it and partly because of the controversy surrounding it. Crouching Tiger had mass appeal based on containing story elements for both men and women to swoon over, and was made by a director whose prior (English) projects had been well-received in the art-house set. Life is Beautiful I haven't seen, but it may just have been a good enough movie to succeed in spite of being subtitled.
Until every Jackie Chan movie that comes out is released in its original format instead of rescored and hack-dubbed, I'm hesitant that just any movie--especially one bearing the stigma of being a cartoon--can be a hit that way.
Crouching Tiger (and, to a certain extent, Iron Monkey which was also released subbed) was a bit of a fluke, even if you don't subscribe to the argument that it was a live-action movie and not a CARTOON, which is "kid stuff". Crouching Tiger had a kind of mass appeal, particularly to the "artsy" crowd, which unfortunately Mononoke didn't. Once Upon a Time, well, people already know what to expect from Rodriguez, due in no small part to all the English movies he's made (as well as the Spanish).