The iPod mini is smaller. A LOT smaller. And thinner. I wouldn't be surprised if the battery life was better. It's solid state, so you can jog with it.
It's a different device, aimed at a, uh, less potato shaped market than your average slashdotter (myself included):).
That would be friggin hilarious. That's an awesome book. Satan as the misunderstood not-so-bad guy. Her head would spin. Or she'd think mine was spinning.
Great. Quasi-christian religious propaganda. Used book store will probably take it in exchange for something. Maybe I can eBay it and get some new guitar strings or the next Paarfi book.
Directly, you're right, this doesn't effect the election much.
Indirectly, I think many parts of the U.S. economy have been holding their breath to see how the war turns out. This will be seen as the-beginning-of-the-end for that war, and I think the economy will start to pick up momentum from here, which for better or worse will help the Bush re-election. Uncertainty is the bane of an economy, and a certain amount of uncertainty just went away.
OK. I pick movies that do well and I get criticized for picking movies that do too well, so the case of DVD's costing only marginally more than CD's is invalid. So I pick movies that didn't do well, where distribution is very small, but it's too small, so the case of DVD's costing only marginally more than CD's is invalid.
I have a feeling if I picked movies that were just released this week, then you'd say "but those are specials on the DVD, so that doesn't count either".
BITE ME. These are pretty much average prices across the spectrum of movies. Disallowing gift-boxed sets, most DVD's cost about $19 or $20, and most CD's cost $14 to $16. I just did a search on "soundtrack" on amazon.com. With a couple of exceptions out of hundred or so I looked at. I haven't seen a normal DVD go for more that $20. My point stands: CD's are way overpriced. At least double what they should be just based on length compared to movies.
Because, you know, the president voted for this bill. Because, you know, the "El Presidente" has foremost authority on allocating and budgeting.
Uhh...what country do you live in?
As another poster mentioned, there's only one member of the administration that gets to vote, and then only in a tie in the Senate. The career folks in the FBI, NSA and CIA sit in front of Congress, and Congress rolls over whenever they can get a few words on the nightly news about helping the "War on Terror".
If you don't like this bill, getting rid of "El Presidente" or "the Shrub" or whatever the cute, stylish nickname for the commander in chief is this week, won't help. THE PRESIDENT DOESN'T HAVE A VOTE IN CONGRESS. The President can only propose bills in a very limited way. The President only appoints the top 2 or 3 levels of the executive branch, the rest are in there forever, and only want to increse their budgets and increase their fiefs. In other words, the DoJ and FBI "full under the jurisdiction of El Presidente" about as much as a teenager falls under the jurisdiction of his parents: the President only gets hurt if they screw something up bad enough to get people killed, and it's in his best interest if they catch as many bad guys a possible to alleviate the chances of screwing up.
To summarize: I'm sure the President is personally involved in every criminal investigation the FBI has, and personally makes decisions on every case to prosecute or not. I'm sure he personally writes every single word the FBI Chief says in front of Congress, and then stands there with a wooden ruler and smacks his hands if he says anything off the sheet. And I'm sure Santa will bring you a nice present this year. Now, if you'll please go learn something about how politics is done that isn't taught in a high school civics class, you might almost perhaps be ready to cast a vote in the next election.
I can't imagine the erosion of rights going down any less quickly in an Al Gore administration, because the same attacks would have happened, causing the same effects. Oh, and it would have been gone long before in a Nader administration, those folks have no concept of personal property. If the Greens ever get elected, I'd imagine expanding police powers just to make sure that everyone's wealth was redistributed, and then complaining because there wasn't enough investment capital.
Gah. Democrats suck, Republicans blow. Not enough people vote to make a difference. All of that is crap. The real problem is the lack of critical thought that goes into voting. Clinton always did well with the "Soccer Mom" voters because he was "good looking". If the majority of America would think about what they were voting for instead of punching random holes in a butterfly ballot, we might not be in this situation now.
Democracy truly is the worst form of government. Except for all of the other ones. (Quote stolen from a very smart guy.)
Pollution is relative. Kyoto is all about one thing: Greenhouse gases. Honestly, I'd rather have greenhouse gases than the toxic crap that comes out of most factories. Kyoto not only ignores toxic crap (for political reasons) but it would actively shift pollution controls away from dealing with toxic crap and into dealing with something that may not have any harmful side effects, we don't know for sure.
We do, for example, know that heavy metals cause problems, but Kyoto does nothing about pollution of heavy metals, and would shift all of the money spent on researching and installing heavy metal anti-pollution devices into researching and installing ways to limit CO2 production.
OK, I was hoping somebody would bring up rain forests.
Do you, personally, want to stop deforestation?
Then buy some damn rain forest. Quit complaining about it. Don't give you money to organizations who have the sole agenda of stopping deforestation through legislation and litigation. Stop the deforestation by owning the trees.
The truly successful environmental groups are typically run by people who buy land and preserve it. Think "Ducks Unlimited" and not "Greenpeace". Ducks Unlimited doesn't get big headlines for bringing huge expensive lawsuits, because they don't. I'd bet DU has saved a lot more wetlands than Greenpeace ever will. While you may not like their motives (them ducks is tasty eatin'), their methods work and they have been widely successful.
I agree we should protect the environment, but I'd much rather see us protect the environment by reducing real toxins that kill plants and animals. I'd rather see a reduction in the emission of paint solvents, heavy metals, and other nifty toxic chemicals. CO2 has not been proven to be harmful, and Kyoto is only about reducing greenhouse gases, like CO2.
In short, we know that many paint solvents cause cancer. We know that heavy metal causes development problems and a wide range of other issues. Hell, we know that leaving rotting animal carcasses around breeds disease. Kyoto doesn't fix any of these problems, and it diverts funds that would fix these problems to fixing something that either doesn't need fixing, or that is a lower priority.
You're trying to create a trend on a multiple-billion year old climate with 10 years of data. Nice. Even trying to do it with 600 years of data is questionable at best, and it seems that the leading analysis of that data is extremely flawed. If you haven't gone and read the report, please do so. It's straightforward and jargon-limited.
Gillette's been making money at it for years. They're quoted as having invented the model with "give away the razors and sell the blades". It's a successful business for them because they use patents to protect their blade designs and they come out with new ones before the old patents expire. The good news is that generally the new ones are way better than the old ones for them (i.e. their products evolve, perhaps even innovate).
That said, I agree with you. I'd rather pay more for a non-disposable printer than have to pay an arm and a leg for cartridges.
BN typically has free shipping on orders of $25 or more, and even so it was only $3.99 waived. BN Readers Advantage is great if you spend more than $250 on books a year (my wife and I spend more than that in any 2 months usually, and we'll easily hit that with christmas presents).
To your point that "few people will be able to afford the initial version"....That's why the initial version needs to be built to appeal to early adopters. There need to be two early versions, one a large honkin SUV that seats 7 or 8 people, and one a stupid-silly-fast sports-car type that seats 2 and does a quarter mile in less time than a good motorcycle.
Don't build 4-door sedans or boring-ass 4-seat 2-door cars that get back and forth to work at a whopping top speed of 65MPH (Insight or Previa anyone?) at first. Build something for people that enjoy driving first.
Showcase the benefits of the technology. Showcase the fact that it's efficient to operate, but first and foremost showcase the fact that it's very very light, agile, and has enough torque to make a big farm tractor envious, and gear it so the Ferraris get nervous. Give me a fuel cell/electric car that has so much torque it can rip tires apart. Then build me some better tires.
Build the commuter cars later. Buid the fun cars first to show off what you can do, then build a commuter car that's almost as good, and use the lessons from the sports car to build the sedan, or more likely the SUV.
There are a lot of things I could take issue with in your comment. But I'll just take on the easy one.
If you're holding up MMC as the paragon of GUI virtue, you are on serious crack, and I'm really pissed that you're not sharing.
I remember way back when SQL Server Enterprise Manager was a standalone piece of software. Then it became MMC-ified and became an even more bloated, unstable piece of poo.
I remember way back when User Manager for Domains was a standalone piece of software. Then it became MMC-ified and is no longer usable on dialup, and it's a more bloated, unstable piece of poo.
I remember way back when Disk Management was a standalone piece of software. Then it became MMC-ified and is a bloated, unstable piece of poo.
There is not ONE SINGLE administrative function that was put into MMC that works better now than it used to when it was standalone.
Perfmon used to be a standalone app, and it didn't take a minute and a half to load on my 1 Ghz PC.
MMC = Bloated, Unstable pile of Poo. Mac OS X may err on the other side of just having a start/stop button, but I'd prefer that to something like MMC that consumes 3 MB of RAM BEFORE you load any plugins.
Why throw the monopoly laws out when you can just not enforce them? Where's the Microsoft case at again? Oh yeah, settled as soon as GWB got his feet underneath him.
If the people are running the government now, then why do we pay taxes?
Companies vote all the time. Enron was one of the largest contributors to both the DNC and the RNC, so they even got to vote TWICE.
Arsenic in drinking water isn't good enough for you? Getting rid of Kyoto (which, admittedly, is a REALLY BAD IDEA ANYWAY) isn't enough?
And anytime a corporation can afford to pay more to lawyers than most countries can...I mean, how much do you think tobacco companies actually pay their lawyers? The reason everything's a class action suit is because that's the only way anybody can afford to sue them.
My question to you is, why should businesses assault government from the front to get what they want when they can buy the government covertly and get the same positive effects without the bad PR?
How about the "direct marketers" pay me to not put my phone number on the list? "Pay me" as in "give me cash", not some cheesy gift certificates valid for crappy merchandise, but nice, universally spendable greenbacks. I'll set a rate based on what I think my time is worth, and if some random marketer decides to meet that payment, I'll even agree to listen to what their minions are saying before I hang up on them.
Of course, people with more disposable income, the ones who generally make up the target market for most advertising, will be the most expensive to reach....Sucks to be a telemarketer.
Shouldn't you be out feeding them instead of: 1) reading slashdot 2) reading a story on slashdot you don't think is worthy 3) reading, and then commenting on a story on slashdot that you don't think is worthy
By your line of reasoning, nearly everything is offtopic and not relevant except for the bare necessities of life. What a very painful existance you must lead.
He doesn't say he won't hire people who worked at SCO. Just not if it's included on the resume. So, don't include it.
Childish? He's running a software company. SCO is a litigation company. They expect to show profits from litigation, not from writing software. If you were running a software company would you hire someone who'd spent the last several years making ice cream? Why do you expect Chris to?
OK, this has been covered ad nauseum. But if you really want eBooks, done the way that they should be, with no DRM, and an outright friendly redistribution policy that amounts to "Make copies for your friends and hand them out, as long as you aren't charging for them that's great", then go to Baen Books (follow the big "Free Stuff Here" link).
They seem to be making money on them. They sell the eBooks cheaper than the real paper ones (the problem with BN's was that they were ludicrously expensive) and you can get the full eBook whenever the hardcover comes out. Actually, you can get the book in pieces before the hardcover hits stores.
In addition to giving away free books, they also have free sample chapters of upcoming books.
You can read all about the how-and-why of it here on Baen's site. Go read that link. It's absolutely indredible. It seems that Jim Baen gets it. We'll wait and see who else does.
I've been reading Baen's eBooks for about a year now. Reading on a desktop PC with a CRT does suck. Reading on my PowerBook's LCD is awesome. It's not without some inconvenience (batteries, not being able to read in the john), but it's comfortable and easy, and it's way cheaper than buying the whole book (they offer individual titles for $5 each, or $15 for their selection of 5). I usually have enough magazines and stuff laying around to read in the john anyway.
If you purchase a selection you can download it in MS Reader shareable format (no DRM). Or HTML, or RTF. Whatever. No DRM on anything. There's no Adobe PDF, because Jim Baen doesn't like PDF (never have heard that story).
If you purchase the latest John Ringo Posleen series book (Hell's Faire) in hardcover you get a CD with the first 3 books on it, along with a boatload of other books (like a dozen books on one CD). And the license is "not for commercial redistribution", so you can use it, read the books, make copies for your friends, whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
The iPod mini is smaller. A LOT smaller. And thinner. I wouldn't be surprised if the battery life was better. It's solid state, so you can jog with it.
:).
It's a different device, aimed at a, uh, less potato shaped market than your average slashdotter (myself included)
That would be friggin hilarious. That's an awesome book. Satan as the misunderstood not-so-bad guy. Her head would spin. Or she'd think mine was spinning.
My Aunt found out I like Science Fiction.
So she got me the new Tim LaHaye book.
Great. Quasi-christian religious propaganda. Used book store will probably take it in exchange for something. Maybe I can eBay it and get some new guitar strings or the next Paarfi book.
Sorry, way OT response....but I love your .sig.
rs.
Directly, you're right, this doesn't effect the election much.
Indirectly, I think many parts of the U.S. economy have been holding their breath to see how the war turns out. This will be seen as the-beginning-of-the-end for that war, and I think the economy will start to pick up momentum from here, which for better or worse will help the Bush re-election. Uncertainty is the bane of an economy, and a certain amount of uncertainty just went away.
OK. I pick movies that do well and I get criticized for picking movies that do too well, so the case of DVD's costing only marginally more than CD's is invalid. So I pick movies that didn't do well, where distribution is very small, but it's too small, so the case of DVD's costing only marginally more than CD's is invalid.
I have a feeling if I picked movies that were just released this week, then you'd say "but those are specials on the DVD, so that doesn't count either".
BITE ME. These are pretty much average prices across the spectrum of movies. Disallowing gift-boxed sets, most DVD's cost about $19 or $20, and most CD's cost $14 to $16. I just did a search on "soundtrack" on amazon.com. With a couple of exceptions out of hundred or so I looked at. I haven't seen a normal DVD go for more that $20. My point stands: CD's are way overpriced. At least double what they should be just based on length compared to movies.
Fine. Be that way. You asked for it.
Stinker Movie Number 1:
Gigli, on DVD: $18.87
Gigli, the Soundtrack: $17.98
Stinker Movie Number 2 (the Madonna-Guy Ritchie fiasco)
Swept Away on DVD: $17.96
Swept Away, Soundtrack: $17.96
Thanks, you inspired me to prove my point even more. CD's are overpriced compared with DVD's, regardless of how much money the movie made.
OK, keep going:
Pirates of the Caribbean on DVD: $17.99
Pirates of the Caribbean, Soundtrack: 13.49
The Matrix Reloaded on DVD: 19.47
The Matrix Reloaded Soundtrack: 14.99
All prices current from Amazon.com
OK, so I can get a 2 hour movie for less than 25% more than a 1 hour audio presentation? And CD's aren't overpriced?
Because, you know, the president voted for this bill. Because, you know, the "El Presidente" has foremost authority on allocating and budgeting.
Uhh...what country do you live in?
As another poster mentioned, there's only one member of the administration that gets to vote, and then only in a tie in the Senate. The career folks in the FBI, NSA and CIA sit in front of Congress, and Congress rolls over whenever they can get a few words on the nightly news about helping the "War on Terror".
If you don't like this bill, getting rid of "El Presidente" or "the Shrub" or whatever the cute, stylish nickname for the commander in chief is this week, won't help. THE PRESIDENT DOESN'T HAVE A VOTE IN CONGRESS. The President can only propose bills in a very limited way. The President only appoints the top 2 or 3 levels of the executive branch, the rest are in there forever, and only want to increse their budgets and increase their fiefs. In other words, the DoJ and FBI "full under the jurisdiction of El Presidente" about as much as a teenager falls under the jurisdiction of his parents: the President only gets hurt if they screw something up bad enough to get people killed, and it's in his best interest if they catch as many bad guys a possible to alleviate the chances of screwing up.
To summarize: I'm sure the President is personally involved in every criminal investigation the FBI has, and personally makes decisions on every case to prosecute or not. I'm sure he personally writes every single word the FBI Chief says in front of Congress, and then stands there with a wooden ruler and smacks his hands if he says anything off the sheet. And I'm sure Santa will bring you a nice present this year. Now, if you'll please go learn something about how politics is done that isn't taught in a high school civics class, you might almost perhaps be ready to cast a vote in the next election.
I can't imagine the erosion of rights going down any less quickly in an Al Gore administration, because the same attacks would have happened, causing the same effects. Oh, and it would have been gone long before in a Nader administration, those folks have no concept of personal property. If the Greens ever get elected, I'd imagine expanding police powers just to make sure that everyone's wealth was redistributed, and then complaining because there wasn't enough investment capital.
Gah. Democrats suck, Republicans blow. Not enough people vote to make a difference. All of that is crap. The real problem is the lack of critical thought that goes into voting. Clinton always did well with the "Soccer Mom" voters because he was "good looking". If the majority of America would think about what they were voting for instead of punching random holes in a butterfly ballot, we might not be in this situation now.
Democracy truly is the worst form of government. Except for all of the other ones. (Quote stolen from a very smart guy.)
Pollution is relative. Kyoto is all about one thing: Greenhouse gases. Honestly, I'd rather have greenhouse gases than the toxic crap that comes out of most factories. Kyoto not only ignores toxic crap (for political reasons) but it would actively shift pollution controls away from dealing with toxic crap and into dealing with something that may not have any harmful side effects, we don't know for sure.
We do, for example, know that heavy metals cause problems, but Kyoto does nothing about pollution of heavy metals, and would shift all of the money spent on researching and installing heavy metal anti-pollution devices into researching and installing ways to limit CO2 production.
OK, I was hoping somebody would bring up rain forests.
Do you, personally, want to stop deforestation?
Then buy some damn rain forest. Quit complaining about it. Don't give you money to organizations who have the sole agenda of stopping deforestation through legislation and litigation. Stop the deforestation by owning the trees.
The truly successful environmental groups are typically run by people who buy land and preserve it. Think "Ducks Unlimited" and not "Greenpeace". Ducks Unlimited doesn't get big headlines for bringing huge expensive lawsuits, because they don't. I'd bet DU has saved a lot more wetlands than Greenpeace ever will. While you may not like their motives (them ducks is tasty eatin'), their methods work and they have been widely successful.
I agree we should protect the environment, but I'd much rather see us protect the environment by reducing real toxins that kill plants and animals. I'd rather see a reduction in the emission of paint solvents, heavy metals, and other nifty toxic chemicals. CO2 has not been proven to be harmful, and Kyoto is only about reducing greenhouse gases, like CO2.
In short, we know that many paint solvents cause cancer. We know that heavy metal causes development problems and a wide range of other issues. Hell, we know that leaving rotting animal carcasses around breeds disease. Kyoto doesn't fix any of these problems, and it diverts funds that would fix these problems to fixing something that either doesn't need fixing, or that is a lower priority.
You're trying to create a trend on a multiple-billion year old climate with 10 years of data. Nice. Even trying to do it with 600 years of data is questionable at best, and it seems that the leading analysis of that data is extremely flawed. If you haven't gone and read the report, please do so. It's straightforward and jargon-limited.
Gillette's been making money at it for years. They're quoted as having invented the model with "give away the razors and sell the blades". It's a successful business for them because they use patents to protect their blade designs and they come out with new ones before the old patents expire. The good news is that generally the new ones are way better than the old ones for them (i.e. their products evolve, perhaps even innovate).
That said, I agree with you. I'd rather pay more for a non-disposable printer than have to pay an arm and a leg for cartridges.
BN typically has free shipping on orders of $25 or more, and even so it was only $3.99 waived. BN Readers Advantage is great if you spend more than $250 on books a year (my wife and I spend more than that in any 2 months usually, and we'll easily hit that with christmas presents).
and if even one thing leaks, we start loosing people
And we all know what happens when people get loose. Chaois ensues. Dogs and cats, living together....
To your point that "few people will be able to afford the initial version"....That's why the initial version needs to be built to appeal to early adopters. There need to be two early versions, one a large honkin SUV that seats 7 or 8 people, and one a stupid-silly-fast sports-car type that seats 2 and does a quarter mile in less time than a good motorcycle.
Don't build 4-door sedans or boring-ass 4-seat 2-door cars that get back and forth to work at a whopping top speed of 65MPH (Insight or Previa anyone?) at first. Build something for people that enjoy driving first.
Showcase the benefits of the technology. Showcase the fact that it's efficient to operate, but first and foremost showcase the fact that it's very very light, agile, and has enough torque to make a big farm tractor envious, and gear it so the Ferraris get nervous. Give me a fuel cell/electric car that has so much torque it can rip tires apart. Then build me some better tires.
Build the commuter cars later. Buid the fun cars first to show off what you can do, then build a commuter car that's almost as good, and use the lessons from the sports car to build the sedan, or more likely the SUV.
So... to answer your question -- avoid West Texas at all costs.
Sound advice, regardless of the environment.
There are a lot of things I could take issue with in your comment. But I'll just take on the easy one.
If you're holding up MMC as the paragon of GUI virtue, you are on serious crack, and I'm really pissed that you're not sharing.
I remember way back when SQL Server Enterprise Manager was a standalone piece of software. Then it became MMC-ified and became an even more bloated, unstable piece of poo.
I remember way back when User Manager for Domains was a standalone piece of software. Then it became MMC-ified and is no longer usable on dialup, and it's a more bloated, unstable piece of poo.
I remember way back when Disk Management was a standalone piece of software. Then it became MMC-ified and is a bloated, unstable piece of poo.
There is not ONE SINGLE administrative function that was put into MMC that works better now than it used to when it was standalone.
Perfmon used to be a standalone app, and it didn't take a minute and a half to load on my 1 Ghz PC.
MMC = Bloated, Unstable pile of Poo. Mac OS X may err on the other side of just having a start/stop button, but I'd prefer that to something like MMC that consumes 3 MB of RAM BEFORE you load any plugins.
Why throw the monopoly laws out when you can just not enforce them? Where's the Microsoft case at again? Oh yeah, settled as soon as GWB got his feet underneath him.
If the people are running the government now, then why do we pay taxes?
Companies vote all the time. Enron was one of the largest contributors to both the DNC and the RNC, so they even got to vote TWICE.
Arsenic in drinking water isn't good enough for you? Getting rid of Kyoto (which, admittedly, is a REALLY BAD IDEA ANYWAY) isn't enough?
And anytime a corporation can afford to pay more to lawyers than most countries can...I mean, how much do you think tobacco companies actually pay their lawyers? The reason everything's a class action suit is because that's the only way anybody can afford to sue them.
My question to you is, why should businesses assault government from the front to get what they want when they can buy the government covertly and get the same positive effects without the bad PR?
I've got an idea.
How about the "direct marketers" pay me to not put my phone number on the list? "Pay me" as in "give me cash", not some cheesy gift certificates valid for crappy merchandise, but nice, universally spendable greenbacks. I'll set a rate based on what I think my time is worth, and if some random marketer decides to meet that payment, I'll even agree to listen to what their minions are saying before I hang up on them.
Of course, people with more disposable income, the ones who generally make up the target market for most advertising, will be the most expensive to reach....Sucks to be a telemarketer.
I think ./ used to have some kind of a deal with fatbrain.com, which was purchased by bn.com. The deal may still be in effect for all I know.
/. crowd would be upset at the patent issues caused by amazon, which would pretty much disqualify them from linkage.
I also think that a lot of the
20% of the people in the world are hungry.
Shouldn't you be out feeding them instead of:
1) reading slashdot
2) reading a story on slashdot you don't think is worthy
3) reading, and then commenting on a story on slashdot that you don't think is worthy
By your line of reasoning, nearly everything is offtopic and not relevant except for the bare necessities of life. What a very painful existance you must lead.
He doesn't say he won't hire people who worked at SCO. Just not if it's included on the resume. So, don't include it.
Childish? He's running a software company. SCO is a litigation company. They expect to show profits from litigation, not from writing software. If you were running a software company would you hire someone who'd spent the last several years making ice cream? Why do you expect Chris to?
OK, this has been covered ad nauseum. But if you really want eBooks, done the way that they should be, with no DRM, and an outright friendly redistribution policy that amounts to "Make copies for your friends and hand them out, as long as you aren't charging for them that's great", then go to Baen Books (follow the big "Free Stuff Here" link).
They seem to be making money on them. They sell the eBooks cheaper than the real paper ones (the problem with BN's was that they were ludicrously expensive) and you can get the full eBook whenever the hardcover comes out. Actually, you can get the book in pieces before the hardcover hits stores.
In addition to giving away free books, they also have free sample chapters of upcoming books.
You can read all about the how-and-why of it here on Baen's site. Go read that link. It's absolutely indredible. It seems that Jim Baen gets it. We'll wait and see who else does.
I've been reading Baen's eBooks for about a year now. Reading on a desktop PC with a CRT does suck. Reading on my PowerBook's LCD is awesome. It's not without some inconvenience (batteries, not being able to read in the john), but it's comfortable and easy, and it's way cheaper than buying the whole book (they offer individual titles for $5 each, or $15 for their selection of 5). I usually have enough magazines and stuff laying around to read in the john anyway.
If you purchase a selection you can download it in MS Reader shareable format (no DRM). Or HTML, or RTF. Whatever. No DRM on anything. There's no Adobe PDF, because Jim Baen doesn't like PDF (never have heard that story).
If you purchase the latest John Ringo Posleen series book (Hell's Faire) in hardcover you get a CD with the first 3 books on it, along with a boatload of other books (like a dozen books on one CD). And the license is "not for commercial redistribution", so you can use it, read the books, make copies for your friends, whatever.