Hopefully Google will realize that most everything published had, as a condition of publication, the loss of the author's rights to that work either temporarily or permanently.
Well, no. It's quite common for authors to retain copyright when they sign a contract with a publisher. For instance, here is a list of some short stories I've had published. Some of these were published in print magazines, some in electronic magazines. None of them asked me for a copyright assignment. Whether or not a publisher requires a copyright assignment depends completely on the publisher, the genre, and the customs of that particular market segment. I pulled the first three books off of the bookshelf next to my computer. How to Brew, by John Palmer, is (c) John Palmer. Programming Perl, by Wall, Christiansen, and Orwant, os (c) O'Reilly. Pragmatic Version Control, by Travis Swicegood, is (c) Travis Swicegood. So your "most everything published" is has a batting average of 1/3 in my sample.
If Google really wants to digitize books en masse, why not start by killing the concept of the exclusive contract and the equally nefarious "work for hire" clauses that are cropping up around the world
Lots of problems with your suggestion:
They're digitizing books that have already been published. You can't change the contracts retroactively.
The reason print publishers require exclusive contracts is that printing costs are almost entirely setup costs. Once you have the job set up on a traditional (not POD) press, the incremental cost of producing one more copy is very small. So the nature of publishing is that you invest a lot of capital up front in order to publish a particular book, and then you hope to make it back over time. The publisher wants an exclusive contract so that they can't be undercut by some other publisher.
These exclusive contracts don't last forever. I have one sitting in my drawer for a story I sold to Dell Magazines. It states "The Seller agrees he will not permit any other publication of the Work [...] until one month after first publication of the Work in the Publisher's magazine." Since the story was publisher more than a month ago, and since they didn't require a copyright assignment, I'm now free to do whatever I like with it. The books that Google is scanning are mostly out of print, and almost all book contracts provide that when the book goes out of print, the exclusive contract is terminated, and the copyright assignment (if any) reverts to the author.
Thanks for the correction. What I should have said is that you can't step DC voltage up or down using a transformer. I think GP poster was saying he wanted his whole house to be on DC, so that he wouldn't have to have an inverter. That only works if every single appliance works on DC. A low-power technique isn't going to help with a dishwasher. The whole exercise is also pointless unless it's cheaper and/or more efficient than the way everything currently works with 110 V AC as the standard. I doubt that the techniques you're talking about satisfy the condition (high power) and (cheaper or more efficient).
I'm not sure what my peak load is at home, but at $1/Watt I imagine I could generate all my own electricity for less than $10,000.
It doesn't matter what your peak load is. If you're in an area that's on the grid, then you want a grid-tied system, and therefore any power you can't generate on your own will come from the grid. At other times, when you have extra (e.g., a hot sunny day when you're out hiking), the power company buys it from you. There is typically a very strong economic incentive to buy a system that matches your yearly consumption, not your peak load. If it's providing less than your yearly consumption, then you aren't getting the best deal, because you still had to pay for a day's labor by the crew with the crane, etc., and you still had to pay for an inverter. The converse is also true: you probably don't want an oversized system. I have photovoltaics on my roof, and in my area, if I produce more than I use over a 12-month period, the electric company won't pay me for the excess. They'll just say, "Gosh, thanks for all that surplus power."
It's typically very, very difficult to make a realistic calculation of how long it will take a residential PV system to pay for itself. People always ask me how long mine will take to pay for itself, and I always tell them honestly that I have absolutely no idea. The problem is that energy prices are extremely volatile -- that's why they exclude them from the CPI. Remember just recently when gas was $4 a gallon? Historically, the price of electric power has always tended to go up, but we don't know how much it will go up over the 25-year design lifetime of our system.
What you can do is to consider all your local factors: latitude, amount of sunny weather, whether you have a south-facing roof, whether there is any shade on your roof, and current local prices for electricity. Every time this topic comes up on slashdot, people will make blanked statements about whether PV is economically viable. That's just nonsense. It depends on all those factors. If it was an utter economic no-go, the industry wouldn't exist. If it was 100% clear that it was economically favorable for everyone in, say, LA, then you'd see PV systems on the roof of every house in LA whose owners had sufficient capital to pay for the system. The fact that the industry exists, but is still fairly small, tells you that there's a lot of uncertainty about it. You're welcome to invest your money in the stock market instead, but it won't help with global warming.
Now the consumer electronics industry just needs to convert everything over to run on DC and I'm all set.
Ain't gonna happen. Network effects are one reason. Another reason is that different devices naturally want to work from different voltages, but you can't step voltage up or down if it's DC.
First off, make sure to read the Slate article, not the crappy techdirt page that just summarizes and links to it.
The Slate article makes a lot of oversimplified analogies. One big difference between books and music is that with music, there is only a very tiny difference in utility between a CD and a song bought online and downloaded. Personally, I perceive the CD as having slightly negative utility compared to the download, because it's just one more physical object to clutter up my house. Other people might prefer the convenience of having the CD, since you don't need to make backup copies of CDs. But in general, they're pretty much interchangeable products. With books, however, there are huge differences in utility between paper and download. I can easily make notes in a paper book. I can loan it to a friend to take to the beach. It's never going to become obsolete, whereas a digital book in a specialized e-book format is almost certainly going to become obsolete within 5-10 years.
Because music has nearly the same utility regardless of whether it's embodied in a physical object, there are lots and lots of people who copy their music from other people without paying for it. There's really no such phenomenon in the case of books. Okay, sure, there are people who scan entire books and post them on scribd or something, but it's a very tiny niche, so this is another case where the analogy between books and music breaks down.
The article says $10 is cheap for a digital book. This is both an oversimplification and an irrelevance to their argument by analogy. In the case of music, the huge difference is that if I want to buy one track, I can buy it for about $1 by downloading it, whereas on CD I would have had to pay $10, even if I didn't want the rest of the music on it. That's an order of magnitude difference in price. When it comes to books, there's nothing like that. $10 is ridiculously expensive for a used mass-market paperback. $10 is not cheap for a new mass-market paperback. $10 is about the going price for a trade paperback. $10 would be insanely cheap for an illustrated physics textbook.
If you want to look for a real threat to the book publishing industry that's analogous to the threat file-sharing poses to the music industry, it's not the Kindle, it's the extreme efficiency of the used book market these days. Years ago, one of my favorite things to do on a weekend was bum around used bookstores in a place like Berkeley or New York. It was fun, but it was incredibly inefficient, and the used books weren't particularly cheap. Today, you can get pretty much any used book you want online, at a very reasonable price, and the internet has obsoleted the concept of a bricks and mortar used bookstore. A lot of titles go for something like a buck plus shipping. This is what the book publishers should really be afraid of. They hate the used book market. I see this most vividly at the community college where I teach. The publishers bring out a new edition of the textbook every few years, for the sole purpose of killing off the used book market. The sales reps are now constantly pushing DRM'd books that the students use on a rental basis, meaning that when they stop paying, they can no longer read the book.
The slashdot summary links to two different articles that show wildly different market shares for Linux. I understand why we might not trust the 0.83% from hitslink.com, since, e.g., lots of people's browsers are probably set up with user agent strings claiming to be something other than what they really are. What I totally don't get is where MS claims to have gotten the much higher figure, which looks like ~5% from the pie chart. All I can think of is standing outside the door of a supermarket and asking people to tell you what OS you use. And ~5% just seems much, much, much too high to me. I see my students use the computers in my physics lab, which are half Windows and half Linux boxes, so I can pretty much tell who's never seen Linux before. Now way is the percentage of Linux users that high.
Don't have anonymous sex with strangers in bath-houses. Or if you must have anonymous sex with strangers in bath-houses use a condom. This has been a public service message.
In other words, don't use AR. Use Evince (on Linux) or Sumatra PDF (Windows). If you must use AR, go to Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and uncheck "Enable Acrobat JavaScript".
No, none of this has much to do with PDF's merits as a file format. Embedding JS in PDF was a mistake. The mistake won't hurt you if you take these elementary precautions.
and unison/rsync/rsnapshot (my favourite file transfer and backup system) basically didn't work, as it would just sit and swap continuously until you nuked the proces
I use unison on my nslu2, and it works fine for me.
But how much power does it use? 5 watts is unparalleled as far as I'm concerned.
The figure I have written down in my notes for the NSLU2 is 10 watts. For both machines, the actual power it draws is probably going to depend a lot on what state it's in: whether the cpu is doing anything, whether it's doing I/O, etc.
So I guess with the Marvell box you get somewhat higher specs, but I'm not sure you really need the higher specs. For most applications, you're going to attach a keychain usb drive to these things, and then the internal flash becomes irrelevant. 32 MB of memory may not sound like much these days, but it's actually plenty for a file server, music server, home automation system, etc. The main advantage I could see to the Marvell is that it sounds a little more open. Linksys ships the NSLU2 in a configuration where it's not really a general-purpose linux box, and you have to go through some hassles to get a real linux on it where you can install packages, etc. Linksys does, however, officially bless the use of third-party linix distros on the NSLU2.
Thanks for the very informative post! Just to clarify, what I bought was the Eee PC 1000, and I don't have WPA on my wifi network. I also don't know for sure that RaLink is what they use on the Windows version of that model; all I know is that the tech was surprised that mine had RaLink, and she told me it wouldn't work, and they didn't have any way to make it work for me.
I bought a Eee, with Linux preinstalled to give to my wife for her birthday last week. The wifi didn't work. Called Asus tech support, and they figured out that the problem was that the machine had an RaLink wifi card, but the only one they had working drivers for was Atheros. They weren't able to offer any solution other than returning it, so I did.
Since they have RaLink on some of their machines, and they say they don't have working Linux drivers for RaLink, it sounds like some of the Windows versions have RaLink, and therefore the OP should check that before trying to switch to Linux.
If you look at the Amazon reviews for the model I bought, you'll see a lot of people complaining that they bought the Linux version, installed Windows, and then Windows didn't work right. On all of those, I clicked the "NO" link next to "Was this review helpful to you?," because that's just silly. If you want Windows, you buy the Windows version. Installing an OS on a desktop tends to be a hassle, doing it on a standard notebook has many more pitfalls, and doing it on a netbook is even more difficult to get right. It's pretty silly that these people are blaming Asus when essentially they just bought the wrong model.
The OP seems to be making the same mistake, but in reverse, which seems even less sensible to me. It means that MS is getting a Windows tax from him for an OS he doesn't like and isn't going to use. Great way to support an illegal monopoly when you didn't even have to, as well as creating huge hassles for yourself. My advice at this point would be either to return it if he can, or sell it on eBay, and then buy one with Linux preinstalled.
BTW, a little googling will show that a lot of people are receiving Eees with nonfunctional wifi.
I'm really looking forward to the day when Linux-based desktop and laptop machines are so cheap and good that it puts MS out of business. Unfortunately, that day hasn't come yet. The quality just isn't there yet. I've bought PCs with Linux preinstalled from a variety of vendors (Great Quality, WalMart, Asus) over the last 5 years or so. The best that ever happened was that the hardware was fine but the version of Linux that came preinstalled (ThizLinux, gOS) was lousy, so I wiped the disk and installed something else (FreeBSD, Ubuntu). The worst that ever happened was this experience with the Eee.
The whole thing seems like a total yawner to me. When I install a package on my ubuntu box, it will typically have side-effects. It may have to install other software that it depends on, and possibly make changes to my system's configuration (e.g., the default if you install apache or ssl is to activate the relevant service). I may or may not agree with Canonical and Debian's choices. If I disagree with them, I can either override them, or choose a different distro that I think does a better job in this area.
He seems to be having an experience on Windows where he's unhappy with the side-effect decisions Sun has made. Although it's on Windows, it seems to be basically the same as the type of issue you can get with a Linux distro, or with any other OS. One possible difference is that packaging of FOSS on non-free OSes generally sucks to high heaven compared to Linux -- and you generally have far fewer choices, and there's nobody looking out for your interests as a user. Well, you make your decision to use Windows and that means you've made your decision to use a system where FOSS packaging sucks.
Huh? My post, which you were replying to, didn't say anything about storage.
LA's problem with lack of capacity shows up on hot days in the summer, when everyone is running their air conditioner. That's exactly when the Mojave plants will be running at their maximum production. Because of this excellent match between peak production and peak demand, there isn't really an issue with storage. It's a perfect fit.
I live in LA. To the east of us is the Mojave Desert, and there's already quite a bit of solar power out there right now. The big issue is transmission lines to get the energy from the Mojave to LA. Building transmission lines requires political action, and that's slow and uncertain because of NIMBY. I have photovoltaics on my roof, but objectively, if you look at the price of land where I live versus the price of land in the Mojave Desert, it's pretty clear where you should be building these things.
Sure. There are *lots* of considerations beyond speed to want SSDs.
Another example: I have a tiny NSLU2 network appliance that I use as a music server. In the out-of-the-box configuration, it runs Linux from a ROM, but you can add an external drive via a USB cable and boot Linux off of that. It doesn't have SATA, so that wasn't an option.
I'm not sure why this guy paid $400 for an 80 Gb SSD. I just upgraded my music server to a 64 Gb SSD, and it only cost $100. Maybe the one he got is a fancier, faster drive?
For my application, none of these filesystem performance things are really an issue at all. I'm almost always reading, almost never writing, and the bottleneck for speed, when there is one, is always the ARM CPU.
It's great if people enjoy tinkering with the latest technology, but the impression I get is that this just isn't the right time to be switching your desktop machine to SSD. Price per Gb is going down rapidly, but is still very poor compared to platters. Performance with SSD technology is potentially much better than with platters, but it will probably be a few more years until (a) operating systems are optimized for SSDs, and (b) all the drives on the market are really optimized for performance the way they should be.
I wouldn't steer people to a proprietary reader like foxit. [...] By moving from one proprietary program to another, one merely moves from one master to another.
Is there an open-source reader for Windows that you like?
Actually, if you are going to be a purist about it, Javascript in a web browser is considered to be a security problem because it is a Turing machine.
I didn't say that JS in a web browser wasn't a security problem. It is. I said that a browser was qualitatively different from a PDF viewer because a user wants and expects a web browser to run executable code, whereas a user doesn't want or expect a PDF viewer to do so.
In both cases, a security-conscious user can disable JS. (I use NoScript with Firefox.) The difference is that it's not reasonable to disable JS by default in a browser (because less sophisticated users will just notice that everything seems broken), and it's not reasonable to enable JS by default in a PDF viewer (because users don't want or need it).
And why exactly does Adobe Reader run with full permissions to all the user's files? Surely by now Adobe would have learned to run it in a sandbox. For example, the code that reads and renders the PDF could run in a separate process (a la IE8 or Google Chrome) and just send image data back to the main window.
You're proposing to attack the problem in the least efficient possible way. This is yet another in a long series of exploits in AR that use the fact that in its default configuration it executes JavaScript embedded in PDFs. The right way to approach this, as a matter of design, would be not to embed a Turing-complete language in a file format that doesn't need it. Once you embed a Turing-complete language in the format, you're giving the bad guy the ability to run any code he wants on the user's machine. The moral of Turing's theorem is that it's essentially impossible to have any automated check that determines what a piece of code will actually do when you execute it. So yeah, you can try to sandbox it, but that's a last resort.
You're comparing with a web browser. A web browser is qualitatively different. In a web browser, the user (a) wants to be able to run javascript code, and (b) expects that such a thing will happen. In a PDF reader, there is typically no reason for the reader to want it to run JS, and the reader has no sane reason to expect it to run JS. Actually, the reason Adobe made AR execute JS by default was that it wanted to be able to do things that are inherently inimical to the user's interest. JS allows the creator of the PDF to determine who's reading the document, and also provides a mechanism for DRM. Lots of people who create PDFs want to believe in the DRM fable that they can give a document to other people, but then control the use of the document after that. As with all DRM, it's inherently impossible to make it work right as long as the user has hardware that they're really allowed to use as a general-purpose PC. E.g., to remove the DRM from a PDF on a linux box, you can do this: gs -q -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=b.pdf a.pdf -c '.setpdfwrite'
As a user, there are basically two sane things you can do. (1) Don't install AR on your machine. Use something else, such as evince on linux, or foxit on windows. They're faster anyway. (2) If there really is extra functionality in AR that you need, turn off JS. To disable js, go to Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and uncheck "Enable Acrobat JavaScript".
"This is another reason why you shouldn't use Perl that comes from vendors," Miyagawa says. "Apple isn't any different from Fedora on this!"
I might add Mandriva, SuSe and most others. Distribution managers want it just run and be stable for users who do not want to know what is going on inside. If there is a need for messing with details, originally packaged software by developer is the best alternative...
I don't think the situations on Linux and MacOS are as similar as you're making them out to be. Every Linux distro explicitly tries to support as many CPAN modules as possible, and every Linux distro has as one of its main goals making it easy in general for users to install open-source software. These are just not high priorities for Apple. You want to use OSS on MacOS? Sure, you can try to get it from Apple, you can try to get it via Fink, you can try to get it via MacPorts, or, in the case of a perl module, you can try to get it via CPAN. It's a mess, especially considering that option #1 has very little coverage, and options #2-4 are not supported by Apple.
Sure, this type of conflict can occur on Linux, but it's much easier to avoid. Basically, whenever I need a CPAN module I check whether there's an Ubuntu package for it. 99% of the time there is, and I install it via apt. The other 1% of the time, I install it via CPAN instead. No conflicts, because there's no overlap between the two sets.
You absolutely need to install the latest perl before you use it - because the perl (or the modules installed with it) installed with your OS is always too old for any particular module you want to install
I've been using perl for about 8 years, and I've never encountered any such problem. For example, I stayed with perl 5.8 for quite a long time before switching to 5.10, and I never had any problem getting CPAN modules to compile.
and even then you have a chance that the module you want is either broken, or depends on a currently broken module.
This isn't a problem with CPAN, it's a problem with the author or maintainer of that module. For instance, I made the mistake of writing an app that depended on Audio::Play and Audio::Data. Then when I switched my desktop machine from BSD to Linux, I found out that I couldn't get it to compile on Linux. I'm a little less naive now. If you check the CPAN bug reporting system, you'll see that there are several important bugs in these modules that are years old, and haven't been fixed. If you look at the reviews on CPAN, you'll see clear signs of trouble. If you go to the parent module's page on cpan, and click on Perl/Platform Version Matrix, you'll see that it fails its test suite on a lot of platforms, on a lot of versions of perl. None of this is a big secret. You just have to do a little bit of homework before you hitch your wagon to a particular CPAN module.
Giving odds for finding a theoretical particle is like giving odds on finding life in the solar system. Without any data to base your odds on, you're just making some shit up. Not only is their level of precision low, but there is zero confidence.
Nope. Here's how it works. Other observations show that the Higgs has to have a mass between 170 and 285 GeV/c2, with 95% confidence. Assuming a given Higgs mass, Fermilab can do Monte Carlo simulations of the results of their experiments, and they can determine a probability that the signal will show up in their data, and show up with a certain level of confidence. For instance, the article says,
"And the chances are even higher - 96% - if its mass is around 170GeV (giga-electron volts)." What this means is that they set some level of statistical significance that would make them confident enough to publish a paper claiming to have found a Higgs. They expect to have some noisy spectrum with a fairly crappy-looking peak sticking up out of it, and they're willing to publish if the statistical significance of that peak passes some predetermined statistical test. Okay, so they run the Monte Carlo simulation 10,000 times, putting in a Higgs mass of 170 GeV. Out of those 10,000 simulations, 9,600 of them produce a simulated peak, at the right energy, that passes their criteria for statistical significance.
It's also possible that the Higgs doesn't exist. There are models that are consistent with that, and also consistent with the experimental data. However, there are fairly model-independent reasons to believe that something new must happen in this energy regime, and it's likely that any experiment that can probe that energy range will detect the whatever-it-is.
What is not possible is that the correct description of physics consists of the standard model minus the Higgs. Such a theory doesn't have the necessary self-consistency and consistency with well-established experimental results.
Thanks for the interesting link. The relevant slide seems to be #25, "Maybe some artists want a commercial anticommons: nobody can be 'exploited'... but most want to exploit commerce. NC maybe does both."
I can think of lots of examples where an NC license is perfectly reasonable. For instance, a lot of short story authors get their work published in traditional magazines, but then try to pull in a little extra revenue via ad-based podcast sites like escapepod.org. A lot of professional musicians may be happy to have their recordings freely distributed simply in order to keep up demand for the live shows where they make their money.
I'm not saying that NC licenses are completely bad. I just think it's sad when people whose work is inherently noncommercial use it reflexively in inappropriate cases, cutting off the possibility of letting the commons benefit from it.
You can want a cut, but you won't get one, and your work is less likely to be used as well. The bar isn't potential nonzero commercial value, it's actual commercial value greater than the transaction costs to clear the work.
I agree with your economic analysis, and there are also noneconomic factors. Imagine if Linus had released the original Linux kernel under a license that forbid commercial use. His work had enormous commercial potential, but if he'd chosen a noncommercial license, I doubt that anybody else would have been interested in contributing. It would have remained a toy project, and the problem would have been ideological, not a problem with transaction costs. You can't get a collaborative open-source project going unless you can build interest among open-source enthusiasts. Look at the way the OLPC's supporters from the OSS world have been jumping ship following the controversy about Windows on the XO. "If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution."
The NC also has the effect of accentuating the unequal status of the original copyright holder and later contributors, because the NC isn't intended to make sure no profit can ever be made from the work, it's intended to make sure that nobody else can ever profit from it. A true copyleft can also have unequal legal status for the copyright holder and everyone else (e.g., the FSF requires copyright assignments from anyone who contributes to a GNU project), but nobody cares about that because you can still fork the project. After a fork, nobody cares that a big chunk of the copyrights are still owned by the original developer, because it doesn't interfere with the project's ability to go forward.
GFDL 1.3 has terms that allow Wikipedia to migrate all their content to CC-BY-SA, as long as they do it by the middle of this year. So score one for license consolidation.
Interesting. I guess that still doesn't help much with material that was originally contributed to WP under earlier versions of GFDL, does it? Seems like it would make more of a difference for recently uploaded photos than for articles.
In addition to software licenses, we have licenses like GFDL and CC-BY-SA, which are intended for books, software manuals, etc. That whole situation is a total botch. The GFDL (without any of the added options like invariant sections, etc.) is essentially philosophically and legally equivalent to CC-BY-SA. The fact that we have two licenses for a single purpose is not a good thing. For instance, I've written some physics textbooks that are copylefted. Sometimes I've taken diagrams and photos I did for the books and added them to WP articles. Other times I've taken photos from WP and put them in my books. What makes this all unnecessarily difficult is that although WP uses GFDL (for historical reasons, because CC postdates WP), various other people use CC-BY-SA. We all want to share, but the licensing creates problems. I've ended up dual-licensing my books for this reason, and as far as I can tell, this allows me to bring in either CC-BY-SA or GFDL materials. On the other hand, if other people want to use a photo from my book, they have to look in the photo credits section at the back, and they may find that it's a photo I got from someone else under GFDL, but their project is CC-BY-SA, so they can't use it. They might be able to switch their own project to a similar dual-license scheme to get around this, but that might not be possible; e.g., look at the Linux kernel, which could never change licenses even if Linus wanted it to, because there are too many copyright holders.
One thing I would suggest to anyone uploading pictures to WP or Wikimedia Commons is that you use their recommended licensing option, which is now dual GFDL/CC-BY-SA.
Another real problem in this area is the tendency of people to pick CC-BY-NC, with a noncommercial clause. I see tons of people doing this even for materials that have zero commercial value. For example, there's an innovative physics textbook from the 1970's that went out of print. Cool book, but it was just a little too controversial; the big sellers tend to be the plain vanilla ones that can make everyone in a university department happy enough to sign off on adopting it. It's been out of print for 30 years, and the rights reverted to the author. He scanned it and put it up on his web site as a PDF. I contacted him, told him how much I liked the book, and suggested that he put it under a CC license, because, e.g., otherwise it would have to disappear from the world on the day he got tired of paying a webhosting bill. He decided to do that, which is cool, but he picked CC-BY-NC, which means the book can never be used as the basis for further collaborative work. I think people have this emotional feeling that they don't want to risk having their work exploited commercially by someone else, because that would be a ripoff. The problem is that they don't seem to do a good job of realistically assessing the chances that that would happen. Although the guy I'm referring to is a published author, there are many other people who just don't have a realistic idea of what it's like to try to make a significant amount of money by writing. There are just too many people out there who think they have the next bestseller on their hands.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, no. It's quite common for authors to retain copyright when they sign a contract with a publisher. For instance, here is a list of some short stories I've had published. Some of these were published in print magazines, some in electronic magazines. None of them asked me for a copyright assignment. Whether or not a publisher requires a copyright assignment depends completely on the publisher, the genre, and the customs of that particular market segment. I pulled the first three books off of the bookshelf next to my computer. How to Brew, by John Palmer, is (c) John Palmer. Programming Perl, by Wall, Christiansen, and Orwant, os (c) O'Reilly. Pragmatic Version Control, by Travis Swicegood, is (c) Travis Swicegood. So your "most everything published" is has a batting average of 1/3 in my sample.
Lots of problems with your suggestion:
Thanks for the correction. What I should have said is that you can't step DC voltage up or down using a transformer. I think GP poster was saying he wanted his whole house to be on DC, so that he wouldn't have to have an inverter. That only works if every single appliance works on DC. A low-power technique isn't going to help with a dishwasher. The whole exercise is also pointless unless it's cheaper and/or more efficient than the way everything currently works with 110 V AC as the standard. I doubt that the techniques you're talking about satisfy the condition (high power) and (cheaper or more efficient).
It doesn't matter what your peak load is. If you're in an area that's on the grid, then you want a grid-tied system, and therefore any power you can't generate on your own will come from the grid. At other times, when you have extra (e.g., a hot sunny day when you're out hiking), the power company buys it from you. There is typically a very strong economic incentive to buy a system that matches your yearly consumption, not your peak load. If it's providing less than your yearly consumption, then you aren't getting the best deal, because you still had to pay for a day's labor by the crew with the crane, etc., and you still had to pay for an inverter. The converse is also true: you probably don't want an oversized system. I have photovoltaics on my roof, and in my area, if I produce more than I use over a 12-month period, the electric company won't pay me for the excess. They'll just say, "Gosh, thanks for all that surplus power."
It's typically very, very difficult to make a realistic calculation of how long it will take a residential PV system to pay for itself. People always ask me how long mine will take to pay for itself, and I always tell them honestly that I have absolutely no idea. The problem is that energy prices are extremely volatile -- that's why they exclude them from the CPI. Remember just recently when gas was $4 a gallon? Historically, the price of electric power has always tended to go up, but we don't know how much it will go up over the 25-year design lifetime of our system.
What you can do is to consider all your local factors: latitude, amount of sunny weather, whether you have a south-facing roof, whether there is any shade on your roof, and current local prices for electricity. Every time this topic comes up on slashdot, people will make blanked statements about whether PV is economically viable. That's just nonsense. It depends on all those factors. If it was an utter economic no-go, the industry wouldn't exist. If it was 100% clear that it was economically favorable for everyone in, say, LA, then you'd see PV systems on the roof of every house in LA whose owners had sufficient capital to pay for the system. The fact that the industry exists, but is still fairly small, tells you that there's a lot of uncertainty about it. You're welcome to invest your money in the stock market instead, but it won't help with global warming.
Ain't gonna happen. Network effects are one reason. Another reason is that different devices naturally want to work from different voltages, but you can't step voltage up or down if it's DC.
First off, make sure to read the Slate article, not the crappy techdirt page that just summarizes and links to it.
The Slate article makes a lot of oversimplified analogies. One big difference between books and music is that with music, there is only a very tiny difference in utility between a CD and a song bought online and downloaded. Personally, I perceive the CD as having slightly negative utility compared to the download, because it's just one more physical object to clutter up my house. Other people might prefer the convenience of having the CD, since you don't need to make backup copies of CDs. But in general, they're pretty much interchangeable products. With books, however, there are huge differences in utility between paper and download. I can easily make notes in a paper book. I can loan it to a friend to take to the beach. It's never going to become obsolete, whereas a digital book in a specialized e-book format is almost certainly going to become obsolete within 5-10 years.
Because music has nearly the same utility regardless of whether it's embodied in a physical object, there are lots and lots of people who copy their music from other people without paying for it. There's really no such phenomenon in the case of books. Okay, sure, there are people who scan entire books and post them on scribd or something, but it's a very tiny niche, so this is another case where the analogy between books and music breaks down.
The article says $10 is cheap for a digital book. This is both an oversimplification and an irrelevance to their argument by analogy. In the case of music, the huge difference is that if I want to buy one track, I can buy it for about $1 by downloading it, whereas on CD I would have had to pay $10, even if I didn't want the rest of the music on it. That's an order of magnitude difference in price. When it comes to books, there's nothing like that. $10 is ridiculously expensive for a used mass-market paperback. $10 is not cheap for a new mass-market paperback. $10 is about the going price for a trade paperback. $10 would be insanely cheap for an illustrated physics textbook.
If you want to look for a real threat to the book publishing industry that's analogous to the threat file-sharing poses to the music industry, it's not the Kindle, it's the extreme efficiency of the used book market these days. Years ago, one of my favorite things to do on a weekend was bum around used bookstores in a place like Berkeley or New York. It was fun, but it was incredibly inefficient, and the used books weren't particularly cheap. Today, you can get pretty much any used book you want online, at a very reasonable price, and the internet has obsoleted the concept of a bricks and mortar used bookstore. A lot of titles go for something like a buck plus shipping. This is what the book publishers should really be afraid of. They hate the used book market. I see this most vividly at the community college where I teach. The publishers bring out a new edition of the textbook every few years, for the sole purpose of killing off the used book market. The sales reps are now constantly pushing DRM'd books that the students use on a rental basis, meaning that when they stop paying, they can no longer read the book.
The slashdot summary links to two different articles that show wildly different market shares for Linux. I understand why we might not trust the 0.83% from hitslink.com, since, e.g., lots of people's browsers are probably set up with user agent strings claiming to be something other than what they really are. What I totally don't get is where MS claims to have gotten the much higher figure, which looks like ~5% from the pie chart. All I can think of is standing outside the door of a supermarket and asking people to tell you what OS you use. And ~5% just seems much, much, much too high to me. I see my students use the computers in my physics lab, which are half Windows and half Linux boxes, so I can pretty much tell who's never seen Linux before. Now way is the percentage of Linux users that high.
Don't have anonymous sex with strangers in bath-houses. Or if you must have anonymous sex with strangers in bath-houses use a condom. This has been a public service message.
In other words, don't use AR. Use Evince (on Linux) or Sumatra PDF (Windows). If you must use AR, go to Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and uncheck "Enable Acrobat JavaScript".
No, none of this has much to do with PDF's merits as a file format. Embedding JS in PDF was a mistake. The mistake won't hurt you if you take these elementary precautions.
I use unison on my nslu2, and it works fine for me.
The figure I have written down in my notes for the NSLU2 is 10 watts. For both machines, the actual power it draws is probably going to depend a lot on what state it's in: whether the cpu is doing anything, whether it's doing I/O, etc.
It's interesting to compare this to the Linksys NSLU2, which I'm using as a home music server.
So I guess with the Marvell box you get somewhat higher specs, but I'm not sure you really need the higher specs. For most applications, you're going to attach a keychain usb drive to these things, and then the internal flash becomes irrelevant. 32 MB of memory may not sound like much these days, but it's actually plenty for a file server, music server, home automation system, etc. The main advantage I could see to the Marvell is that it sounds a little more open. Linksys ships the NSLU2 in a configuration where it's not really a general-purpose linux box, and you have to go through some hassles to get a real linux on it where you can install packages, etc. Linksys does, however, officially bless the use of third-party linix distros on the NSLU2.
Thanks for the very informative post! Just to clarify, what I bought was the Eee PC 1000, and I don't have WPA on my wifi network. I also don't know for sure that RaLink is what they use on the Windows version of that model; all I know is that the tech was surprised that mine had RaLink, and she told me it wouldn't work, and they didn't have any way to make it work for me.
I bought a Eee, with Linux preinstalled to give to my wife for her birthday last week. The wifi didn't work. Called Asus tech support, and they figured out that the problem was that the machine had an RaLink wifi card, but the only one they had working drivers for was Atheros. They weren't able to offer any solution other than returning it, so I did.
Since they have RaLink on some of their machines, and they say they don't have working Linux drivers for RaLink, it sounds like some of the Windows versions have RaLink, and therefore the OP should check that before trying to switch to Linux.
If you look at the Amazon reviews for the model I bought, you'll see a lot of people complaining that they bought the Linux version, installed Windows, and then Windows didn't work right. On all of those, I clicked the "NO" link next to "Was this review helpful to you?," because that's just silly. If you want Windows, you buy the Windows version. Installing an OS on a desktop tends to be a hassle, doing it on a standard notebook has many more pitfalls, and doing it on a netbook is even more difficult to get right. It's pretty silly that these people are blaming Asus when essentially they just bought the wrong model.
The OP seems to be making the same mistake, but in reverse, which seems even less sensible to me. It means that MS is getting a Windows tax from him for an OS he doesn't like and isn't going to use. Great way to support an illegal monopoly when you didn't even have to, as well as creating huge hassles for yourself. My advice at this point would be either to return it if he can, or sell it on eBay, and then buy one with Linux preinstalled.
BTW, a little googling will show that a lot of people are receiving Eees with nonfunctional wifi. I'm really looking forward to the day when Linux-based desktop and laptop machines are so cheap and good that it puts MS out of business. Unfortunately, that day hasn't come yet. The quality just isn't there yet. I've bought PCs with Linux preinstalled from a variety of vendors (Great Quality, WalMart, Asus) over the last 5 years or so. The best that ever happened was that the hardware was fine but the version of Linux that came preinstalled (ThizLinux, gOS) was lousy, so I wiped the disk and installed something else (FreeBSD, Ubuntu). The worst that ever happened was this experience with the Eee.
What is a "sysbar bubble based Java update?"
The whole thing seems like a total yawner to me. When I install a package on my ubuntu box, it will typically have side-effects. It may have to install other software that it depends on, and possibly make changes to my system's configuration (e.g., the default if you install apache or ssl is to activate the relevant service). I may or may not agree with Canonical and Debian's choices. If I disagree with them, I can either override them, or choose a different distro that I think does a better job in this area.
He seems to be having an experience on Windows where he's unhappy with the side-effect decisions Sun has made. Although it's on Windows, it seems to be basically the same as the type of issue you can get with a Linux distro, or with any other OS. One possible difference is that packaging of FOSS on non-free OSes generally sucks to high heaven compared to Linux -- and you generally have far fewer choices, and there's nobody looking out for your interests as a user. Well, you make your decision to use Windows and that means you've made your decision to use a system where FOSS packaging sucks.
Huh? My post, which you were replying to, didn't say anything about storage.
LA's problem with lack of capacity shows up on hot days in the summer, when everyone is running their air conditioner. That's exactly when the Mojave plants will be running at their maximum production. Because of this excellent match between peak production and peak demand, there isn't really an issue with storage. It's a perfect fit.
I live in LA. To the east of us is the Mojave Desert, and there's already quite a bit of solar power out there right now. The big issue is transmission lines to get the energy from the Mojave to LA. Building transmission lines requires political action, and that's slow and uncertain because of NIMBY. I have photovoltaics on my roof, but objectively, if you look at the price of land where I live versus the price of land in the Mojave Desert, it's pretty clear where you should be building these things.
Another example: I have a tiny NSLU2 network appliance that I use as a music server. In the out-of-the-box configuration, it runs Linux from a ROM, but you can add an external drive via a USB cable and boot Linux off of that. It doesn't have SATA, so that wasn't an option.
I'm not sure why this guy paid $400 for an 80 Gb SSD. I just upgraded my music server to a 64 Gb SSD, and it only cost $100. Maybe the one he got is a fancier, faster drive?
For my application, none of these filesystem performance things are really an issue at all. I'm almost always reading, almost never writing, and the bottleneck for speed, when there is one, is always the ARM CPU.
It's great if people enjoy tinkering with the latest technology, but the impression I get is that this just isn't the right time to be switching your desktop machine to SSD. Price per Gb is going down rapidly, but is still very poor compared to platters. Performance with SSD technology is potentially much better than with platters, but it will probably be a few more years until (a) operating systems are optimized for SSDs, and (b) all the drives on the market are really optimized for performance the way they should be.
Is there an open-source reader for Windows that you like?
I didn't say that JS in a web browser wasn't a security problem. It is. I said that a browser was qualitatively different from a PDF viewer because a user wants and expects a web browser to run executable code, whereas a user doesn't want or expect a PDF viewer to do so.
In both cases, a security-conscious user can disable JS. (I use NoScript with Firefox.) The difference is that it's not reasonable to disable JS by default in a browser (because less sophisticated users will just notice that everything seems broken), and it's not reasonable to enable JS by default in a PDF viewer (because users don't want or need it).
You're proposing to attack the problem in the least efficient possible way. This is yet another in a long series of exploits in AR that use the fact that in its default configuration it executes JavaScript embedded in PDFs. The right way to approach this, as a matter of design, would be not to embed a Turing-complete language in a file format that doesn't need it. Once you embed a Turing-complete language in the format, you're giving the bad guy the ability to run any code he wants on the user's machine. The moral of Turing's theorem is that it's essentially impossible to have any automated check that determines what a piece of code will actually do when you execute it. So yeah, you can try to sandbox it, but that's a last resort.
You're comparing with a web browser. A web browser is qualitatively different. In a web browser, the user (a) wants to be able to run javascript code, and (b) expects that such a thing will happen. In a PDF reader, there is typically no reason for the reader to want it to run JS, and the reader has no sane reason to expect it to run JS. Actually, the reason Adobe made AR execute JS by default was that it wanted to be able to do things that are inherently inimical to the user's interest. JS allows the creator of the PDF to determine who's reading the document, and also provides a mechanism for DRM. Lots of people who create PDFs want to believe in the DRM fable that they can give a document to other people, but then control the use of the document after that. As with all DRM, it's inherently impossible to make it work right as long as the user has hardware that they're really allowed to use as a general-purpose PC. E.g., to remove the DRM from a PDF on a linux box, you can do this: gs -q -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=b.pdf a.pdf -c '.setpdfwrite'
As a user, there are basically two sane things you can do. (1) Don't install AR on your machine. Use something else, such as evince on linux, or foxit on windows. They're faster anyway. (2) If there really is extra functionality in AR that you need, turn off JS. To disable js, go to Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and uncheck "Enable Acrobat JavaScript".
I don't think the situations on Linux and MacOS are as similar as you're making them out to be. Every Linux distro explicitly tries to support as many CPAN modules as possible, and every Linux distro has as one of its main goals making it easy in general for users to install open-source software. These are just not high priorities for Apple. You want to use OSS on MacOS? Sure, you can try to get it from Apple, you can try to get it via Fink, you can try to get it via MacPorts, or, in the case of a perl module, you can try to get it via CPAN. It's a mess, especially considering that option #1 has very little coverage, and options #2-4 are not supported by Apple.
Sure, this type of conflict can occur on Linux, but it's much easier to avoid. Basically, whenever I need a CPAN module I check whether there's an Ubuntu package for it. 99% of the time there is, and I install it via apt. The other 1% of the time, I install it via CPAN instead. No conflicts, because there's no overlap between the two sets.
I've been using perl for about 8 years, and I've never encountered any such problem. For example, I stayed with perl 5.8 for quite a long time before switching to 5.10, and I never had any problem getting CPAN modules to compile.
This isn't a problem with CPAN, it's a problem with the author or maintainer of that module. For instance, I made the mistake of writing an app that depended on Audio::Play and Audio::Data. Then when I switched my desktop machine from BSD to Linux, I found out that I couldn't get it to compile on Linux. I'm a little less naive now. If you check the CPAN bug reporting system, you'll see that there are several important bugs in these modules that are years old, and haven't been fixed. If you look at the reviews on CPAN, you'll see clear signs of trouble. If you go to the parent module's page on cpan, and click on Perl/Platform Version Matrix, you'll see that it fails its test suite on a lot of platforms, on a lot of versions of perl. None of this is a big secret. You just have to do a little bit of homework before you hitch your wagon to a particular CPAN module.
Nope. Here's how it works. Other observations show that the Higgs has to have a mass between 170 and 285 GeV/c2, with 95% confidence. Assuming a given Higgs mass, Fermilab can do Monte Carlo simulations of the results of their experiments, and they can determine a probability that the signal will show up in their data, and show up with a certain level of confidence. For instance, the article says, "And the chances are even higher - 96% - if its mass is around 170GeV (giga-electron volts)." What this means is that they set some level of statistical significance that would make them confident enough to publish a paper claiming to have found a Higgs. They expect to have some noisy spectrum with a fairly crappy-looking peak sticking up out of it, and they're willing to publish if the statistical significance of that peak passes some predetermined statistical test. Okay, so they run the Monte Carlo simulation 10,000 times, putting in a Higgs mass of 170 GeV. Out of those 10,000 simulations, 9,600 of them produce a simulated peak, at the right energy, that passes their criteria for statistical significance.
It's also possible that the Higgs doesn't exist. There are models that are consistent with that, and also consistent with the experimental data. However, there are fairly model-independent reasons to believe that something new must happen in this energy regime, and it's likely that any experiment that can probe that energy range will detect the whatever-it-is.
What is not possible is that the correct description of physics consists of the standard model minus the Higgs. Such a theory doesn't have the necessary self-consistency and consistency with well-established experimental results.
Thanks for the interesting link. The relevant slide seems to be #25, "Maybe some artists want a commercial anticommons: nobody can be 'exploited' ... but most want to exploit commerce. NC maybe does both."
I can think of lots of examples where an NC license is perfectly reasonable. For instance, a lot of short story authors get their work published in traditional magazines, but then try to pull in a little extra revenue via ad-based podcast sites like escapepod.org. A lot of professional musicians may be happy to have their recordings freely distributed simply in order to keep up demand for the live shows where they make their money.
I'm not saying that NC licenses are completely bad. I just think it's sad when people whose work is inherently noncommercial use it reflexively in inappropriate cases, cutting off the possibility of letting the commons benefit from it.
I agree with your economic analysis, and there are also noneconomic factors. Imagine if Linus had released the original Linux kernel under a license that forbid commercial use. His work had enormous commercial potential, but if he'd chosen a noncommercial license, I doubt that anybody else would have been interested in contributing. It would have remained a toy project, and the problem would have been ideological, not a problem with transaction costs. You can't get a collaborative open-source project going unless you can build interest among open-source enthusiasts. Look at the way the OLPC's supporters from the OSS world have been jumping ship following the controversy about Windows on the XO. "If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution."
The NC also has the effect of accentuating the unequal status of the original copyright holder and later contributors, because the NC isn't intended to make sure no profit can ever be made from the work, it's intended to make sure that nobody else can ever profit from it. A true copyleft can also have unequal legal status for the copyright holder and everyone else (e.g., the FSF requires copyright assignments from anyone who contributes to a GNU project), but nobody cares about that because you can still fork the project. After a fork, nobody cares that a big chunk of the copyrights are still owned by the original developer, because it doesn't interfere with the project's ability to go forward.
Interesting. I guess that still doesn't help much with material that was originally contributed to WP under earlier versions of GFDL, does it? Seems like it would make more of a difference for recently uploaded photos than for articles.
In addition to software licenses, we have licenses like GFDL and CC-BY-SA, which are intended for books, software manuals, etc. That whole situation is a total botch. The GFDL (without any of the added options like invariant sections, etc.) is essentially philosophically and legally equivalent to CC-BY-SA. The fact that we have two licenses for a single purpose is not a good thing. For instance, I've written some physics textbooks that are copylefted. Sometimes I've taken diagrams and photos I did for the books and added them to WP articles. Other times I've taken photos from WP and put them in my books. What makes this all unnecessarily difficult is that although WP uses GFDL (for historical reasons, because CC postdates WP), various other people use CC-BY-SA. We all want to share, but the licensing creates problems. I've ended up dual-licensing my books for this reason, and as far as I can tell, this allows me to bring in either CC-BY-SA or GFDL materials. On the other hand, if other people want to use a photo from my book, they have to look in the photo credits section at the back, and they may find that it's a photo I got from someone else under GFDL, but their project is CC-BY-SA, so they can't use it. They might be able to switch their own project to a similar dual-license scheme to get around this, but that might not be possible; e.g., look at the Linux kernel, which could never change licenses even if Linus wanted it to, because there are too many copyright holders.
One thing I would suggest to anyone uploading pictures to WP or Wikimedia Commons is that you use their recommended licensing option, which is now dual GFDL/CC-BY-SA.
Another real problem in this area is the tendency of people to pick CC-BY-NC, with a noncommercial clause. I see tons of people doing this even for materials that have zero commercial value. For example, there's an innovative physics textbook from the 1970's that went out of print. Cool book, but it was just a little too controversial; the big sellers tend to be the plain vanilla ones that can make everyone in a university department happy enough to sign off on adopting it. It's been out of print for 30 years, and the rights reverted to the author. He scanned it and put it up on his web site as a PDF. I contacted him, told him how much I liked the book, and suggested that he put it under a CC license, because, e.g., otherwise it would have to disappear from the world on the day he got tired of paying a webhosting bill. He decided to do that, which is cool, but he picked CC-BY-NC, which means the book can never be used as the basis for further collaborative work. I think people have this emotional feeling that they don't want to risk having their work exploited commercially by someone else, because that would be a ripoff. The problem is that they don't seem to do a good job of realistically assessing the chances that that would happen. Although the guy I'm referring to is a published author, there are many other people who just don't have a realistic idea of what it's like to try to make a significant amount of money by writing. There are just too many people out there who think they have the next bestseller on their hands.