Also from that web site: for a very refreshing view of freely-available material actually helping boost sales, see Janis Ian's article on how her website has helped sales, as well as an author's putting one book on-line helped sales of her other books.
This was written almost a year ago, but is still very relevant.
Thanks for the link! I just read the entire front page, and Eric Flint seems to really believe in sharing, as a karmic way of increasing profits (word-of-mouth etc.).
One thing he mentions, though, which is something to consider: he says that technology isn't going to replace authors. I wouldn't be too sure about that -- we already have AIs that can write poetry and paint pictures. Are short stories that far off?
You're not kidding. My wife's from Brazil, and the minimum monthly wage down there is about R$250 (Reals, which is equal to about $83) -- and books there sell for R$30 or so. So a Brazilian, spending all his income, would be able to purchase almost 3 books.
Admittedly, not everyone makes minimum wage, but look at the US's plight: minimum wage here is about $5.50/hr, which equates to about $1,000 a month. A book costs about $5, which means an American can purchase 200 books a month.
Is it any wonder the third world is so illiterate and uneducated? And their government wants that to continue, because an uninformed populace won't uprise against the criminals in government who routinely dip their hands in the till.
Don't bother printing them out. I read books on my Palm.
It was great re-reading all the Larry Niven books I bought as a teenager (someone compiled 25 books and short stories and put them on Kazaa) -- I caught references that my younger self passed right by, and I was able to carry the Palm with me wherever I went, so any time I had some "down time" I could read a few pages.
I've also been reading Gutenberg books, which while older and not a good source of technology info, still have a lot to say about the human condition and relationship "advice."
Also, think of the costs involved: a projection screen just sits there, costing nothing except what you paid for it. Whereas this fog screen requires a constant flow of air, which costs electricity, and the fog must be generated somehow as well.
The projector is a fixed cost for either use (unless you need a brighter projector to use on the fog screen, it didn't really mention that but it seems reasonable). So a business would tend toward using projection screens for in-house meetings.
Now, for customer meetings it could be considered an advertising/marketing cost.
I expect it'll be several days or weeks before SCO responds to this
They already did (as your other response points out, they have stock hemorrhage to fight) -- it's here -- and says quite little. I especially like that they're saying IBM is lying because they won't "indemnify" their customers. Has anyone successfully sued Microsoft (or others) for faulty software?
If IBM wants customers to accept the GPL risk, it should indemnify them against that risk. The continuing refusal to provide customer indemnification is IBM's truest measure of belief in its recently filed claims.
Why should indemnification play into this discussion at all? It's just a red herring to get PHB's to worry.
Has anybody successfully sued Microsoft for problems with their software? Even after Microsoft started indemnifying their (high-value) customers? I thought not.
No. I'm sorry. Nothing is better than watching Battlebots.
Heh. Had a friend in college who used to say, "This'd be better than sex if sex wasn't so good." (I doubt Battlebots beats sex... well, at least for a certain subset of Battlebots.)
When you say "patent portfolio" and "IBM" together in the same post I get this mental picture of the warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
You said it. IBM stated that SCO have violated a minimum of 4 patents.
Just 4? I would bet that IBM has something like 40,000 patents that SCO is actually violating. IBM is playing this game like pros.
Short on the open tomorrow, this puppy is going down. If you're risk-averse, buy IBM (or buy calls on IBM; you can't buy puts on SCO).
I'm happy Microsoft put these idiots up to this. Anyone in the technical world with the slightest clue hates SCO and Microsoft with a virulent hatred by now. It takes about 2 seconds to explain what free software it to a complete neophyte, and another 2 seconds for them to understand how stupid this SCO shit is. The backlash will have more people than ever bailing out of Microsoft.
Agreed. One thing that should have been in the article (my addition in bold) was from the following paragraph:
John Weathersby, chairman of the Open Source Software Institute said the government clients he works with have no immediate plans to pay the fee. The Oxford, Miss.-based nonprofit Open Source Software Institute was founded in 2001 to promote government use of open-source software, or software in which the source code is included with the software package. As all software was, prior to the rise of Microsoft.
Or something similar; perhaps "As all software was back in the days of mainframes" to be less MS-bashing. But they deserve it -- Bill Gates is primarily responsible for the closed-source model of software, based on some of his early writings when he started Microsoft.
And an issue that is just casually glazed over in this debate that the RIAA has ignited is that much of the material traded isn't under the copyright of any RIAA memeber.
I for one only share non-infringing materials. For instance, Beatallica is Beatles songs done in the style of Metallica, very creative, and their web site explicitly states:
If you're having trouble downloading the songs, try the mirror site, or get the songs through Kazaa, WinMX, or some other p2p client.
So I have their permission to share their stuff. And it helps to, because people then don't cut you off from downloading because you're just a leech.;-)
I've found movies to be horribly misnamed -- downloading "Matrix Reloaded" or "Terminator 3" and you'll end up with a different movie, sometimes Swedish porn. I don't understand why people will misname the movies; if it was the MPAA doing it, it would be 700 MB of/dev/random (or "What the fuck do you think you're doing?") instead of a differently-copyrighted work.
Bittorrent seems to be the most accurate in terms of getting what it's named, although BT speeds are random on this DSL line (cable was much better, about 3 times faster overall and about 50 times faster for BT usage). A nice BT page is Suprnova.tk.
Guess how long it'll take take the Linux folks to solve any "problem" that Microsoft graciously points out? Not long. How is that a loss for Linux? Seems like it makes Linux stronger *exactly* where MS sees a temporary weakness.
Exactly. Just like that mindcraft "report" from a couple years ago, where they pointed out exactly where Linux was lacking compared to Microsoft -- and weeks later, Linux had taken the lead.
Anything pointing out differences is really just asking for those differences to be fixed. I somewhat pity Microsoft; Linux is their number one concern (because "economic factors" are a concern for every company in existence).
Thanks! Nice angle. I couldn't reproduce it exactly (the interface doesn't let you type the numbers, and it jumps about.30 each pixel the mouse moves). So my attempt was also right hip, heading 204.16, pitch -57.01, and I had a score of 0 for the entire fall, and it went up to 16 right at the end.
Funny though, each time I try it I get a different (low) score, even with the Force being the same (1 bar). I just tried it at 2 bars and got 15. So... beat that! (I also just tried again at 1 bar, and it was 0 for about 15 seconds! -- but then he tumbled down the entire staircase. It must be configured to never stop when it's at 0...)
WOW! I just tried with 5 bars, and he fell with a score of... get this... 2! (I also got 4 with 1 bar. Enough.)
I had some cool low scores on Truck Dismount as well; the lowest was 662, by putting him in position 6 and putting a ramp right behind him, so he sits down and doesn't hit his head; the guy's up/down position slider all the way down, truck on fast, and another ramp in front of him so the truck won't come back at him. (This game doesn't have a random element: I get the same score every time.)
By moving the ramp sideways, I was able to reduce the score (which seems weird, since he's sitting down exactly the same no matter where the ramp is!), and got it down to 439.
Note that in position 6, you can position the ramp so that his feet are inside the ramp. He leaps into the air, almost as high as the truck, when you do this.;-)
Another thing: you can get him stuck inside the windshield, with these settings: no ramps, guy in middle vertically, position 4 (on hood of truck), fastest truck. When he hits the wall, his legs go through the windshield and he sits there spinning for quite some time (but the score is only around 26k).
I've tried several ways of getting higher scores; my personal best is 88,353, and I can't say exactly how I did it because it won't show the sliders (I can watch the replay though); fast truck; 2 ramps; he was in the cab, with no windshield, and flew out; the truck landed on him upside-down, and the corner of the roof of the truck separated his head and right arm from his body, giving much damage. It ended before the damage was done -- the truck was still on top of him.
One other way to get high scores (my highest is 77,955) is to put him in position 5 (standing in front of the truck) with a ramp directly in front of him, and a slow truck (but not slowest -- need to play with the settings), and it will knock him down, then the truck's bumper will separate his head from his body, and keep giving damage (and again, it stops before the damage is fully done -- in fact, this replay ends with his neck still red). I guess it calculates amount of movement and stops when it's below a certain threshold.
I once made more in 3 weeks than most people make in a year using options. The worst part is that I made money, because then I continued to do risky option trading and lost more than I gained -- a lot more.
Man, the 90s were great when money grew on trees.
I had bought 3 Yahoo options for a total of about $5,700, and after 3 weeks they were worth $36,000 -- a 631% gain, in line with your friend. (What options was he trading? It'd be funny if it was the same trade; this was from December 1998 to January 1999.)
I posted this in response to another poster who was saying "buy puts and make a killing":
As far as I've been able to research (see
CBOE) [cboe.com] there are no options of any type for SCO.
This is too bad, because although puts have a time limit, they're much more profitable than selling short (max gain is 200%, if you use all of your margin ability which is of course very dangerous). With the right puts (I'd buy one year out), you could easily make 500%.
So shorting SCO cannot be made less risky, as there are no options available. I wish there were... (If you can find them, please respond!)
And if you buy the correct series of put options on SCO, you can be 500% better off when the judge tells SCO to go fuck itself sideways with a wire brush.
As far as I've been able to research (see CBOE) there are no options of any type for SCO.
This is too bad, because although puts have a time limit, they're much more profitable than selling short (max gain is 200%, if you use all of your margin ability which is of course very dangerous). With the right puts (I'd buy one year out), you could easily make 500%.
ok, it might have some quantum computing ability,but that is far from accepted fact
Check out this page -- the math is way over my head, but it does clearly state that the human brain works on quantum principles.
It also has many, many links to supporting papers.
My mind was blown back in March of 2000, when I read an article that stated the brain worked on quantum principles, so if we wanted to create a computer as powerful as the human brain we needed to understand quantum physics.
3 weeks later, I read an article which said we had identified a quantum effect and could reproduce it in the lab: entanglement.
Basically, entanglement allows instantaneous communication at a distance; by changing the spin of one electron, the spin of its entangled pair is also changed. This article shows that (in 1997) they had tested it to a distance of 7 miles; they say there's no theoretical limit to the distance it could work at.
What blew my mind was that combining the two articles -- the human brain works on quantum principles, and one of those principles is communication at a distance -- I now believe that telepathy is possible.
Then I thought of the (admittedly anecdotal) evidence: we've all heard about a mother knowing when a child is in danger. But how many times have you heard of a father knowing? Me either. It must be that, during the 9 months the child is inside the mother's womb, exchanging fluids, that they are performing entanglement with each other.
Thinking further, we hear about twins being much more closely linked than any mother and child. This also makes sense, since they are right next to each other and have more opportunity to entangle than mother and child, whose brains are about 2 feet apart.
I'd imagine we're in the first 10% or so of our "evolution" of telepathy, since we communicate with words and rarely use entanglement to communicate. That's really neat, because most people think "we're top of the food chain, we're perfect" but we are still evolving capabilities.
The article also mentions that SETI may be doomed to failure since it's looking for radio signals, and any sufficiently advanced species would use entanglement for their communications since it's much faster and more efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
This was written almost a year ago, but is still very relevant.
One thing he mentions, though, which is something to consider: he says that technology isn't going to replace authors. I wouldn't be too sure about that -- we already have AIs that can write poetry and paint pictures. Are short stories that far off?
Admittedly, not everyone makes minimum wage, but look at the US's plight: minimum wage here is about $5.50/hr, which equates to about $1,000 a month. A book costs about $5, which means an American can purchase 200 books a month.
Is it any wonder the third world is so illiterate and uneducated? And their government wants that to continue, because an uninformed populace won't uprise against the criminals in government who routinely dip their hands in the till.
It was great re-reading all the Larry Niven books I bought as a teenager (someone compiled 25 books and short stories and put them on Kazaa) -- I caught references that my younger self passed right by, and I was able to carry the Palm with me wherever I went, so any time I had some "down time" I could read a few pages.
I've also been reading Gutenberg books, which while older and not a good source of technology info, still have a lot to say about the human condition and relationship "advice."
I agree, it's ridiculous to make the questions links. Please don't do it again, guys.
The projector is a fixed cost for either use (unless you need a brighter projector to use on the fog screen, it didn't really mention that but it seems reasonable). So a business would tend toward using projection screens for in-house meetings.
Now, for customer meetings it could be considered an advertising/marketing cost.
If they sue God, they violate the patent I just filed.
(Twice, actually, first time with "test@test.com", second time with "webmasters@fsf.org". ;-)
Actually, IBM is a master at this game: they struck when execs couldn't sell because the end of quarter was approaching.
So, not only are they refuting SCO's outrageous claims -- they're also hurting management where it counts most -- in the pocketbook.
They already did (as your other response points out, they have stock hemorrhage to fight) -- it's here -- and says quite little. I especially like that they're saying IBM is lying because they won't "indemnify" their customers. Has anyone successfully sued Microsoft (or others) for faulty software?
Why should indemnification play into this discussion at all? It's just a red herring to get PHB's to worry.
Has anybody successfully sued Microsoft for problems with their software? Even after Microsoft started indemnifying their (high-value) customers? I thought not.
Heh. Had a friend in college who used to say, "This'd be better than sex if sex wasn't so good." (I doubt Battlebots beats sex... well, at least for a certain subset of Battlebots.)
You said it. IBM stated that SCO have violated a minimum of 4 patents.
Just 4? I would bet that IBM has something like 40,000 patents that SCO is actually violating. IBM is playing this game like pros.
Short on the open tomorrow, this puppy is going down. If you're risk-averse, buy IBM (or buy calls on IBM; you can't buy puts on SCO).
Agreed. One thing that should have been in the article (my addition in bold) was from the following paragraph:
Or something similar; perhaps "As all software was back in the days of mainframes" to be less MS-bashing. But they deserve it -- Bill Gates is primarily responsible for the closed-source model of software, based on some of his early writings when he started Microsoft.
Location: United States
Category: Sales
Email: sco@goatse.cx
Subject: Enjoy your stay at club fed
Message: Your pump-and-dump scheme has been referred to the appropriate authorities. Enjoy the money while you have your freedom.
I for one only share non-infringing materials. For instance, Beatallica is Beatles songs done in the style of Metallica, very creative, and their web site explicitly states:
So I have their permission to share their stuff. And it helps to, because people then don't cut you off from downloading because you're just a leech. ;-)
I've found movies to be horribly misnamed -- downloading "Matrix Reloaded" or "Terminator 3" and you'll end up with a different movie, sometimes Swedish porn. I don't understand why people will misname the movies; if it was the MPAA doing it, it would be 700 MB of /dev/random (or "What the fuck do you think you're doing?") instead of a differently-copyrighted work.
Bittorrent seems to be the most accurate in terms of getting what it's named, although BT speeds are random on this DSL line (cable was much better, about 3 times faster overall and about 50 times faster for BT usage). A nice BT page is Suprnova.tk.
Exactly. Just like that mindcraft "report" from a couple years ago, where they pointed out exactly where Linux was lacking compared to Microsoft -- and weeks later, Linux had taken the lead.
Anything pointing out differences is really just asking for those differences to be fixed. I somewhat pity Microsoft; Linux is their number one concern (because "economic factors" are a concern for every company in existence).
Funny though, each time I try it I get a different (low) score, even with the Force being the same (1 bar). I just tried it at 2 bars and got 15. So ... beat that! (I also just tried again at 1 bar, and it was 0 for about 15 seconds! -- but then he tumbled down the entire staircase. It must be configured to never stop when it's at 0...)
WOW! I just tried with 5 bars, and he fell with a score of ... get this ... 2! (I also got 4 with 1 bar. Enough.)
I had some cool low scores on Truck Dismount as well; the lowest was 662, by putting him in position 6 and putting a ramp right behind him, so he sits down and doesn't hit his head; the guy's up/down position slider all the way down, truck on fast, and another ramp in front of him so the truck won't come back at him. (This game doesn't have a random element: I get the same score every time.)
By moving the ramp sideways, I was able to reduce the score (which seems weird, since he's sitting down exactly the same no matter where the ramp is!), and got it down to 439.
Note that in position 6, you can position the ramp so that his feet are inside the ramp. He leaps into the air, almost as high as the truck, when you do this. ;-)
Another thing: you can get him stuck inside the windshield, with these settings: no ramps, guy in middle vertically, position 4 (on hood of truck), fastest truck. When he hits the wall, his legs go through the windshield and he sits there spinning for quite some time (but the score is only around 26k).
I've tried several ways of getting higher scores; my personal best is 88,353, and I can't say exactly how I did it because it won't show the sliders (I can watch the replay though); fast truck; 2 ramps; he was in the cab, with no windshield, and flew out; the truck landed on him upside-down, and the corner of the roof of the truck separated his head and right arm from his body, giving much damage. It ended before the damage was done -- the truck was still on top of him.
One other way to get high scores (my highest is 77,955) is to put him in position 5 (standing in front of the truck) with a ramp directly in front of him, and a slow truck (but not slowest -- need to play with the settings), and it will knock him down, then the truck's bumper will separate his head from his body, and keep giving damage (and again, it stops before the damage is fully done -- in fact, this replay ends with his neck still red). I guess it calculates amount of movement and stops when it's below a certain threshold.
At any rate, it's been fun!
Man, the 90s were great when money grew on trees.
I had bought 3 Yahoo options for a total of about $5,700, and after 3 weeks they were worth $36,000 -- a 631% gain, in line with your friend. (What options was he trading? It'd be funny if it was the same trade; this was from December 1998 to January 1999.)
Here you go:
1. Buy gun.
2. ???
3. Dead president!
Come get me.
So shorting SCO cannot be made less risky, as there are no options available. I wish there were... (If you can find them, please respond!)
As far as I've been able to research (see CBOE) there are no options of any type for SCO.
This is too bad, because although puts have a time limit, they're much more profitable than selling short (max gain is 200%, if you use all of your margin ability which is of course very dangerous). With the right puts (I'd buy one year out), you could easily make 500%.
"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
And I'm wondering what SCO's response will be. "For Unlawful Corruption of the Kernel"?
Check out this page -- the math is way over my head, but it does clearly state that the human brain works on quantum principles.
It also has many, many links to supporting papers.
My mind was blown back in March of 2000, when I read an article that stated the brain worked on quantum principles, so if we wanted to create a computer as powerful as the human brain we needed to understand quantum physics.
3 weeks later, I read an article which said we had identified a quantum effect and could reproduce it in the lab: entanglement.
Basically, entanglement allows instantaneous communication at a distance; by changing the spin of one electron, the spin of its entangled pair is also changed. This article shows that (in 1997) they had tested it to a distance of 7 miles; they say there's no theoretical limit to the distance it could work at.
What blew my mind was that combining the two articles -- the human brain works on quantum principles, and one of those principles is communication at a distance -- I now believe that telepathy is possible.
Then I thought of the (admittedly anecdotal) evidence: we've all heard about a mother knowing when a child is in danger. But how many times have you heard of a father knowing? Me either. It must be that, during the 9 months the child is inside the mother's womb, exchanging fluids, that they are performing entanglement with each other.
Thinking further, we hear about twins being much more closely linked than any mother and child. This also makes sense, since they are right next to each other and have more opportunity to entangle than mother and child, whose brains are about 2 feet apart.
I'd imagine we're in the first 10% or so of our "evolution" of telepathy, since we communicate with words and rarely use entanglement to communicate. That's really neat, because most people think "we're top of the food chain, we're perfect" but we are still evolving capabilities.
The article also mentions that SETI may be doomed to failure since it's looking for radio signals, and any sufficiently advanced species would use entanglement for their communications since it's much faster and more efficient.