I've purchased something I've bought it and it's mine.
So if you buy a book, you can make 1,000 copies and sell them? The book is "yours" after all.
No. Whern you buy something covered by copyright (or other laws protecting intellectual property) you only have reproduction or reuse rights as they provided for by the law and/or any contracts that you signed.
As others have noted, pro photographers typically license their photos for specific narrow uses. For example, they may sell the rights to use a photo in a specific issue of a magazine. But, especially if they're not a staff photographer, that probably does not grant rights to use the photo for another story, in advertising, in a book of the "best hotos of the year", etc.
The ownership issue comes up all the time, BTW, with wedding photos and the like. Traditionally wedding photographers kept control of the negatives and made much of their profit through high-priced reprints (which lets them low-ball the actual shooting fee). This model is changing though because home scanners and inkjet printers are making it too easy to make bootleg copies of prints.
There's a "rational" argument for playing the lottery even if the expected value based on absolute dollar and cents is negative. Standard expected value analyses assume that a dollar is always worth the same dollar no matter the circumstances. In fact, there's an economic argument based on utlity value of money (if I remember my terms right) that the true value of a dollar (to a given person) is not constant.
Thus, as others have commented in a more anecdotal way, $5 per week, say, may be invisible to someone in a certain income bracket while a life-changing lottery winning is not. The utility value of the $5 is essentially zero; the utility value of a life-changing win is more than the sum of the dollars involved.
Now, obviously, there's also a rather large multiplier involved even if the utility value of the money spent is "essentially zero." But it's one way of looking at it. BTW, it's pretty clear that this argument does not apply to more modest $50 or $100 prizes. These are expected value-negative however you figure them. The only argument in these cases is an entertainment one.
Assuming that these forecasts are accurate -- a big assumption with this sort of hard-to-predict thing but let's stipulate it is for purposes of argument...
It's not clear to me that the shrinkage is necessarily because of outsourcing overseas as everyone seems to be assuming. Sure that might be (doubtless will be) part of it but it doesn't seem that would be the only trend. In addition, in spite of the increase in the number of computers and things automated, there's also an increase in use of packaged software and tools that greatly increase productivity. A lot more can be accomplished with a lot fewer porogrammers than 10 or 20 years ago.
You can certainly find lots of examples in other industries where far fewer people are employed in spite of higher overall domestic output because of productivity increases.
In terms of Linux, Boston isn't a bad location. In particular you've got a significant Finacial Serices industry (though obviously less than New York) as well as a lot of Biotech that's been making a lot of use of Linux cluster. Plus various other companies and organizations.
But your basic point is absolutely dead on. The focus of Linux worls is absolutely NOT students and such who are showing up for givewaways and because it's cool. Linuxworld is focused on companies that have money to spend on Linix. It's not a hobbyist show.
Why aren't they made? Well, when you can get a new 2 GHz Dell for $400 if you wait for the right rebates and sales, it's going to be pretty hard for anyone to make money selling a new, slower PC. Maybe you could shave another $100 off for a system that ran at 25% the speed. Not many people are going to go for that deal. (And I'm by no means sure you could cut the cost that much.)
If you're looking for used gear, there's lots of avenues. E-Bay obviously -- though there's the caveat emptor factor plus lots of folks seem to have a rather overvalued opinion of how much that system they paid $2K for just a few years ago is worth. You can also try these guys: http://www.retrobox.com.
Well, however you come up with the number -- whether it be by wrongful death litigation costs or whatver -- some sort of "cost of human life" does need to be part of the equation. You can ALWAYS make things safer but safety needs to be balanced against the costs in dollars and time. That may seem cold-hearted but that's the reality.
No he isn't. The containers technology in Solaris 10 is related to Solaris Resource Manager not the Volume Manager. Although I haven't seen a lot of the details about how this is going to work yet, what Sun says they're doing is to "harden" the resource groupings that you have with Solaris 9 so that they're more like virtual machines or partitions.
They're not VMs in the usual meaning of the word because they're all still running under a single copy of the OS, but the idea is that in Solaris 10, there will be be sufficient software isolation of the resource groups that most software failures within a group won't affect other groups. (Which is part of the reason that people use VMs anyway.)
At least if you don't count the Unix workstations that already existed at the time. Steve Jobs did a great job of pitching all sorts of NeXT technologies as "new" to the PC crowd that really weren't. In a way this would have been OK if the NeXT hit price points that let it bring those capabilities into markets that had never seen them before--but it didn't.
Why is this comment modded as funny? Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander and all that. If functionality needs to be/should be/etc. unbundled from Windows, why should any other OS be any different? Because Windows is a monopoly today? Perhaps. But that implies an argument that once you get above a certain percentage of marketshare, you need to start unbundling functionality.
>it is quite difficult for the average joe to produce tv content for the masses
True.
>it is trivial to produce web content It's easy to produce crap. It's also relatively easiER to produce writing and still images than broadcast production-grade video. But that doesn't make it trivial. The Web is a delivery mechanism. An in-depth written study of some topic (or work of fiction) aka a book is no (well not much) easier to produce for the Web than any other medium. Now, it may be easier to get published, but that doesn't make it any better or easier to write.
>there will always be the openinfo/opensource mentality people who will provide reasonable content for free, for the love of it.
"Reasonable"? Perhaps. However, even today, a lot of the best open source content is being produced as a sideline to more commercial ventures. This is even true of open source code. How many open source projects are being done primarily by programmers on someone's payroll?
>for a premium service to survive it has got to be VERY premium
I think that's probably true -- although if micropayments ever became prevalent, it might mean that only some individual pieces of content had to be very premium (easier than a whole service).
>itunes is not a webservice or internet service
As I said earlier, the Web is a distribution medium not the content itself. The same could be said of iTunes.
Here's one guess from Brewster Kahle at Alexa Internet:
"guess-timated" the Library of Congress' existing print holdings as "about 20 terabytes or $200,000 in storage space. It would take up the space of a couple of Coke machines." Of course, unlike Alexa Internet, which takes everything on pages including video clips, sound, and graphics, Kahle's estimate for digital storage of LC's print collection reflects "only the text, all ASCII. The graphics would get very complicated to estimate."
The other big issue with Powerpoint presentations is that they're trying to be too many things all at once. They're a presentation (duh) but they also end up being speaker notes, background information, reference material -- and that's before chart-junk and chart-graphics. Good presentation slides usually have some well chosen graphics and just enough text to structure. But in a typical business setting that assumes that the presenter is familiar enough with the material that he doesn't need to read it off the slide and that more detailed data and such are available in other ways to the audience than in the presentation.
Now, for your typical status report, it may well make sense to just stuff everything in a Powerpoint presentation. But this philosophy of putting everything on the page then ends up carrying over to other types of presentations that would be far better if strcutured differently (such as with a presentation and a separate handout).
>or focus it and bring it to the front upon mouse hovering over it? (I can't imagine how this can be useful, it's very confusing and unexpected if you set it to this)
If I'm understanding you correctly, this is how lots of people used to set up X on their Unix workstations. The thinking was that it took less effort to switch windows if you didn't have to click. Of course, it's also easier to switch by accident.
But, you're right. I don't setup any of my systems this way any longer because this behavior is "confusing and unexpected" (or at least unexpected). There are lots of potential behaviors you can have in a user interface. Some are clearly sensible. Some are clearly horrid. Lots more are neither clearly good nor bad, partly a case of personal perference; partly a case of "the accustomed way of doing things."
I did a fair bit of searching when researching something I wrote about this a few weeks back http://www.illuminata.com/cgi-local/pub.cgi?docid= scoderived. It appears to be in 4.3BSD but not, as far as I could see, in current open source BSD variants. I didn't have a copy of BSD4.4-lite to check so I'm not sure when it was taken out or otherwise modified beyond easy recognition.
The code goes back at least as far as Sixth Edition Unix. I saw another comment that put it back even further.
Ironically, a lot of SCO's case will also boil down to how broadly derivative works extend. Here's a link to an analysis of SCO's case as being primarily about how broadly a derivative works claim can extend: http://www.illuminata.com/cgi-local/pub1.cgi?docid =scoderived
Most schools probably ALREADY "have a deal with the music industry." I don't know the current status of such things, but I remember when I was going to school way back when there was an issue around "public performance of music without payment" (i.e. music played at parties. As I recall, the solution was an annual or whatever flat payment to the group that collects music royalties. I don't know how this issue is handled in general these days, but there are some similarities.
One important distinction that was made in one of the legal statements was that these codes were written with the more or less express purpose of being incorporated into the law. The distinction is subtle, but important. I think most of us would agree that if Joe-Geek programmer were to write a book on a "Software Engineering Code of Ethics" and some legislature were to pass a law saying that the Code of Ethics in said book MUST be followed subject to fines of xxx... (basically incorp[orating the book by reference into the law) that should not suddenly place that book into the public domain.
The case here is a bit different. It's really more of an internet-driven change in business model where SOMEONE previously had to make printed copies of these codes and the organizations who created them maintained the right to do so (and profit by doing so) themselves. Now that distribution can be essentially free, it becomes an important disctinction whether it can be freely posted or not.
Plus (on amazon etc.) you have an essentially unlimited selection. You can read what other people and reviewers have to say about a particular album. You can typically listen to far more extensive (albeit shorter and lower quality) song clips. You can take your time and just put something in a wish list. You can easily skip over to related titles. Overall it's a much "richer" experience.
I still sometimes go in stores and do the serendipity thing especially in a really good used store (like Amoeba in SF). But, overall, online's bothe better and cheaper (except for loss leaders). That's hard to beat.
Yes, both StarOffice and OpenOffice. I'd like to report that they're better than Office XP but they're not. They're less stable and are missing features here and there. For example, Office XP's revision marking -- that I use extensively -- is a fairly large step up from OpenOffice (and previous revs of Microsoft Office). Now, if the argument is that OpenOffice is good enough for a lot of people and the price is right, I'll enthusiastically agree. But better? No.
>Actually, there's no use for most businesses to have a "web presence".
I have to disagree. Just about ANY business depends on attracting new customers in addition to servicing your current customers. A "web presence" doesn't need to be a full online catalog. It doesn't even need to be particularly dynamic. It can be as simple as information about services/products and hours if you're a store.
Let's say you're a small landscaping business that would like to attract some new customers. Wouldn't having a simple web site be useful just in case people are searching for a landscaping service in town X on the web (as people increasingly do).
It can be as simple as a single attractive page -- an online business card if you would.
Absolutely. The historical distinction between distributed memory and shared memory definitely begins to blur a bit with RDMA. Just a little bit for now. But in the future the boundaries will blur further. And recognizing that latency differences are very important (which is what NUMA-aware means) will become increasingly important.
NUMA architectures as the term is generally used don't really have a direct relationaship with Remote DMA, Renote Shared Memory etc. (except insofar as remote accesses of any type tend to take longer than local ones.) NUMA is a type of SMP system design in which a given CPU can access some memory locations faster than others because they're physically closer. Almost all big (>8 way) systems in commercial use today are NUMA to some degree or other whether thewir vendors choose to advertise the fact.
To be more precise, NUMA as it is generally used today is synonymous with cache coherenet NUMA (cc-NUMA) and is architecturally similar to all other shared memory systems (basically SMP's) except for the fact that some meory accesses take longer than others -- which the OS should take into account.
A few weeks ago, I started getting a bounce message from AOL domains in response to a mailing list hosted on a dynamic DNS address within ATTBI.
This is a nice thing about DVD's...
on
Firefly Coming to DVD
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's apparently cost effective to release them for series that weren't on the air long and which will therefore be difficult to find even in syndication (which has traditionally at least demanded that shows be on the air for three years or so to sell). The other short-lived Fox show I'd like to see come out on DVD is Action.
Fox didn't handle Firefly particularly well but I'm sort of doubtful that was the reason for its demise at the end of the day. I sort of enjoyed it and found the characters generally appealing, but the whole literal Western in space thing took a REALLY massive suspension of disbelief. The whole economic system the show portrayed just didn't make sense (e.g. paying for an interstellar trip by hauling some cattle around). Etc. And it was reputedly a very expensive show to make.
Slashdot Mirror
I've purchased something I've bought it and it's mine. So if you buy a book, you can make 1,000 copies and sell them? The book is "yours" after all. No. Whern you buy something covered by copyright (or other laws protecting intellectual property) you only have reproduction or reuse rights as they provided for by the law and/or any contracts that you signed. As others have noted, pro photographers typically license their photos for specific narrow uses. For example, they may sell the rights to use a photo in a specific issue of a magazine. But, especially if they're not a staff photographer, that probably does not grant rights to use the photo for another story, in advertising, in a book of the "best hotos of the year", etc. The ownership issue comes up all the time, BTW, with wedding photos and the like. Traditionally wedding photographers kept control of the negatives and made much of their profit through high-priced reprints (which lets them low-ball the actual shooting fee). This model is changing though because home scanners and inkjet printers are making it too easy to make bootleg copies of prints.
There's a "rational" argument for playing the lottery even if the expected value based on absolute dollar and cents is negative. Standard expected value analyses assume that a dollar is always worth the same dollar no matter the circumstances. In fact, there's an economic argument based on utlity value of money (if I remember my terms right) that the true value of a dollar (to a given person) is not constant.
Thus, as others have commented in a more anecdotal way, $5 per week, say, may be invisible to someone in a certain income bracket while a life-changing lottery winning is not. The utility value of the $5 is essentially zero; the utility value of a life-changing win is more than the sum of the dollars involved.
Now, obviously, there's also a rather large multiplier involved even if the utility value of the money spent is "essentially zero." But it's one way of looking at it. BTW, it's pretty clear that this argument does not apply to more modest $50 or $100 prizes. These are expected value-negative however you figure them. The only argument in these cases is an entertainment one.
Assuming that these forecasts are accurate -- a big assumption with this sort of hard-to-predict thing but let's stipulate it is for purposes of argument...
It's not clear to me that the shrinkage is necessarily because of outsourcing overseas as everyone seems to be assuming. Sure that might be (doubtless will be) part of it but it doesn't seem that would be the only trend. In addition, in spite of the increase in the number of computers and things automated, there's also an increase in use of packaged software and tools that greatly increase productivity. A lot more can be accomplished with a lot fewer porogrammers than 10 or 20 years ago.
You can certainly find lots of examples in other industries where far fewer people are employed in spite of higher overall domestic output because of productivity increases.
In terms of Linux, Boston isn't a bad location. In particular you've got a significant Finacial Serices industry (though obviously less than New York) as well as a lot of Biotech that's been making a lot of use of Linux cluster. Plus various other companies and organizations.
But your basic point is absolutely dead on. The focus of Linux worls is absolutely NOT students and such who are showing up for givewaways and because it's cool. Linuxworld is focused on companies that have money to spend on Linix. It's not a hobbyist show.
Why aren't they made? Well, when you can get a new 2 GHz Dell for $400 if you wait for the right rebates and sales, it's going to be pretty hard for anyone to make money selling a new, slower PC. Maybe you could shave another $100 off for a system that ran at 25% the speed. Not many people are going to go for that deal. (And I'm by no means sure you could cut the cost that much.)
If you're looking for used gear, there's lots of avenues. E-Bay obviously -- though there's the caveat emptor factor plus lots of folks seem to have a rather overvalued opinion of how much that system they paid $2K for just a few years ago is worth. You can also try these guys: http://www.retrobox.com.
Well, however you come up with the number -- whether it be by wrongful death litigation costs or whatver -- some sort of "cost of human life" does need to be part of the equation. You can ALWAYS make things safer but safety needs to be balanced against the costs in dollars and time. That may seem cold-hearted but that's the reality.
No he isn't. The containers technology in Solaris 10 is related to Solaris Resource Manager not the Volume Manager. Although I haven't seen a lot of the details about how this is going to work yet, what Sun says they're doing is to "harden" the resource groupings that you have with Solaris 9 so that they're more like virtual machines or partitions.
They're not VMs in the usual meaning of the word because they're all still running under a single copy of the OS, but the idea is that in Solaris 10, there will be be sufficient software isolation of the resource groups that most software failures within a group won't affect other groups. (Which is part of the reason that people use VMs anyway.)
At least if you don't count the Unix workstations that already existed at the time. Steve Jobs did a great job of pitching all sorts of NeXT technologies as "new" to the PC crowd that really weren't. In a way this would have been OK if the NeXT hit price points that let it bring those capabilities into markets that had never seen them before--but it didn't.
Why is this comment modded as funny? Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander and all that. If functionality needs to be/should be/etc. unbundled from Windows, why should any other OS be any different? Because Windows is a monopoly today? Perhaps. But that implies an argument that once you get above a certain percentage of marketshare, you need to start unbundling functionality.
Seems pretty whacked to me.
>it is quite difficult for the average joe to produce tv content for the masses
True.
>it is trivial to produce web content
It's easy to produce crap. It's also relatively easiER to produce writing and still images than broadcast production-grade video. But that doesn't make it trivial. The Web is a delivery mechanism. An in-depth written study of some topic (or work of fiction) aka a book is no (well not much) easier to produce for the Web than any other medium. Now, it may be easier to get published, but that doesn't make it any better or easier to write.
>there will always be the openinfo/opensource mentality people who will provide reasonable content for free, for the love of it.
"Reasonable"? Perhaps. However, even today, a lot of the best open source content is being produced as a sideline to more commercial ventures. This is even true of open source code. How many open source projects are being done primarily by programmers on someone's payroll?
>for a premium service to survive it has got to be VERY premium
I think that's probably true -- although if micropayments ever became prevalent, it might mean that only some individual pieces of content had to be very premium (easier than a whole service).
>itunes is not a webservice or internet service
As I said earlier, the Web is a distribution medium not the content itself. The same could be said of iTunes.
Here's one guess from Brewster Kahle at Alexa Internet:
"guess-timated" the Library of Congress' existing print holdings as "about 20 terabytes or $200,000 in storage space. It would take up the space of a couple of Coke machines." Of course, unlike Alexa Internet, which takes everything on pages including video clips, sound, and graphics, Kahle's estimate for digital storage of LC's print collection reflects "only the text, all ASCII. The graphics would get very complicated to estimate."
The other big issue with Powerpoint presentations is that they're trying to be too many things all at once. They're a presentation (duh) but they also end up being speaker notes, background information, reference material -- and that's before chart-junk and chart-graphics. Good presentation slides usually have some well chosen graphics and just enough text to structure. But in a typical business setting that assumes that the presenter is familiar enough with the material that he doesn't need to read it off the slide and that more detailed data and such are available in other ways to the audience than in the presentation.
Now, for your typical status report, it may well make sense to just stuff everything in a Powerpoint presentation. But this philosophy of putting everything on the page then ends up carrying over to other types of presentations that would be far better if strcutured differently (such as with a presentation and a separate handout).
If I'm understanding you correctly, this is how lots of people used to set up X on their Unix workstations. The thinking was that it took less effort to switch windows if you didn't have to click. Of course, it's also easier to switch by accident.
But, you're right. I don't setup any of my systems this way any longer because this behavior is "confusing and unexpected" (or at least unexpected). There are lots of potential behaviors you can have in a user interface. Some are clearly sensible. Some are clearly horrid. Lots more are neither clearly good nor bad, partly a case of personal perference; partly a case of "the accustomed way of doing things."
I did a fair bit of searching when researching something I wrote about this a few weeks back http://www.illuminata.com/cgi-local/pub.cgi?docid= scoderived. It appears to be in 4.3BSD but not, as far as I could see, in current open source BSD variants. I didn't have a copy of BSD4.4-lite to check so I'm not sure when it was taken out or otherwise modified beyond easy recognition.
The code goes back at least as far as Sixth Edition Unix. I saw another comment that put it back even further.
Ironically, a lot of SCO's case will also boil down to how broadly derivative works extend. Here's a link to an analysis of SCO's case as being primarily about how broadly a derivative works claim can extend: http://www.illuminata.com/cgi-local/pub1.cgi?docid =scoderived
Most schools probably ALREADY "have a deal with the music industry." I don't know the current status of such things, but I remember when I was going to school way back when there was an issue around "public performance of music without payment" (i.e. music played at parties. As I recall, the solution was an annual or whatever flat payment to the group that collects music royalties. I don't know how this issue is handled in general these days, but there are some similarities.
One important distinction that was made in one of the legal statements was that these codes were written with the more or less express purpose of being incorporated into the law. The distinction is subtle, but important. I think most of us would agree that if Joe-Geek programmer were to write a book on a "Software Engineering Code of Ethics" and some legislature were to pass a law saying that the Code of Ethics in said book MUST be followed subject to fines of xxx... (basically incorp[orating the book by reference into the law) that should not suddenly place that book into the public domain.
The case here is a bit different. It's really more of an internet-driven change in business model where SOMEONE previously had to make printed copies of these codes and the organizations who created them maintained the right to do so (and profit by doing so) themselves. Now that distribution can be essentially free, it becomes an important disctinction whether it can be freely posted or not.
Plus (on amazon etc.) you have an essentially unlimited selection. You can read what other people and reviewers have to say about a particular album. You can typically listen to far more extensive (albeit shorter and lower quality) song clips. You can take your time and just put something in a wish list. You can easily skip over to related titles. Overall it's a much "richer" experience.
I still sometimes go in stores and do the serendipity thing especially in a really good used store (like Amoeba in SF). But, overall, online's bothe better and cheaper (except for loss leaders). That's hard to beat.
Yes, both StarOffice and OpenOffice. I'd like to report that they're better than Office XP but they're not. They're less stable and are missing features here and there. For example, Office XP's revision marking -- that I use extensively -- is a fairly large step up from OpenOffice (and previous revs of Microsoft Office). Now, if the argument is that OpenOffice is good enough for a lot of people and the price is right, I'll enthusiastically agree. But better? No.
Actually there IS an opt-out feature.
>Actually, there's no use for most businesses to have a "web presence".
I have to disagree. Just about ANY business depends on attracting new customers in addition to servicing your current customers. A "web presence" doesn't need to be a full online catalog. It doesn't even need to be particularly dynamic. It can be as simple as information about services/products and hours if you're a store.
Let's say you're a small landscaping business that would like to attract some new customers. Wouldn't having a simple web site be useful just in case people are searching for a landscaping service in town X on the web (as people increasingly do).
It can be as simple as a single attractive page -- an online business card if you would.
Absolutely. The historical distinction between distributed memory and shared memory definitely begins to blur a bit with RDMA. Just a little bit for now. But in the future the boundaries will blur further. And recognizing that latency differences are very important (which is what NUMA-aware means) will become increasingly important.
NUMA architectures as the term is generally used don't really have a direct relationaship with Remote DMA, Renote Shared Memory etc. (except insofar as remote accesses of any type tend to take longer than local ones.) NUMA is a type of SMP system design in which a given CPU can access some memory locations faster than others because they're physically closer. Almost all big (>8 way) systems in commercial use today are NUMA to some degree or other whether thewir vendors choose to advertise the fact.
To be more precise, NUMA as it is generally used today is synonymous with cache coherenet NUMA (cc-NUMA) and is architecturally similar to all other shared memory systems (basically SMP's) except for the fact that some meory accesses take longer than others -- which the OS should take into account.
A few weeks ago, I started getting a bounce message from AOL domains in response to a mailing list hosted on a dynamic DNS address within ATTBI.
It's apparently cost effective to release them for series that weren't on the air long and which will therefore be difficult to find even in syndication (which has traditionally at least demanded that shows be on the air for three years or so to sell). The other short-lived Fox show I'd like to see come out on DVD is Action.
Fox didn't handle Firefly particularly well but I'm sort of doubtful that was the reason for its demise at the end of the day. I sort of enjoyed it and found the characters generally appealing, but the whole literal Western in space thing took a REALLY massive suspension of disbelief. The whole economic system the show portrayed just didn't make sense (e.g. paying for an interstellar trip by hauling some cattle around). Etc. And it was reputedly a very expensive show to make.