Well, it makes me question why. Books that are published by traditional means tend to make substantially more money for their authors. They sell more copies, because they end up in bookstores and with a substantially lower cover price (I'm not going to pay $17+delivery for a 224 page paperback novel). Therefore, there are three general kinds of books that go to self publishing.
1. Those that will appeal to only an incredibly narrow niche market which there is no mainstream press willing to cover. This sounds, from the review, to be pretty mainstream SF/Fantasy. The subject matter would not rule it out for traditional publication.
2. Books that are not well enough written to meet the standards of a professional publisher.
3. Books whose authors are clueless as to how the business of publishing works, and think that self publishing is therefore their best option.
(There's a fourth, actually. Open content books. But I'd expect it to have been mentioned here if this was one.)
Obviously there's the occasional exception to this. Well written, mainstream books do get self published from time to time. I believe that Grisham's first novel was published like this. But, they're a tiny fraction of the shite that's out there. Which is the other reason, aside from the price, I won't be buying this book. I figure there's maybe a one in fifty chance that it's actually any good.
No offence to the author, of course. Or the reviewer, who clearly liked it. I don't know either of you.
This is not clear and should be something for the lawyers.
The interesting thing about Nominet's dispute resolution system is that there will be no lawyers involved (unless one of the parties chooses to use a lawyer as their representative). It's an informal sit around the table and work out the problems system, decided based more on the merits of the facts as presented than on arcane rules and regulation. You can't just win by sending in a good lawyer.
Thus Findlay Steele Associates got to keep their domain (worth seeing the disclaimer they've got on the front page!), and I see little reason Mr Cohen shouldn't keep it.
Incidentally, is this the sex.com guy? The name sounds familiar.
I considered that, but there's a catch -- the Windows licenses only allow ten connections whether you're using Microsoft servers or not. So, yes, using Samba on Windows 2000 Pro may let you bypass that restriction as imposed by W2K Pro, but it's still not `legal'.
I'm not sure this restriction is legal. It is entirely unrelated to copyright, it is merely MS attempting to prevent you using the software in particular ways, and what they can do in an end user contract that isn't shown to the purchaser before sale is rather limited. I'd put money on them never enforcing this all the way to court because they don't want to set a precedent.
). It claims to be able to 'stop a vast majority of spam' without the need for content filters, and 'virtually eliminates spoofed addresses, phishing, and even many viruses with a few cached DNS look-ups and a couple of if/then statements'.
Oh, yeah, and completely stop mailing lists from being usable. That, too.
This kind of term means that by contributing or distributing code under such a license, you may ACCIDENTALLY be giving up the right to take patent actions against persons unknown.
You cannot give up such right without actually giving those persons a patent license. You may have to be prepared to cease distributing the software within 60 days if you do, though. I don't think this will bother many people.
If memory serves, there has been an official FSF statement that while this kind of term is GPL-incompatible, they think it is good, and will likely include similar terms in a future version of the GPL.
It's a not-particularly-heavily-modified version of the MPL.
It seems not, because they presumably had to modify it to include the fact that the license grant is "subject to third party intellectual property claims".
Which probably makes it next to useless, as I believe Solaris is based on Sys V code, which means that those 3rd party rights might belong to either SCO or Novell, it's tricky to tell which at this stage.
we have to devise some mechanism to emit the light from where we want it to be seen, in all directions so it can be seen on all sides.
Or from somewhere else but in a fashion that tricks the eye into thinking it originated from that point.
Now, that's tricky, but I see no reason it couldn't be done. It'd probably have to be controlled by a system that tracked the location of your eyeball and made a lot of very fast calculations in order to project a beam of coherent light to exactly the right point on it, but I see nothing _totally_ infeasible about it.:)
That was actually an admin error. They were using a cacheing service that's supposed to automatically provide a local mirror, but some of the local mirrors were misconfigured by mistake.
I think the theory is more along the lines of, if you want to steel a laptop from X company to get data from its hard disk, the easiest way of doing this is probably to get a job there as a janitor and swipe one while you're doing your rounds.
Janitors get access to all areas of an office, even ones that are usually kept secure. There are few qualifications required for the job, beyond having good references (which can be faked if you have the infrastructure for it). It's simply the easiest way in. And even if you can't, it's a low paying job which means that those doing it are more likely to be bribable than, say, the IT staff.
Does *anyone* put the ellipses(?) in acronyms nowadays?
Not ellipses; ellipses look like this...
Yes. The NY Times. It is apparently an editorial style decision that any acronym that hasn't been officially adopted as a word must have the periods between letters for publication in the paper. Apparently this is related to the fact that they use block caps for headlines, and wanted a way of making the abbreviations stand out from ordinary text. Or so I've been told.
Figures vary wildly, because both measurements are hard to make. I was reporting the highest ratio I was able to generate, because the GP post suggested it was substantially higher than that, and I wanted to give an "at most" figure. Probably should have made that clearer, though.:)
The argument against that would be that vulcanism is currently at a lower level than it has been at historically, and that therefore the little we add to it is producing less effect than was produced naturally at times in the past without causing environmental disasters.
Of course, that ignores the fact that we do produce large amounts of CO2 when compared to vulcanism. And that while the system may indeed have a tipping point (which some theories state was reached at the permian-triassic boundary causing widespread mass extinctions), we'd probably notice if we reached it.
Not that that would do us a lot of good, I guess, because by then it would be too late.
Who'se numbers did you use to "work them out"? Did your numbers also include comparison of industrial & "natural" sources of other greenhouse gasses like methane? Probably not.
The emissions figures for human-originated production came from a set of documents prepared for Kyoto compliance checking, I can't remember where I found them. I also found similar figures in two different sources, although I'm not sure now what they were.
The figures were for CO2 only.
I used the most conservative man-made CO2 figures I could find and the least conservative vulcanism figures, so that 50% from vulcanism should be read as an absolute maximum. In all reality, it's probably substantially lower. I see one other poster replying to me has it down below at 1/150th, which seems low but doesn't surprise me a huge amount; I was seeing a wide variety of figures reported, and some of them could have generated ratios of this order of magnitude.
Even historically when population densities were much lower, the west of england has had more rain than the east. It's geographical; our predominent weather system is caused by the gulf stream (north atlantic current) so almost all weather systems first pass over land in the south west, which is where they then dump their rain...
Didn't I hear a news report about Mt. Saint Helens just the other day... something about it putting out more C02 than all human civilization? Surely that has no influence on the atmosphere...
If you did it was inaccurate. I don't have the figures any more, but I did work them out for a previous reply on this subject where I had believed the same thing you have been told. It turns out that vulcanism only accounts for about 50% of CO2 emissions in total at the moment. No single source dwarfs human production, as is routinely reported in some sources.
Studies have shown that passively sitting around not talking to anyone all day doesn't exactly help your brain keep in shape. (You have to exercise it, you know? Seriously.)
I understand that playing chess is considered as one of the best remedies for this problem. Chess computers are cheap.
But, I'll ask you, why would a company issue a press release about (potential) patent infringement, especially when they stand to make money from it, if not to stir Fear, Uncertaintity, and Doubt?
LAWYER: Well, the fact of Linux's violation of these patents was clearly stated and widely reported throughout the press several months ago, yet the defendant has continued using the software. This is clear evidence of willfull infringement, and as such we are entitled to double damages.
(Jury members nod their heads in agreement. Suckers.)
If you attend a prestigous university, you will know important people who will offer you a job.
I think for most people this is pretty much a myth.
Look at a year's intake into a prestigious university. There are thousands of people there. You'll probably get to know 10-20 of them well enough for them to offer you a job. How many of them are going to become "important"?
The university I studied at is one of the top 5 in Britain for CS. I can't honestly say that any of the people I graduated with are now in top positions. Certainly none that would be worth pulling connections with to get a job from.
For example, open up notepad on Windows XP. Note the view menu. There's one item, called 'status bar'. It's disabled (well it is on my machine). Why? I know what a status bar is, thank you very much. I know that the menu item should show me it. But it's disabled, WHY? No amount of help is going to get you there, because the help is always going to be context independent, you would have to list all the cases.
1. There's no reason help *must* be context independent. Help documents could easily contain commands that check the internal state of the application that started them to display suggestions based on how it is configured.
2. In any well designed application, there should only ever be one or maybe two reasons why a command item is disabled. This could easily be documented in the help for the command item. (It doesn't help that XP doesn't actually have any help at all for notepad's status bar, presumably because the facility was added after the help was written, and it did take me a while to discover that the reason it is disabled is because the status bar is for some reason incompatible with word wrap)
Slashdot Mirror
Not that there's anything wrong with that
Well, it makes me question why. Books that are published by traditional means tend to make substantially more money for their authors. They sell more copies, because they end up in bookstores and with a substantially lower cover price (I'm not going to pay $17+delivery for a 224 page paperback novel). Therefore, there are three general kinds of books that go to self publishing.
1. Those that will appeal to only an incredibly narrow niche market which there is no mainstream press willing to cover. This sounds, from the review, to be pretty mainstream SF/Fantasy. The subject matter would not rule it out for traditional publication.
2. Books that are not well enough written to meet the standards of a professional publisher.
3. Books whose authors are clueless as to how the business of publishing works, and think that self publishing is therefore their best option.
(There's a fourth, actually. Open content books. But I'd expect it to have been mentioned here if this was one.)
Obviously there's the occasional exception to this. Well written, mainstream books do get self published from time to time. I believe that Grisham's first novel was published like this. But, they're a tiny fraction of the shite that's out there. Which is the other reason, aside from the price, I won't be buying this book. I figure there's maybe a one in fifty chance that it's actually any good.
No offence to the author, of course. Or the reviewer, who clearly liked it. I don't know either of you.
Sorry, but that'd be warm fudge.
This is not clear and should be something for the lawyers.
The interesting thing about Nominet's dispute resolution system is that there will be no lawyers involved (unless one of the parties chooses to use a lawyer as their representative). It's an informal sit around the table and work out the problems system, decided based more on the merits of the facts as presented than on arcane rules and regulation. You can't just win by sending in a good lawyer.
Thus Findlay Steele Associates got to keep their domain (worth seeing the disclaimer they've got on the front page!), and I see little reason Mr Cohen shouldn't keep it.
Incidentally, is this the sex.com guy? The name sounds familiar.
I considered that, but there's a catch -- the Windows licenses only allow ten connections whether you're using Microsoft servers or not. So, yes, using Samba on Windows 2000 Pro may let you bypass that restriction as imposed by W2K Pro, but it's still not `legal'.
I'm not sure this restriction is legal. It is entirely unrelated to copyright, it is merely MS attempting to prevent you using the software in particular ways, and what they can do in an end user contract that isn't shown to the purchaser before sale is rather limited. I'd put money on them never enforcing this all the way to court because they don't want to set a precedent.
). It claims to be able to 'stop a vast majority of spam' without the need for content filters, and 'virtually eliminates spoofed addresses, phishing, and even many viruses with a few cached DNS look-ups and a couple of if/then statements'.
Oh, yeah, and completely stop mailing lists from being usable. That, too.
This kind of term means that by contributing or distributing code under such a license, you may ACCIDENTALLY be giving up the right to take patent actions against persons unknown.
You cannot give up such right without actually giving those persons a patent license. You may have to be prepared to cease distributing the software within 60 days if you do, though. I don't think this will bother many people.
If memory serves, there has been an official FSF statement that while this kind of term is GPL-incompatible, they think it is good, and will likely include similar terms in a future version of the GPL.
Look at the linked page. It's based heavily on the MPL, so it isn't really _new_. It's just got CYA modifications in it.
It's a not-particularly-heavily-modified version of the MPL.
It seems not, because they presumably had to modify it to include the fact that the license grant is "subject to third party intellectual property claims".
Which probably makes it next to useless, as I believe Solaris is based on Sys V code, which means that those 3rd party rights might belong to either SCO or Novell, it's tricky to tell which at this stage.
we have to devise some mechanism to emit the light from where we want it to be seen, in all directions so it can be seen on all sides.
:)
Or from somewhere else but in a fashion that tricks the eye into thinking it originated from that point.
Now, that's tricky, but I see no reason it couldn't be done. It'd probably have to be controlled by a system that tracked the location of your eyeball and made a lot of very fast calculations in order to project a beam of coherent light to exactly the right point on it, but I see nothing _totally_ infeasible about it.
That was actually an admin error. They were using a cacheing service that's supposed to automatically provide a local mirror, but some of the local mirrors were misconfigured by mistake.
I think the theory is more along the lines of, if you want to steel a laptop from X company to get data from its hard disk, the easiest way of doing this is probably to get a job there as a janitor and swipe one while you're doing your rounds.
Janitors get access to all areas of an office, even ones that are usually kept secure. There are few qualifications required for the job, beyond having good references (which can be faked if you have the infrastructure for it). It's simply the easiest way in. And even if you can't, it's a low paying job which means that those doing it are more likely to be bribable than, say, the IT staff.
Does *anyone* put the ellipses(?) in acronyms nowadays?
Not ellipses; ellipses look like this...
Yes. The NY Times. It is apparently an editorial style decision that any acronym that hasn't been officially adopted as a word must have the periods between letters for publication in the paper. Apparently this is related to the fact that they use block caps for headlines, and wanted a way of making the abbreviations stand out from ordinary text. Or so I've been told.
Was that one of the ones that came with CP/M 86? Or was it a proper DOS compatible one?
Is anything IBM compatible these days?
All I see is "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP"
Figures vary wildly, because both measurements are hard to make. I was reporting the highest ratio I was able to generate, because the GP post suggested it was substantially higher than that, and I wanted to give an "at most" figure. Probably should have made that clearer, though. :)
The argument against that would be that vulcanism is currently at a lower level than it has been at historically, and that therefore the little we add to it is producing less effect than was produced naturally at times in the past without causing environmental disasters.
Of course, that ignores the fact that we do produce large amounts of CO2 when compared to vulcanism. And that while the system may indeed have a tipping point (which some theories state was reached at the permian-triassic boundary causing widespread mass extinctions), we'd probably notice if we reached it.
Not that that would do us a lot of good, I guess, because by then it would be too late.
Who'se numbers did you use to "work them out"? Did your numbers also include comparison of industrial & "natural" sources of other greenhouse gasses like methane? Probably not.
The emissions figures for human-originated production came from a set of documents prepared for Kyoto compliance checking, I can't remember where I found them. I also found similar figures in two different sources, although I'm not sure now what they were.
The figures were for CO2 only.
I used the most conservative man-made CO2 figures I could find and the least conservative vulcanism figures, so that 50% from vulcanism should be read as an absolute maximum. In all reality, it's probably substantially lower. I see one other poster replying to me has it down below at 1/150th, which seems low but doesn't surprise me a huge amount; I was seeing a wide variety of figures reported, and some of them could have generated ratios of this order of magnitude.
Even historically when population densities were much lower, the west of england has had more rain than the east. It's geographical; our predominent weather system is caused by the gulf stream (north atlantic current) so almost all weather systems first pass over land in the south west, which is where they then dump their rain...
Didn't I hear a news report about Mt. Saint Helens just the other day... something about it putting out more C02 than all human civilization? Surely that has no influence on the atmosphere...
If you did it was inaccurate. I don't have the figures any more, but I did work them out for a previous reply on this subject where I had believed the same thing you have been told. It turns out that vulcanism only accounts for about 50% of CO2 emissions in total at the moment. No single source dwarfs human production, as is routinely reported in some sources.
Studies have shown that passively sitting around not talking to anyone all day doesn't exactly help your brain keep in shape. (You have to exercise it, you know? Seriously.)
I understand that playing chess is considered as one of the best remedies for this problem. Chess computers are cheap.
How about a nice game of chess?
But, I'll ask you, why would a company issue a press release about (potential) patent infringement, especially when they stand to make money from it, if not to stir Fear, Uncertaintity, and Doubt?
LAWYER: Well, the fact of Linux's violation of these patents was clearly stated and widely reported throughout the press several months ago, yet the defendant has continued using the software. This is clear evidence of willfull infringement, and as such we are entitled to double damages.
(Jury members nod their heads in agreement. Suckers.)
If you attend a prestigous university, you will know important people who will offer you a job.
I think for most people this is pretty much a myth.
Look at a year's intake into a prestigious university. There are thousands of people there. You'll probably get to know 10-20 of them well enough for them to offer you a job. How many of them are going to become "important"?
The university I studied at is one of the top 5 in Britain for CS. I can't honestly say that any of the people I graduated with are now in top positions. Certainly none that would be worth pulling connections with to get a job from.
For example, open up notepad on Windows XP. Note the view menu. There's one item, called 'status bar'. It's disabled (well it is on my machine). Why? I know what a status bar is, thank you very much. I know that the menu item should show me it. But it's disabled, WHY? No amount of help is going to get you there, because the help is always going to be context independent, you would have to list all the cases.
1. There's no reason help *must* be context independent. Help documents could easily contain commands that check the internal state of the application that started them to display suggestions based on how it is configured.
2. In any well designed application, there should only ever be one or maybe two reasons why a command item is disabled. This could easily be documented in the help for the command item. (It doesn't help that XP doesn't actually have any help at all for notepad's status bar, presumably because the facility was added after the help was written, and it did take me a while to discover that the reason it is disabled is because the status bar is for some reason incompatible with word wrap)