If there is no DRM there will only be sold one copy.
4 co-authors. Each of them must have at least 10 friends. I reckon that adds up to about 30 copies sold, and nobody being able to figure out who's lying about having bought it.
Indeed. And while J A Konrath is actually a reasonably well-known writer who writes (I'm led to believe) fairly good books, the *vast* majority of e-book self-publishers aren't in his league, so his experiences don't really translate to other people trying to get into the business. Konrath had a run of good-selling traditionally-published books before he started self-publishing, thus managed to build a fan base off the back of the marketing the publishers did for him. This doesn't apply to most of the people who read his articles and decide that maybe self publishing a novel is the way forward for them. It isn't, except in unusual circumstances. Konrath exemplifies one of those; there are others (e.g. you're famous for some reason other than your writing, you have a ready-made large network of people you'll be able to sell to, etc.).
But here's the thing, their behavior wasn't honest or genuinely based on real belief in the value of the stocks.
No day trader makes decisions based on real beliefs of the value of stocks. That just isn't how day trading works. Day trading is essentially taking advantage of patterns that form in price changes because of the ways that people decide to buy and sell stocks. Read any advanced how-to-day-trade text and you'll see most of it is about psychology, because understanding what other investers are doing allows you to predict how their actions will affect the price of stocks. The entire point is to guess what purchases and sales other traders will make and to make money from the price movement those will create. Which is exactly what this pair did, the only difference being that it was a single automated trader rather than an entire market they were second-guessing.
28. A computer-based method for aiding a user in accessing a body of stored information which includes segments of related information, the method comprising
displaying a set of labels, each label providing an abbreviated indication of information content of a corresponding one of said segments,
said labels being displayed in an organized model reflecting relationships among information contents of said corresponding segments,
enabling a user to point to individual labels in said model using an electronic pointing technique, and
for each label to which said user points, displaying to the user, for previewing, the information content of the corresponding segment.
This is the broadest claim that isn't ruled out by application area (other claims are for a "computer-based method for aiding a user in assembling a customized body of information from a larger body of available information segments" and a "computer-based method for producing an annotated body of stored information", neither of which is likely to apply to any of the web sites cited in the summary). It appears to describe any system in which information is available in multiple units (e.g. pages), and where a preview of such a unit is available on mouseover of the control (e.g. link) that will select it. They might get away with this; I can't think of anyone doing it before 1990, which is the filing date, and there definitely are web sites that are doing things that match this description.
They may want to *try* claim 58:
58. A system comprising storage containing
a body of information comprising segments,
said storage also containing
a set of labels, each label indicating the content of a corresponding one of said segments, said labels being arranged in an organized model reflecting relationships among corresponding said segments, and
software for displaying said model and for enabling a user to access a selected said segment by invoking a corresponding label in said model.
But as this describes any hypertext system, and there were plenty available prior to the filing date, I imagine they would fail in that one.
Claim 59 is perhaps a little more interesting:
59. A computer-based method for providing assistance to a user of an application program comprising
in response to a user requesting assistance in the course of using said program, displaying a set of labels, each label indicating the content of a corresponding segment of assistance information, said labels being displayed in an organized model, and
simultaneously while displaying said set of labels, displaying a segment of assistance information corresponding to one of said labels selected by said user.
This seems to apply to any help application that displays a preview of the help topic in its search results. Filing date is 1990, so prior art may be hard to find on that one.
WTF does this mean, and WTF does it have to do with rollovers?
Read the claims rather than the abstract. The claims describe a system that assembles a set of information from a wide variety of possible information, and (critically) provides a preview on mouseover of the options.
Unfortunately for WebVentures, I don't think they understand what this patent is for. It appears to describe a database front end application that is unlike most I've seen on the web -- I can think of a couple of specialist sites that might match the description, but none by any of the people listed as being sued.
This Casion calculator costs $130. Go ahead, find a phone for that price (bearing in mind contract cost also) that can provide all the same functionality in form factor that is as convenient. Sure, you could do it easily with any touch-screen smartphone - but those things cost $300+.
I'm looking at prices in the UK, so I've converted to pounds. $130 = £85. Nokia C3 is £80 on PAYG deals (no contract), and provides a full QWERTY keyboard, 320x240 display (i.e. similar total resolution to the calculator, although a different aspect ratio), 18-bit colour rather than 16, about 4 times as much memory, an SD slot, and Symbian Series 40 OS (supports Java ME, which could be used to provide the same functions as the calculator).
Cheaper at £70 is the LG POP GD510, which has a 240x400 touchscreen display, and 3 times as much memory as the calculator.
Most churches don't claim that giving money to them will bring you health or good fortune. They are asking for money for running costs and charity without any promise of a return
Don't forget that there's a strong thread in most forms of Christianity that being a generally good, charitable person who helps do God's work makes you more likely to be accepted into heaven rather than being damned to a rather unpleasant eternity spent in hell. This turns "just asking for charity" into "extracting money with (vague, ill-defined) menaces" in my book.
[...] wherever there are no Catholics to spread those methods they are Freemasons in their place, and wherever the Freemasons have no standing then you see Jews importing muslims to induce the native population to join a club that eventually gets absorbed into Freemasonry?
Anyway, it's not about the number of people in the database, it's about some number of records associated with each person presenting their location, so probably GPS coordinates taken at some time intervals.
Interestingly, if you assume they've averaged half the number of people currently being tracked (not an unreasonable assumption if the popularity of such tracking has been steadily increasing), and hourly logging, then you get 2^31 / 8000 / 24 / 365 = about 30 years, which is perhaps not coincidentally the approximate length of time the company has been offering tracking services for (they started in 1978, apparently -- not sure if they were using GPS at the time though: it was still a military experiment back then).
Fail. The correct digital medium to prop open a door with is a hard disk. Preferably with the case partially removed so that visitors can see the platters. That's what I have my office door propped open with right now.
Is that everything published, even foreign works published in the UK or just things that originated in the U.K.
AIUI, it is everything that is published in the UK. This includes foreign works in cases where there is an organisation acting as a publisher in the UK, but not if the publisher is outside the UK and retailers import directly from them.
If so, why does that sound so small?
Because unlike the US Library of Congress or the British Museum, the Bodleian only gets the stuff they specifically request, which appears to be around a quarter of the total that is actually published from what I can work out.
More and more books are being only released in digital format.
Name a single one that is relevant, by which I mean it has either:
1) made it into a best seller list somewhere 2) been a recommended text on an academic course somewhere 3) been recommended by a well-known newspaper or magazine
Because believe me, if a book doesn't hit at least one of those criteria, almost nobody cares about it. Because almost nobody's heard of it.
While I agree that ebooks are, in fact, the future, and that the future is now very nearly here (the screen on the Kindle 3 is a thing of beauty compared to past devices, for example), this doesn't mean dead trees are yet -- well -- dead. The market for dead tree books is in the order of ten times larger than the market for ebooks, and given current expansion rates, it seems likely that they will become equal at some point in the next ten years. Beyond that point, expansion of ebook sales is likely to start slowing down, and it will be a while after that before any serious mainstream publisher starts considering not selling physical copies of their books.
I think those are metric years. They are different than our years.
We don't have metric years. A year is unfortunately too far from a power-of-10 seconds to be standardised to a metric unit. Instead we have quarters of a metric quad-year, which is equal to 100,000,000 seconds (126,230,400 being an imperial quad-year[1]).
[1] except unleap-quad-years. An unleap quad-year only occurs every 25 imperial quad-years and are shorter by around three-quarters of a metric day[2][3] [2] actually, 86,400 seconds, which is a little more than three quarters of the 100,000 seconds in a metric day [3] now do you see why metrication is so helpful?
How many typewritten pages or Libraries of Congresses is that?
The LOC has already been answered for you, but for reference an average book contains around 100,000 words. An average typewritten double-spaced page has about 250 words. So this would be about 2.4 billion typewritten pages, or 1.2 billion if you condensed the typescript by not double-spacing it. Further paper savings could be made by decreasing margins from the standard of 1" on each side (for example, I find 2cm margins on A4 give about 275 words per page).
chart CDs used to have at least 20 tracks on them...
Really? When I think back to the stuff I bought in the 90s, I don't think many had more than 15. Also, until relatively recently, CDs were limited in run time to 74 minutes, and with the average length of a song in the late 80s/early 90s being about 4 minutes, fitting on 20 would have been unusual.
Do you mean, "import users from an external source"? If so, why not use a phrase that's easy to understand rather than a frankly bizarre metaphor that draws attention away from what you were actually trying to say?
1. Console game prices have always been higher than PC (and, earlier, home computer) game prices. When most of us complain about game prices, it's the PC games we're complaining about.
2. The real-terms cost of other forms of entertainment have dropped over the same period. At least where I am, a chart CD used to cost £15 and is now more like £10; according to the Bank of England inflation calculator [horrible flash thing] that's £25-£10 reduction, or a drop of more than half in real terms cost. Other forms of entertainment have reduced similarly. So, by comparison to the competition, games *are* more expensive.
Games programming is very hard, but most employers (or agencies / HR people) don't seem to grasp that.
That's because it isn't. A small subset of games programming is very hard (i.e. the very small proportion of a typical game's code that is close-to-the-metal performance-critical code). The rest is no harder than typical enterprise software.
The Lord of the Rings Online client is not too bad
I'm assuming that's the same client as the D&D Online client, also from Turbine, which about 20% of the time results in broken downloads (download sitting in a verification state permanently after download has finished) if you don't turn P2P off. If these companies want us to use P2P, they should make sure it works first.
Can we go back to not giving a fuck what the MPAA thinks?
Not until they stop legally harassing people for using services they don't like.
Bittorrent is simply not welcome on corporate networks because it opens up the potential to get sued by the MPAA/RIAA. If you're running a large network where you can't trust all the users, you effectively have to firewall all common P2P applications because otherwise you're likely to end up on the receiving end of a copyright infringement claim. You can try arguing that you shouldn't be held responsible for your users' unauthorised activities, but you'll have to answer the question of why your network wasn't locked down so the unauthorised activities couldn't happen.
If you suffer from this, get a bt client (any decent and recent one) that can automatically throttle down upload speed
The problem is that the clients built in to large software packages (e.g. WoW) often lack such options, or make them hard to find. See (e.g.) this thread on the WoW forums for users complaining about the lack of such a feature in the WoW updater.
The fact is that nobody in the US government has said this app is an aid to terrorists. Its just something that is supposed by a couple of random people. I don't know how slashdot comes to the conclusion that the "US" (government I presume) exclaimed this.
Yes, but OTOH, nothing in the summary says that anybody in the US government has said this app is an aid to terrorists. I don't know how you came to the conclusion that slashdot came to the conclusion that the US exclaimed this.
(Seriously: you're accusing the summary of not accurately reflecting what's in the article, but you're not accurately reflecting what's in the summary...)
And on my English copy of Windows XP Home Edition, this resolves to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data. So why does Windows mark this folder hidden so that the end user can't easily back up the files inside to removable media or send them to other people over the Internet?
Because it's designed for application-specific data that shouldn't be manipulated by users in ordinary circumstances (which is what is most commonly stored in Program Files). If you want users to see the files, you could try CSIDL_COMMON_DOCUMENTS instead, which even has a nice handy shortcut in the "other places" bar in the side panel of the "My Computer" window ("Shared Documents").
I don't remember the last time I had a PC break in a way that wasn't reparable.
Actually, I lie. I do. It was a P1-100 I bought in 1996. I'd used it as my primary workstation for years, then relegated it to file/print/web server for a while after that, until finally it was too slow for that task, after which it became my router/firewall for a while. Sure, I had to swap out components when they broke, but that was always cheaper than replacing it with something else that could do the same functions. It had a new power supply, a new cheap hard disk, and about 5 new cpu cooling fans, until eventually the CPU just stopped working. This was some time around 2007-2008, and I couldn't find anyone who'd sell me a processor that would work in the same motherboard, and the AT PSU and case wouldn't work with new motherboards, so I eventually had to just junk everything.
And it's not as if there aren't plenty of small PC shops that'll happily do this kind of repair for you if you're not able to do it yourself. So, as long as you have a use for a computer and no need to upgrade, I'd say it's often more economical just to repair rather than replace.
Or you download some file from M$ that does the same thing as that command. Do you honestly believe M$ would EVER tell a user to run something on a command line?
Maybe not, but it's not like the command line is the only way:
Slashdot Mirror
If there is no DRM there will only be sold one copy.
4 co-authors. Each of them must have at least 10 friends. I reckon that adds up to about 30 copies sold, and nobody being able to figure out who's lying about having bought it.
Indeed. And while J A Konrath is actually a reasonably well-known writer who writes (I'm led to believe) fairly good books, the *vast* majority of e-book self-publishers aren't in his league, so his experiences don't really translate to other people trying to get into the business. Konrath had a run of good-selling traditionally-published books before he started self-publishing, thus managed to build a fan base off the back of the marketing the publishers did for him. This doesn't apply to most of the people who read his articles and decide that maybe self publishing a novel is the way forward for them. It isn't, except in unusual circumstances. Konrath exemplifies one of those; there are others (e.g. you're famous for some reason other than your writing, you have a ready-made large network of people you'll be able to sell to, etc.).
But here's the thing, their behavior wasn't honest or genuinely based on real belief in the value of the stocks.
No day trader makes decisions based on real beliefs of the value of stocks. That just isn't how day trading works. Day trading is essentially taking advantage of patterns that form in price changes because of the ways that people decide to buy and sell stocks. Read any advanced how-to-day-trade text and you'll see most of it is about psychology, because understanding what other investers are doing allows you to predict how their actions will affect the price of stocks. The entire point is to guess what purchases and sales other traders will make and to make money from the price movement those will create. Which is exactly what this pair did, the only difference being that it was a single automated trader rather than an entire market they were second-guessing.
Claim 28 is probably the relevant one.
This is the broadest claim that isn't ruled out by application area (other claims are for a "computer-based method for aiding a user in assembling a customized body of information from a larger body of available information segments" and a "computer-based method for producing an annotated body of stored information", neither of which is likely to apply to any of the web sites cited in the summary). It appears to describe any system in which information is available in multiple units (e.g. pages), and where a preview of such a unit is available on mouseover of the control (e.g. link) that will select it. They might get away with this; I can't think of anyone doing it before 1990, which is the filing date, and there definitely are web sites that are doing things that match this description.
They may want to *try* claim 58:
But as this describes any hypertext system, and there were plenty available prior to the filing date, I imagine they would fail in that one.
Claim 59 is perhaps a little more interesting:
This seems to apply to any help application that displays a preview of the help topic in its search results. Filing date is 1990, so prior art may be hard to find on that one.
WTF does this mean, and WTF does it have to do with rollovers?
Read the claims rather than the abstract. The claims describe a system that assembles a set of information from a wide variety of possible information, and (critically) provides a preview on mouseover of the options.
Unfortunately for WebVentures, I don't think they understand what this patent is for. It appears to describe a database front end application that is unlike most I've seen on the web -- I can think of a couple of specialist sites that might match the description, but none by any of the people listed as being sued.
This Casion calculator costs $130. Go ahead, find a phone for that price (bearing in mind contract cost also) that can provide all the same functionality in form factor that is as convenient. Sure, you could do it easily with any touch-screen smartphone - but those things cost $300+.
I'm looking at prices in the UK, so I've converted to pounds. $130 = £85. Nokia C3 is £80 on PAYG deals (no contract), and provides a full QWERTY keyboard, 320x240 display (i.e. similar total resolution to the calculator, although a different aspect ratio), 18-bit colour rather than 16, about 4 times as much memory, an SD slot, and Symbian Series 40 OS (supports Java ME, which could be used to provide the same functions as the calculator).
Cheaper at £70 is the LG POP GD510, which has a 240x400 touchscreen display, and 3 times as much memory as the calculator.
Most churches don't claim that giving money to them will bring you health or good fortune. They are asking for money for running costs and charity without any promise of a return
Don't forget that there's a strong thread in most forms of Christianity that being a generally good, charitable person who helps do God's work makes you more likely to be accepted into heaven rather than being damned to a rather unpleasant eternity spent in hell. This turns "just asking for charity" into "extracting money with (vague, ill-defined) menaces" in my book.
[...] wherever there are no Catholics to spread those methods they are Freemasons in their place, and wherever the Freemasons have no standing then you see Jews importing muslims to induce the native population to join a club that eventually gets absorbed into Freemasonry?
Why is there no moderation -1, Batshit Crazy?
Anyway, it's not about the number of people in the database, it's about some number of records associated with each person presenting their location, so probably GPS coordinates taken at some time intervals.
Interestingly, if you assume they've averaged half the number of people currently being tracked (not an unreasonable assumption if the popularity of such tracking has been steadily increasing), and hourly logging, then you get 2^31 / 8000 / 24 / 365 = about 30 years, which is perhaps not coincidentally the approximate length of time the company has been offering tracking services for (they started in 1978, apparently -- not sure if they were using GPS at the time though: it was still a military experiment back then).
Ever try to prop a door open with a DVD?
Fail. The correct digital medium to prop open a door with is a hard disk. Preferably with the case partially removed so that visitors can see the platters. That's what I have my office door propped open with right now.
Is that everything published, even foreign works published in the UK or just things that originated in the U.K.
AIUI, it is everything that is published in the UK. This includes foreign works in cases where there is an organisation acting as a publisher in the UK, but not if the publisher is outside the UK and retailers import directly from them.
If so, why does that sound so small?
Because unlike the US Library of Congress or the British Museum, the Bodleian only gets the stuff they specifically request, which appears to be around a quarter of the total that is actually published from what I can work out.
More and more books are being only released in digital format.
Name a single one that is relevant, by which I mean it has either:
1) made it into a best seller list somewhere
2) been a recommended text on an academic course somewhere
3) been recommended by a well-known newspaper or magazine
Because believe me, if a book doesn't hit at least one of those criteria, almost nobody cares about it. Because almost nobody's heard of it.
While I agree that ebooks are, in fact, the future, and that the future is now very nearly here (the screen on the Kindle 3 is a thing of beauty compared to past devices, for example), this doesn't mean dead trees are yet -- well -- dead. The market for dead tree books is in the order of ten times larger than the market for ebooks, and given current expansion rates, it seems likely that they will become equal at some point in the next ten years. Beyond that point, expansion of ebook sales is likely to start slowing down, and it will be a while after that before any serious mainstream publisher starts considering not selling physical copies of their books.
I think those are metric years. They are different than our years.
We don't have metric years. A year is unfortunately too far from a power-of-10 seconds to be standardised to a metric unit. Instead we have quarters of a metric quad-year, which is equal to 100,000,000 seconds (126,230,400 being an imperial quad-year[1]).
[1] except unleap-quad-years. An unleap quad-year only occurs every 25 imperial quad-years and are shorter by around three-quarters of a metric day[2][3]
[2] actually, 86,400 seconds, which is a little more than three quarters of the 100,000 seconds in a metric day
[3] now do you see why metrication is so helpful?
How many typewritten pages or Libraries of Congresses is that?
The LOC has already been answered for you, but for reference an average book contains around 100,000 words. An average typewritten double-spaced page has about 250 words. So this would be about 2.4 billion typewritten pages, or 1.2 billion if you condensed the typescript by not double-spacing it. Further paper savings could be made by decreasing margins from the standard of 1" on each side (for example, I find 2cm margins on A4 give about 275 words per page).
chart CDs used to have at least 20 tracks on them...
Really? When I think back to the stuff I bought in the 90s, I don't think many had more than 15. Also, until relatively recently, CDs were limited in run time to 74 minutes, and with the average length of a song in the late 80s/early 90s being about 4 minutes, fitting on 20 would have been unusual.
"germinate user seeds"?
Do you mean, "import users from an external source"? If so, why not use a phrase that's easy to understand rather than a frankly bizarre metaphor that draws attention away from what you were actually trying to say?
1. Console game prices have always been higher than PC (and, earlier, home computer) game prices. When most of us complain about game prices, it's the PC games we're complaining about.
2. The real-terms cost of other forms of entertainment have dropped over the same period. At least where I am, a chart CD used to cost £15 and is now more like £10; according to the Bank of England inflation calculator [horrible flash thing] that's £25-£10 reduction, or a drop of more than half in real terms cost. Other forms of entertainment have reduced similarly. So, by comparison to the competition, games *are* more expensive.
Games programming is very hard, but most employers (or agencies / HR people) don't seem to grasp that.
That's because it isn't. A small subset of games programming is very hard (i.e. the very small proportion of a typical game's code that is close-to-the-metal performance-critical code). The rest is no harder than typical enterprise software.
The Lord of the Rings Online client is not too bad
I'm assuming that's the same client as the D&D Online client, also from Turbine, which about 20% of the time results in broken downloads (download sitting in a verification state permanently after download has finished) if you don't turn P2P off. If these companies want us to use P2P, they should make sure it works first.
MPAA said the same thing about the VCR.
Can we go back to not giving a fuck what the MPAA thinks?
Not until they stop legally harassing people for using services they don't like.
Bittorrent is simply not welcome on corporate networks because it opens up the potential to get sued by the MPAA/RIAA. If you're running a large network where you can't trust all the users, you effectively have to firewall all common P2P applications because otherwise you're likely to end up on the receiving end of a copyright infringement claim. You can try arguing that you shouldn't be held responsible for your users' unauthorised activities, but you'll have to answer the question of why your network wasn't locked down so the unauthorised activities couldn't happen.
If you suffer from this, get a bt client (any decent and recent one) that can automatically throttle down upload speed
The problem is that the clients built in to large software packages (e.g. WoW) often lack such options, or make them hard to find. See (e.g.) this thread on the WoW forums for users complaining about the lack of such a feature in the WoW updater.
The fact is that nobody in the US government has said this app is an aid to terrorists. Its just something that is supposed by a couple of random people. I don't know how slashdot comes to the conclusion that the "US" (government I presume) exclaimed this.
Yes, but OTOH, nothing in the summary says that anybody in the US government has said this app is an aid to terrorists. I don't know how you came to the conclusion that slashdot came to the conclusion that the US exclaimed this.
(Seriously: you're accusing the summary of not accurately reflecting what's in the article, but you're not accurately reflecting what's in the summary...)
And on my English copy of Windows XP Home Edition, this resolves to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data. So why does Windows mark this folder hidden so that the end user can't easily back up the files inside to removable media or send them to other people over the Internet?
Because it's designed for application-specific data that shouldn't be manipulated by users in ordinary circumstances (which is what is most commonly stored in Program Files). If you want users to see the files, you could try CSIDL_COMMON_DOCUMENTS instead, which even has a nice handy shortcut in the "other places" bar in the side panel of the "My Computer" window ("Shared Documents").
Say your PC breaks.
I don't remember the last time I had a PC break in a way that wasn't reparable.
Actually, I lie. I do. It was a P1-100 I bought in 1996. I'd used it as my primary workstation for years, then relegated it to file/print/web server for a while after that, until finally it was too slow for that task, after which it became my router/firewall for a while. Sure, I had to swap out components when they broke, but that was always cheaper than replacing it with something else that could do the same functions. It had a new power supply, a new cheap hard disk, and about 5 new cpu cooling fans, until eventually the CPU just stopped working. This was some time around 2007-2008, and I couldn't find anyone who'd sell me a processor that would work in the same motherboard, and the AT PSU and case wouldn't work with new motherboards, so I eventually had to just junk everything.
And it's not as if there aren't plenty of small PC shops that'll happily do this kind of repair for you if you're not able to do it yourself. So, as long as you have a use for a computer and no need to upgrade, I'd say it's often more economical just to repair rather than replace.
Or you download some file from M$ that does the same thing as that command. Do you honestly believe M$ would EVER tell a user to run something on a command line?
Maybe not, but it's not like the command line is the only way:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/sag_ip_v6_pro_inst.mspx?mfr=true