gcc does warn about it, but the extra parantheses around the assignment suppress the warning. It's part of the language specification, so the compiler can't forbid it - at least not by default.
It depends on the contract the author signed with whoever bought the film rights, which is usually a function of how badly he needed or wanted the money, and how good his lawyer was in comparison to the other side's. It used to be common for the publisher of the book to buy the right to adapt or convert the story to any other other medium, so they wouldn't need the author's permission to sell the movie rights. And of course, once the author is dead, his heirs, assuming they still own the rights, tend not to be so fussy about maintaining the integrity of Daddy's or Grandaddy's artistic vision...
About two million years at the current rate. Of course, if the rate of uploading continues to accelerate as it has been doing, they might get there a bit sooner.
"Zero day" refers to a vulnerability for which no patch exists, presumably because the vendor wasn't aware of it. It's the amount of time between when the vendor becomes aware of the vulnerability and when the black hats can start exploiting it, not the amount of time that it's existed.
When you can type "Pringles" into the search box on your favourite torrent site and download some instructions for your 3D printer that will produce a can of them in less time and for less money than going to the store and buying a can, then food manufacturers will start putting DRM in food...
Back then, the universe contained the same amount of matter as it does now, but compressed into a much smaller volume. Therefore it was much denser - much too dense to be considered a vacuum - meaning that sound could travel through it.
I've heard (too lazy to dig out a source) that printing physical books and shipping them to the retailer accounts for about 20% of the retail price. Publishers invest a lot of money in each book that they publish (the author's advance, editing, cover design, marketing and so on). They still have the mindset that shelf space is scarce, meaning that if a book doesn't show a profit within six months or a year of release, it probably never will, because it will have been kicked out of the front of the bookshop to make room for the next release.
The problem was not Apple's app store model. The problem was that Apple allegedly colluded with the publishers to raise the prices of ebooks in other stores. With iPhone and iPad apps, it didn't matter so much, because the Apple store is the only officially-sanctioned source of those. I guess Apple didn't like the thought of having to compete on price with other ebook retailers...
Very few people use all of the options on their cars either. I don't use AM radio, but it's nice to know it's there if I ever want to.
Agreed, but (unless the radio is very badly designed) having circuitry for AM reception doesn't interfere with FM or digital reception. Whereas a touchscreen is an extra layer of stuff between your eyes and the pixels, which reduces image quality or has to be compensated for. A better car analogy might be that the air conditioning is always running, and the "off" switch just diverts the air flow to the outside of the vehicle...
E-Book prices are fixed by a cartel of publishers.
Which the government (for some values of "government") has noticed, and decided to do something about. Google "ebook price fixing lawsuit" for more information.
Book paper is too rough to wipe your arse with, and if the publisher used cheap ink, you end up dirtier than you were to start...
Blame the publishers for DRM. They're the ones who refused to let Amazon sell electronic versions of their books without it. The Kindle is perfectly happy to display un-DRMed ebooks in any of the formats it supports. KDP, Amazon's self-publishing programme, allows the author to choose whether to add DRM to the book. I've left it off all of mine, for reasons that will be familiar to any Slashdot reader.
It's the same with regional restrictions. Traditionally, authors usually license their books to publishers by territory and/or language. An author in Germany might license his book to a German publisher, but that publisher might only be allowed to sell it in Germany, or only in countries where German is the main language. They might not have the contacts or the understanding of the market to do a proper job of selling the book in other countries or languages, so they're happy to let the author or his agent try to license the book elsewhere. Amazon.de carries the German version of the ebook, which the publisher isn't allowed to sell outside Germany.
The reason that terms from the publisher's contract with the author get carried over to the retailer is because of something called agency pricing. When selling ebooks, the retailer acts as an agent of the publisher, not an independent entity. The publisher sets the retail price of the book, and the retailer takes a fixed percentage of that as commission. This is something that Apple strongarmed the publishers into doing, because they didn't want to have to compete on price when they started selling ebooks. Google "ebook price fixing lawsuit" for more information. (Agency pricing itself isn't illegal, but the lawsuit alleges that Apple and five of the big six publishers colluded to use it to keep ebook prices artificially high. Some of the publishers have already settled, and have agreed to stop using agency pricing.)
At the university I attended, it was the standard language for all the courses that involved programming or software design. That may have been because the head of the computer science department was on one of the committees that designed it. This was about 20 years ago. I was aware that it's still used for real-time applications, particularly military and aerospace, but I'm mildly surprised that anyone still cares about it enough to develop a new version of the standard. I applied for a programming job at a defence company that used it, circa 1995, but haven't had anything to do with it since.
I wouldn't describe it as complex, particularly, but it is pedantic and verbose, requiring you to prove that you know what you're doing. You have to spell out a lot of things that other languages assume by default or leave up to the specific implementation. For example, there's a statement that explicitly does nothing, like NOP in assembly languages, so you can say things like "if condition then do something else null; end if;" so that it's clear to the reader that you definitely want to do nothing if the condition is false - you didn't just forget about it. Another quirk is that if you want to mix AND and OR in a Boolean expression, you have to use brackets to show what order you want things evaluated in. "x or y or z" is fine, as is "x and y and z", but "x or y and z" is a syntax error - you have to write "(x or y) and z" or "x or (y and z)". The reasoning is that other languages differ as to whether the two operators have different precedence or the same precedence, so you might expect it to evaluate one way and find that it evaluates the other way.
Fun fact - Oracle's PL/SQL, the language in which you write triggers and stored procedures for the database, owes a lot of its syntax and semantics to Ada.
Also, if we're wrong about how the moon was formed, the worst that'll happen is that someone has to rewrite a few astronomy textbooks. If we're wrong about humans making the planet hotter (which I don't believe we are), that means rich people don't need to spend a lot of money reducing the amount of greenhouse gases they dump into the atmosphere. Maybe that's why "giant impact deniers" are rather rarer than climate change deniers...
So did they let you borrow the book, or pirate it? You never actually answered the reason you decided to try the site, just that he had a shitty search engine.
I gave up before I got that far. My point was that if their search was no good, it didn't matter whether they were a pirate site or a legitimate one - either way, I didn't see them posing any danger to my earnings.
Another indie author here. I saw the hysteria in one of my Facebook groups last week and decided to see for myself. I searched lendink for my name and saw my three books listed. One of my titles is available only for the Kindle at the moment, so I thought I'd ask to borrow it for the Nook. That should determine whether they really were just matching up people to borrow books, or were pirating them.
Before they'd let me borrow a book, they wanted me to offer one for someone else to borrow. I pretended to have one of my own titles to offer. They asked me for the author and title so they could do a search on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but then seemed to ignore the author and just bring up the first match for a search on the title. One of my books has the same title as about ten other books. The others have "and" in the title, which most search functions ignore. So the site wouldn't let me offer my own books to be borrowed. Meaning that regardless of whether they were pirating or lending, they weren't very good at it.
I suppose for some indie authors, it's easy to believe that the reason they're not making megabucks is because everyone's pirating their book. Easier than believing it's because of Sturgeon's Law...
...let's give them data. I foresee a Thunderbird plugin that randomly sends email to random addresses, to give the government more chaff to sort through. Or you could set up a virtual machine and let it become part of a botnet. Last time I checked, it wasn't illegal to allow someone else to use your computer for spamming...
If you've written a book and want to give it away, perhaps you shouldn't distribute it (only) via a site that's used mainly for hosting or linking to pirated books. There are plenty of "show off your writing" sites that you could post it to, or you could spend a few dollars for your own hosting.
GSM has a fixed maximum cell size - 20km radius at first, later extended to 35km. CDMA doesn't have a maximum. GSM does because it uses time division multiplexing - several phones can transmit and receive on the same frequency, and they take turns. The further from the tower your phone is, the longer the signal takes to travel back and forth, and there comes a point where your transmissions spill into the next slot, reducing call quality for whoever's using it. If you get to that distance from the tower, it will just drop the call. The maximum cell size is a tradeoff between how much equipment the network needs to serve a given area and how much spectrum it would have to use.
In densely-populated places like most of Europe, the maximum cell size isn't really an issue - there aren't many places where you can leave one settlement and travel 20km without entering another. Australia and North America, on the other hand, are much more spread out, and the number of GSM cells that would be needed to provide acceptable coverage to rural areas would be too expensive for the likely revenue from them.
...plus a 12K JPEG of me and a 60K JPEG for the background. No Javascript or Flash, because I'm not doing anything that needs them. The site as a whole is probably around 200 megs, but most of that is photos and files to download.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know the shuf command existed until now. You just gave me an easier way to pick my lottery numbers -
seq 1 49 | shuf -n 6 | sort -n
Thanks for that.
gcc does warn about it, but the extra parantheses around the assignment suppress the warning. It's part of the language specification, so the compiler can't forbid it - at least not by default.
Most mediaeval cathedrals took that sort of time to finish.
It depends on the contract the author signed with whoever bought the film rights, which is usually a function of how badly he needed or wanted the money, and how good his lawyer was in comparison to the other side's. It used to be common for the publisher of the book to buy the right to adapt or convert the story to any other other medium, so they wouldn't need the author's permission to sell the movie rights. And of course, once the author is dead, his heirs, assuming they still own the rights, tend not to be so fussy about maintaining the integrity of Daddy's or Grandaddy's artistic vision...
About two million years at the current rate. Of course, if the rate of uploading continues to accelerate as it has been doing, they might get there a bit sooner.
"Zero day" refers to a vulnerability for which no patch exists, presumably because the vendor wasn't aware of it. It's the amount of time between when the vendor becomes aware of the vulnerability and when the black hats can start exploiting it, not the amount of time that it's existed.
See Prof Wikipedia for more details.
When you can type "Pringles" into the search box on your favourite torrent site and download some instructions for your 3D printer that will produce a can of them in less time and for less money than going to the store and buying a can, then food manufacturers will start putting DRM in food...
Back then, the universe contained the same amount of matter as it does now, but compressed into a much smaller volume. Therefore it was much denser - much too dense to be considered a vacuum - meaning that sound could travel through it.
I've heard (too lazy to dig out a source) that printing physical books and shipping them to the retailer accounts for about 20% of the retail price. Publishers invest a lot of money in each book that they publish (the author's advance, editing, cover design, marketing and so on). They still have the mindset that shelf space is scarce, meaning that if a book doesn't show a profit within six months or a year of release, it probably never will, because it will have been kicked out of the front of the bookshop to make room for the next release.
The problem was not Apple's app store model. The problem was that Apple allegedly colluded with the publishers to raise the prices of ebooks in other stores. With iPhone and iPad apps, it didn't matter so much, because the Apple store is the only officially-sanctioned source of those. I guess Apple didn't like the thought of having to compete on price with other ebook retailers...
Very few people use all of the options on their cars either. I don't use AM radio, but it's nice to know it's there if I ever want to.
Agreed, but (unless the radio is very badly designed) having circuitry for AM reception doesn't interfere with FM or digital reception. Whereas a touchscreen is an extra layer of stuff between your eyes and the pixels, which reduces image quality or has to be compensated for. A better car analogy might be that the air conditioning is always running, and the "off" switch just diverts the air flow to the outside of the vehicle...
E-Book prices are fixed by a cartel of publishers.
Which the government (for some values of "government") has noticed, and decided to do something about. Google "ebook price fixing lawsuit" for more information.
Book paper is too rough to wipe your arse with, and if the publisher used cheap ink, you end up dirtier than you were to start...
Blame the publishers for DRM. They're the ones who refused to let Amazon sell electronic versions of their books without it. The Kindle is perfectly happy to display un-DRMed ebooks in any of the formats it supports. KDP, Amazon's self-publishing programme, allows the author to choose whether to add DRM to the book. I've left it off all of mine, for reasons that will be familiar to any Slashdot reader.
It's the same with regional restrictions. Traditionally, authors usually license their books to publishers by territory and/or language. An author in Germany might license his book to a German publisher, but that publisher might only be allowed to sell it in Germany, or only in countries where German is the main language. They might not have the contacts or the understanding of the market to do a proper job of selling the book in other countries or languages, so they're happy to let the author or his agent try to license the book elsewhere. Amazon.de carries the German version of the ebook, which the publisher isn't allowed to sell outside Germany.
The reason that terms from the publisher's contract with the author get carried over to the retailer is because of something called agency pricing. When selling ebooks, the retailer acts as an agent of the publisher, not an independent entity. The publisher sets the retail price of the book, and the retailer takes a fixed percentage of that as commission. This is something that Apple strongarmed the publishers into doing, because they didn't want to have to compete on price when they started selling ebooks. Google "ebook price fixing lawsuit" for more information. (Agency pricing itself isn't illegal, but the lawsuit alleges that Apple and five of the big six publishers colluded to use it to keep ebook prices artificially high. Some of the publishers have already settled, and have agreed to stop using agency pricing.)
At the university I attended, it was the standard language for all the courses that involved programming or software design. That may have been because the head of the computer science department was on one of the committees that designed it. This was about 20 years ago. I was aware that it's still used for real-time applications, particularly military and aerospace, but I'm mildly surprised that anyone still cares about it enough to develop a new version of the standard. I applied for a programming job at a defence company that used it, circa 1995, but haven't had anything to do with it since.
I wouldn't describe it as complex, particularly, but it is pedantic and verbose, requiring you to prove that you know what you're doing. You have to spell out a lot of things that other languages assume by default or leave up to the specific implementation. For example, there's a statement that explicitly does nothing, like NOP in assembly languages, so you can say things like "if condition then do something else null; end if;" so that it's clear to the reader that you definitely want to do nothing if the condition is false - you didn't just forget about it. Another quirk is that if you want to mix AND and OR in a Boolean expression, you have to use brackets to show what order you want things evaluated in. "x or y or z" is fine, as is "x and y and z", but "x or y and z" is a syntax error - you have to write "(x or y) and z" or "x or (y and z)". The reasoning is that other languages differ as to whether the two operators have different precedence or the same precedence, so you might expect it to evaluate one way and find that it evaluates the other way.
Fun fact - Oracle's PL/SQL, the language in which you write triggers and stored procedures for the database, owes a lot of its syntax and semantics to Ada.
Also, if we're wrong about how the moon was formed, the worst that'll happen is that someone has to rewrite a few astronomy textbooks. If we're wrong about humans making the planet hotter (which I don't believe we are), that means rich people don't need to spend a lot of money reducing the amount of greenhouse gases they dump into the atmosphere. Maybe that's why "giant impact deniers" are rather rarer than climate change deniers...
So did they let you borrow the book, or pirate it? You never actually answered the reason you decided to try the site, just that he had a shitty search engine.
I gave up before I got that far. My point was that if their search was no good, it didn't matter whether they were a pirate site or a legitimate one - either way, I didn't see them posing any danger to my earnings.
Another indie author here. I saw the hysteria in one of my Facebook groups last week and decided to see for myself. I searched lendink for my name and saw my three books listed. One of my titles is available only for the Kindle at the moment, so I thought I'd ask to borrow it for the Nook. That should determine whether they really were just matching up people to borrow books, or were pirating them.
Before they'd let me borrow a book, they wanted me to offer one for someone else to borrow. I pretended to have one of my own titles to offer. They asked me for the author and title so they could do a search on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but then seemed to ignore the author and just bring up the first match for a search on the title. One of my books has the same title as about ten other books. The others have "and" in the title, which most search functions ignore. So the site wouldn't let me offer my own books to be borrowed. Meaning that regardless of whether they were pirating or lending, they weren't very good at it.
I suppose for some indie authors, it's easy to believe that the reason they're not making megabucks is because everyone's pirating their book. Easier than believing it's because of Sturgeon's Law...
Agreed. (Posting to undo a moderation that I fat-fingered - sorry!)
I was thinking of that when I wrote my post. I wish I could say I was surprised that the minister didn't read the bill...
They're going to have to, aren't they? Since otherwise that's an obvious place for criminals and terrorists to hide their communications.
...let's give them data. I foresee a Thunderbird plugin that randomly sends email to random addresses, to give the government more chaff to sort through. Or you could set up a virtual machine and let it become part of a botnet. Last time I checked, it wasn't illegal to allow someone else to use your computer for spamming...
If you've written a book and want to give it away, perhaps you shouldn't distribute it (only) via a site that's used mainly for hosting or linking to pirated books. There are plenty of "show off your writing" sites that you could post it to, or you could spend a few dollars for your own hosting.
ALGOL 68 allowed whitespace in identifiers. There's a reason most later languages don't...
GSM has a fixed maximum cell size - 20km radius at first, later extended to 35km. CDMA doesn't have a maximum. GSM does because it uses time division multiplexing - several phones can transmit and receive on the same frequency, and they take turns. The further from the tower your phone is, the longer the signal takes to travel back and forth, and there comes a point where your transmissions spill into the next slot, reducing call quality for whoever's using it. If you get to that distance from the tower, it will just drop the call. The maximum cell size is a tradeoff between how much equipment the network needs to serve a given area and how much spectrum it would have to use.
In densely-populated places like most of Europe, the maximum cell size isn't really an issue - there aren't many places where you can leave one settlement and travel 20km without entering another. Australia and North America, on the other hand, are much more spread out, and the number of GSM cells that would be needed to provide acceptable coverage to rural areas would be too expensive for the likely revenue from them.
...plus a 12K JPEG of me and a 60K JPEG for the background. No Javascript or Flash, because I'm not doing anything that needs them. The site as a whole is probably around 200 megs, but most of that is photos and files to download.