What, exactly, does a lamp or light switch compute? A useful definition of a computer is anything that's Turing complete - see here. Changing your own light bulbs is probably already illegal if you're not a Registered Electrical Practitioner...
Good points, and if they actually were my publisher, I wouldn't have (as much of) a problem signing an exclusive agreement with them. But they're not my publisher - or I don't consider them as such, anyway. They're a retailer. If they were my publisher, I'd expect them to do some of the things a publisher traditionally does, like exercising some discrimination over what they publish and making some effort to market the books to readers. One of my books that's eligible for the programme was uploaded the day before, and had sold two copies at the time I received their offer, so I don't think they're being in any way choosy over who they invite.
I'm an indie author (see sig) with a couple of books on sale at Amazon, among other places. On the one hand, Amazon already accounts for about 90% of my sales, so I wouldn't be giving up much revenue by offering a title there exclusively, and it wouldn't take much borrowing to make up the loss. On the other hand, everyone and his dog will jump on this programme, so that $6 million pie is going to be cut into a lot of very thin slices, to the point that the likely reward doesn't seem worth what I have to give up in order to participate. If someone manages to challenge Amazon as an ebook retailer, I don't want to be locked out of them. On the gripping hand, I've seen what companies do when they become monopolies, and I've no desire to help build another one.
Bricks-and-mortar libraries don't tell authors and publishers, "We'll stock your books if you promise not to sell them anywhere else." Then again, no library is anywhere near as big or influential as Amazon...
vFAT is what provides long filenames in FAT16. As long as you limit yourself to using 8.3 filenames on the disk, you wouldn't need a license - and since it's only Windows that needs this driver, the filenames can be chosen specifically to fit within that naming scheme.
Hmm. I have to say it wouldn't surprise me, this being Windows and all, but my drive worked in Windows 7 and XP SP 3. The manual says it doesn't work in Windows 2000 - you can only have one partition per USB socket there.
A small partition at the start of the drive formatted as FAT16 or FAT32 that contains the drivers. The rest of the space is a big partition formatted as ext-whatever. I have a 256-meg USB drive with a floppy-sized partition that contains some sort of driver for Windows 95 or 98, presumably so that you can format the big partition without making the drive useless with any computer where you didn't install the driver.
Until a few years ago, you could've (ab)used the autorun feature to make that work, but since malware writers finally got around to exploiting the gaping security hole that autorun represents, Microsoft now disable it by default. So you're back where you started.
Support for long filenames in FAT appeared in Windows 95, so any patents on it ought to expire in the next few years. FAT32 came in with Windows 95 OSR 2 - I'm too lazy to look up when that was released, but patents on it probably haven't got much longer. I don't imagine it's a coincidence that Microsoft are pushing a replacement for these filesystems.
I have a novel on sale in the Kindle Store (Death & Magic, a murder mystery set in a school for wizards). I wrote it in OpenOffice.org, before I had any thought of releasing it as an ebook. When the time came to convert it, I exported it as HTML and used a text editor to get rid of all the crap that OO.o puts in just in case you want to re-import it and have it look something like it used to. This took a couple of evenings - I could probably have done it faster if I'd been braver with my regexs. It kept the italics without any problems. I put in some basic CSS to control the paragraph indents and make the chapter headings look nice.
I tried using Amazon's KindleGen program for converting the HTML to.mobi, but couldn't figure out how to fix all the compiler warnings. Then I found Mobipocket Creator, which did everything I needed without any fuss, and produced a file that looked perfect on my Kindle. (Well - perfect apart from the known bugs in rendering, such as the way it won't add more than a certain amount of padding between words, so a line can look too short if there's a long word at the start of the next one.)
I learned my lesson - the book I'm writing now (volume 3 of the series) is starting life as HTML in a text editor, so I control exactly what formatting goes into it.
Let me know when your book's on the Kindle - it sounds like the sort of thing I might like.
A solution would be to make the first chapter free and the full book $5.
Amazon already requires this as a condition of publishing your book on the Kindle. They make the first 10% of any book available as a free download. When you get to the end of that 10%, there's a link to buy the complete book. If you don't want to buy it, just delete the sample. Smashwords does the same, but allow the author to say how much of the book he wants to offer as a free sample. I presume other bookshops have a similar arrangement, but I haven't bought anything from them.
This feature probably needs to be more heavily promoted... I saw a review of The Help by Kathryn Stockett that amounted to, "The Southern dialect made the book too hard to read. If I'd known about it, I wouldn't have bought the book." The Southern dialect is readily apparent from the first page (or screen), so this person could easily have saved their money...
One use of the data would be to create a uniform worldwide definition of "sea level". Countries have their own standards for it. We know they're not the same, but we don't always know by how much they differ. When the Channel Tunnel (between Britain and France) was being dug, and the diggers from each end met in the middle, they found they were about 50cm out - each side had been measuring their depth relative to their own definition of "sea level".
That would probably work better, yes. Though you can bet this hack wasn't done by someone looking up the record for phone number 000-0000-0000, then 000-0000-0001, then... Perhaps as well as limiting the number of searches an employee can do, searches should be limited to returning no more than X records, where X is much smaller than the number of records in the database.
The most basic call center employee needs access to data of all the customers, since any of them may call. How can you partition the data and at the same time achieve seamless customer experience wherever the customer may contact you?
Partition the call centre employees according to the least significant digit or digits of the customer's telephone number. Employees A, B and C deal with customers with phone numbers ending in 0, and can only see records of those customers. Employees D, E and F deal with phone numbers ending in 1, and so on.
This is how it was done when I worked in the civil service nearly 20 years ago (well, there it was alphabetically by customer surname, but it's the same principle). That was done for logistical convenience, because we had huge quantities of paper. The records of any customer who might call me would be within 10 feet of where I was sitting, but it had the useful side effect of making it obvious if I went looking at records I wasn't supposed to.
Granted, this approach in itself wouldn't stop someone copying everything they can access onto a DVD, but if done properly, it would limit the number of customers who want to sue you. It would also give you a head start on figuring out which employee has gone rogue or wrote their password on a Post-It...
...I did my computing A-Level on these machines. The school had about 20 of them, networked together with Econet and using a 20 megabyte hard disk for storage. Students had an allocation of 100 K (yes, kilobytes), and I don't think I ever filled mine up...
The specification for the SMS message format pre-dates Y2K by about 15 years. I came across it in 1995 (and thought it was useless - what sort of idiot would try to fit a message into 160 characters? And who would want to type it on a 12-button keyboard?). Where I worked, nobody worried about Y2K until about 1998.
Yet more cynical Slashdot nerd demands that even more cynical Slashdot nerd turn in his nerd card for not recognising a Simpsons quote that references Star Trek...
(It's Grade School Confidential, the one where Principal Skinner and Mrs Krabapple carry on a sordid affair in school. Bart finds out about it and exposes them in front of his classmates. "Set your faces to stun" is what he says just before flinging open the door that the lovers are hiding behind.)
We may have to agree to disagree... I don't think computers should be involved in counting votes at all. Any system where the voter can verify his vote after he's left the polling station is open to votes being bought. If the registrar knows which voter cast which ballot, what stops him selling that information to someone else?
Forcing an attacker to hack multiple systems is good, but there's always the possibility of a buffer overflow or SQL injection.
The way I see it, having lots of people count lots of pieces of paper works well for something that has to be done once every three to five years. (If we were doing it once a week, I might want to automate it.) Letting the computers take over that process brings no significant advantages, and adds lots of problems that I believe are insoluble.
Voting machines are inherently untrustworthy. Publish all the code you like. Have it inspected by Donald Knuth. The voters have no way of knowing that that code is what's actually running on the machines in the polling stations, or that the hardware will execute it in the way that the language spec says it should. Attempts to give them a way to know are a sticking plaster over a gaping wound - there are too many things about the machine that are invisible to the naked eye, and too many ways in which the machine can be made to lie.
Paper-based elections need a lot of people to run them. This is a good thing, because someone who wants to rig an election has to bribe or threaten a lot of people. The more people are in that position, the more likely one of them is to blow the whistle. Someone who wants to rig an election that's run by voting machines has to influence far fewer people. That's the whole point of computers - they do work that would otherwise have to be done by people. If you want to bring in lots more people who are hard to bribe or threaten, you might as well have them run the election and leave the computers out of it.
The argument that voting machines will give us the result of the election faster than paper ballots is true but irrelevant. Do you want the wrong answer in half an hour, or the right answer in two days? A politician, once elected, will serve for three to five years, and unless he drops dead or gets a blowjob from the wrong person, it's very hard to remove him before the next election. You'd better be damn sure that the guy you put there was the one the people actually wanted.
Thanks for that. I've had a quick look around it just now, and I'll definitely be spending some more time there.
I replaced the default distro with Xenium, as I wanted something a bit more familiar. Sadly, the guy who created it looks to have lost interest in it, so it's good to see someone else picking up the torch.
Even when I bought it, it wasn't the best value for money. The attractions were the small size and low weight, and the fact it ran Linux out of the box.
To me, this machine is essentially a portable electric typewriter. I write novels (as if you can't tell from my sig!) and I want something I can use for writing when I'm away from home. For years, I used a Psion 5mx, which I eventually gave up on when the touch screen stopped being touch-sensitive.
I'd wanted to replace the Psion, but couldn't find anything with a decent screen and keyboard of a similar size and weight that didn't come with Windows out of the box (wanting to avoid the MS tax). I don't like to buy second-hand, as you don't know how careful the previous owner was.
Then along came the eeePc, and I thought it was what I'd been waiting for... until I saw it ran Xandros. Their patent deal with MS makes them a non-starter for me.
Then I saw the CnMBook / Alpha 400 / whatever else it's called. I noted that it had a CPU on which no current version of Windows will run (I think NT had a MIPS port about 15 years ago). I couldn't find anything not to like about their Linux distro, so I treated myself to an early Christmas present:-)
Yeah, they might not understand the Internet, but they understand their obligations under the GPL:-)
The CPU in mine is a 400MHz MIPS clone. No idea how that compares with an x86 or ARM device. It has 128MB of RAM and 2GB of on-board flash. It has an SD slot and 3 USB sockets, so you could plug 4GB into each of those, for a (rather unwieldy) 16GB of additional storage.
It takes about 2 minutes to boot into an X desktop. More annoying is that it doesn't have a suspend or hibernate mode - or if it does, I haven't found it. It has a key with "Zzz" written on it, but this just switches off the screen backlight. Still, it does what I bought it for.
It's called a CnMBook. Have a look at this page. (Yeah, I know - bare IP address looks suspicious. I don't think the manufacturer's quite got the hang of this Internet thing. Google is your friend if you don't trust me.) It's sold under a lot of different names.
The specs are similar to the gadget on show here. Mine has a slower CPU, less memory and no touch screen. Battery life is 2.5-3 hours. The OS is a heavily-customised Debian. I love the small size and low weight. I can fit it into my coat pocket. The screen is nice and clear. The keyboard is reasonable, but is prone to registering phantom keystrokes - running vi is therefore not recommended. I don't know if it's just mine that does this, or if it's a design flaw.
The main app I run on it is a text editor. It's a bit slow for anything else.
I paid £139 for mine just before Christmas. I bought it from Maplin, who are now selling them off for £99 - probably because they were evasive about it not running Windows. They now have a Windows CE version of it, which has "Windows CE" in the product name.
Since there's a note from Pratchett at the start of the book saying, "There's a machine very much like bank's computer in the Science Museum in London," I'd say yes, he did know about it.
Linus owns the trademark, but only some of the copyrights - the code he wrote himself. Copyright in the rest of Linux (probably most of it nowadays) belongs to whoever wrote it. (Unless they assigned it to someone else.) So unless MS wants to buy out all the other contributors too, that billion dollars wouldn't get them very far.
By "Eastern bloc" I meant the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe.
This page talks at some length about a Soviet dissident and his reactions to the novel. Basically, he found it hard to believe Orwell lived in Britain, not Russia. That doesn't (much) support my assertion that the Soviet government used the book as a blueprint (or at least, thought it had a lot of good ideas), but I did say "allegedly":-)
Unfortunately for your hopes of moving to somewhere sane, I live in Britain.
Slashdot Mirror
What, exactly, does a lamp or light switch compute? A useful definition of a computer is anything that's Turing complete - see here. Changing your own light bulbs is probably already illegal if you're not a Registered Electrical Practitioner...
Good points, and if they actually were my publisher, I wouldn't have (as much of) a problem signing an exclusive agreement with them. But they're not my publisher - or I don't consider them as such, anyway. They're a retailer. If they were my publisher, I'd expect them to do some of the things a publisher traditionally does, like exercising some discrimination over what they publish and making some effort to market the books to readers. One of my books that's eligible for the programme was uploaded the day before, and had sold two copies at the time I received their offer, so I don't think they're being in any way choosy over who they invite.
I'm an indie author (see sig) with a couple of books on sale at Amazon, among other places. On the one hand, Amazon already accounts for about 90% of my sales, so I wouldn't be giving up much revenue by offering a title there exclusively, and it wouldn't take much borrowing to make up the loss. On the other hand, everyone and his dog will jump on this programme, so that $6 million pie is going to be cut into a lot of very thin slices, to the point that the likely reward doesn't seem worth what I have to give up in order to participate. If someone manages to challenge Amazon as an ebook retailer, I don't want to be locked out of them. On the gripping hand, I've seen what companies do when they become monopolies, and I've no desire to help build another one.
Bricks-and-mortar libraries don't tell authors and publishers, "We'll stock your books if you promise not to sell them anywhere else." Then again, no library is anywhere near as big or influential as Amazon...
vFAT is what provides long filenames in FAT16. As long as you limit yourself to using 8.3 filenames on the disk, you wouldn't need a license - and since it's only Windows that needs this driver, the filenames can be chosen specifically to fit within that naming scheme.
Hmm. I have to say it wouldn't surprise me, this being Windows and all, but my drive worked in Windows 7 and XP SP 3. The manual says it doesn't work in Windows 2000 - you can only have one partition per USB socket there.
A small partition at the start of the drive formatted as FAT16 or FAT32 that contains the drivers. The rest of the space is a big partition formatted as ext-whatever. I have a 256-meg USB drive with a floppy-sized partition that contains some sort of driver for Windows 95 or 98, presumably so that you can format the big partition without making the drive useless with any computer where you didn't install the driver.
Until a few years ago, you could've (ab)used the autorun feature to make that work, but since malware writers finally got around to exploiting the gaping security hole that autorun represents, Microsoft now disable it by default. So you're back where you started.
Support for long filenames in FAT appeared in Windows 95, so any patents on it ought to expire in the next few years. FAT32 came in with Windows 95 OSR 2 - I'm too lazy to look up when that was released, but patents on it probably haven't got much longer. I don't imagine it's a coincidence that Microsoft are pushing a replacement for these filesystems.
I have a novel on sale in the Kindle Store ( Death & Magic , a murder mystery set in a school for wizards). I wrote it in OpenOffice.org, before I had any thought of releasing it as an ebook. When the time came to convert it, I exported it as HTML and used a text editor to get rid of all the crap that OO.o puts in just in case you want to re-import it and have it look something like it used to. This took a couple of evenings - I could probably have done it faster if I'd been braver with my regexs. It kept the italics without any problems. I put in some basic CSS to control the paragraph indents and make the chapter headings look nice.
I tried using Amazon's KindleGen program for converting the HTML to .mobi, but couldn't figure out how to fix all the compiler warnings. Then I found Mobipocket Creator, which did everything I needed without any fuss, and produced a file that looked perfect on my Kindle. (Well - perfect apart from the known bugs in rendering, such as the way it won't add more than a certain amount of padding between words, so a line can look too short if there's a long word at the start of the next one.)
I learned my lesson - the book I'm writing now (volume 3 of the series) is starting life as HTML in a text editor, so I control exactly what formatting goes into it.
Let me know when your book's on the Kindle - it sounds like the sort of thing I might like.
Amazon already requires this as a condition of publishing your book on the Kindle. They make the first 10% of any book available as a free download. When you get to the end of that 10%, there's a link to buy the complete book. If you don't want to buy it, just delete the sample. Smashwords does the same, but allow the author to say how much of the book he wants to offer as a free sample. I presume other bookshops have a similar arrangement, but I haven't bought anything from them.
This feature probably needs to be more heavily promoted... I saw a review of The Help by Kathryn Stockett that amounted to, "The Southern dialect made the book too hard to read. If I'd known about it, I wouldn't have bought the book." The Southern dialect is readily apparent from the first page (or screen), so this person could easily have saved their money...
One use of the data would be to create a uniform worldwide definition of "sea level". Countries have their own standards for it. We know they're not the same, but we don't always know by how much they differ. When the Channel Tunnel (between Britain and France) was being dug, and the diggers from each end met in the middle, they found they were about 50cm out - each side had been measuring their depth relative to their own definition of "sea level".
That would probably work better, yes. Though you can bet this hack wasn't done by someone looking up the record for phone number 000-0000-0000, then 000-0000-0001, then... Perhaps as well as limiting the number of searches an employee can do, searches should be limited to returning no more than X records, where X is much smaller than the number of records in the database.
The most basic call center employee needs access to data of all the customers, since any of them may call. How can you partition the data and at the same time achieve seamless customer experience wherever the customer may contact you?
Partition the call centre employees according to the least significant digit or digits of the customer's telephone number. Employees A, B and C deal with customers with phone numbers ending in 0, and can only see records of those customers. Employees D, E and F deal with phone numbers ending in 1, and so on.
This is how it was done when I worked in the civil service nearly 20 years ago (well, there it was alphabetically by customer surname, but it's the same principle). That was done for logistical convenience, because we had huge quantities of paper. The records of any customer who might call me would be within 10 feet of where I was sitting, but it had the useful side effect of making it obvious if I went looking at records I wasn't supposed to.
Granted, this approach in itself wouldn't stop someone copying everything they can access onto a DVD, but if done properly, it would limit the number of customers who want to sue you. It would also give you a head start on figuring out which employee has gone rogue or wrote their password on a Post-It...
...I did my computing A-Level on these machines. The school had about 20 of them, networked together with Econet and using a 20 megabyte hard disk for storage. Students had an allocation of 100 K (yes, kilobytes), and I don't think I ever filled mine up...
Now get off my lawn!
The specification for the SMS message format pre-dates Y2K by about 15 years. I came across it in 1995 (and thought it was useless - what sort of idiot would try to fit a message into 160 characters? And who would want to type it on a 12-button keyboard?). Where I worked, nobody worried about Y2K until about 1998.
Yet more cynical Slashdot nerd demands that even more cynical Slashdot nerd turn in his nerd card for not recognising a Simpsons quote that references Star Trek...
(It's Grade School Confidential, the one where Principal Skinner and Mrs Krabapple carry on a sordid affair in school. Bart finds out about it and exposes them in front of his classmates. "Set your faces to stun" is what he says just before flinging open the door that the lovers are hiding behind.)
We may have to agree to disagree... I don't think computers should be involved in counting votes at all. Any system where the voter can verify his vote after he's left the polling station is open to votes being bought. If the registrar knows which voter cast which ballot, what stops him selling that information to someone else?
Forcing an attacker to hack multiple systems is good, but there's always the possibility of a buffer overflow or SQL injection.
The way I see it, having lots of people count lots of pieces of paper works well for something that has to be done once every three to five years. (If we were doing it once a week, I might want to automate it.) Letting the computers take over that process brings no significant advantages, and adds lots of problems that I believe are insoluble.
Voting machines are inherently untrustworthy. Publish all the code you like. Have it inspected by Donald Knuth. The voters have no way of knowing that that code is what's actually running on the machines in the polling stations, or that the hardware will execute it in the way that the language spec says it should. Attempts to give them a way to know are a sticking plaster over a gaping wound - there are too many things about the machine that are invisible to the naked eye, and too many ways in which the machine can be made to lie.
Paper-based elections need a lot of people to run them. This is a good thing, because someone who wants to rig an election has to bribe or threaten a lot of people. The more people are in that position, the more likely one of them is to blow the whistle. Someone who wants to rig an election that's run by voting machines has to influence far fewer people. That's the whole point of computers - they do work that would otherwise have to be done by people. If you want to bring in lots more people who are hard to bribe or threaten, you might as well have them run the election and leave the computers out of it.
The argument that voting machines will give us the result of the election faster than paper ballots is true but irrelevant. Do you want the wrong answer in half an hour, or the right answer in two days? A politician, once elected, will serve for three to five years, and unless he drops dead or gets a blowjob from the wrong person, it's very hard to remove him before the next election. You'd better be damn sure that the guy you put there was the one the people actually wanted.
Thanks for that. I've had a quick look around it just now, and I'll definitely be spending some more time there.
I replaced the default distro with Xenium, as I wanted something a bit more familiar. Sadly, the guy who created it looks to have lost interest in it, so it's good to see someone else picking up the torch.
Even when I bought it, it wasn't the best value for money. The attractions were the small size and low weight, and the fact it ran Linux out of the box.
To me, this machine is essentially a portable electric typewriter. I write novels (as if you can't tell from my sig!) and I want something I can use for writing when I'm away from home. For years, I used a Psion 5mx, which I eventually gave up on when the touch screen stopped being touch-sensitive.
I'd wanted to replace the Psion, but couldn't find anything with a decent screen and keyboard of a similar size and weight that didn't come with Windows out of the box (wanting to avoid the MS tax). I don't like to buy second-hand, as you don't know how careful the previous owner was.
Then along came the eeePc, and I thought it was what I'd been waiting for... until I saw it ran Xandros. Their patent deal with MS makes them a non-starter for me.
Then I saw the CnMBook / Alpha 400 / whatever else it's called. I noted that it had a CPU on which no current version of Windows will run (I think NT had a MIPS port about 15 years ago). I couldn't find anything not to like about their Linux distro, so I treated myself to an early Christmas present :-)
Yes, that's the one. It's sold under so many different names that I have no idea which is the real one and which are just symlinks.
Yeah, they might not understand the Internet, but they understand their obligations under the GPL :-)
The CPU in mine is a 400MHz MIPS clone. No idea how that compares with an x86 or ARM device. It has 128MB of RAM and 2GB of on-board flash. It has an SD slot and 3 USB sockets, so you could plug 4GB into each of those, for a (rather unwieldy) 16GB of additional storage.
It takes about 2 minutes to boot into an X desktop. More annoying is that it doesn't have a suspend or hibernate mode - or if it does, I haven't found it. It has a key with "Zzz" written on it, but this just switches off the screen backlight. Still, it does what I bought it for.
...or something very much like it.
It's called a CnMBook. Have a look at this page. (Yeah, I know - bare IP address looks suspicious. I don't think the manufacturer's quite got the hang of this Internet thing. Google is your friend if you don't trust me.) It's sold under a lot of different names.
The specs are similar to the gadget on show here. Mine has a slower CPU, less memory and no touch screen. Battery life is 2.5-3 hours. The OS is a heavily-customised Debian. I love the small size and low weight. I can fit it into my coat pocket. The screen is nice and clear. The keyboard is reasonable, but is prone to registering phantom keystrokes - running vi is therefore not recommended. I don't know if it's just mine that does this, or if it's a design flaw.
The main app I run on it is a text editor. It's a bit slow for anything else.
I paid £139 for mine just before Christmas. I bought it from Maplin, who are now selling them off for £99 - probably because they were evasive about it not running Windows. They now have a Windows CE version of it, which has "Windows CE" in the product name.
Since there's a note from Pratchett at the start of the book saying, "There's a machine very much like bank's computer in the Science Museum in London," I'd say yes, he did know about it.
Linus owns the trademark, but only some of the copyrights - the code he wrote himself. Copyright in the rest of Linux (probably most of it nowadays) belongs to whoever wrote it. (Unless they assigned it to someone else.) So unless MS wants to buy out all the other contributors too, that billion dollars wouldn't get them very far.
By "Eastern bloc" I meant the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe.
This page talks at some length about a Soviet dissident and his reactions to the novel. Basically, he found it hard to believe Orwell lived in Britain, not Russia. That doesn't (much) support my assertion that the Soviet government used the book as a blueprint (or at least, thought it had a lot of good ideas), but I did say "allegedly" :-)
Unfortunately for your hopes of moving to somewhere sane, I live in Britain.