If the company is using it without her knowledge, then good on the IOC. Because that means the athlete is being taken advantage of by the company. If the company wants to be associated with the athlete, they should pay! Most olympians have to work part time (with large amounts of unpaid holidays), and their sporting pursuit costs them MAJOR money to do. So they NEED every dollar they can get (yes some olympians are cashed up but they are a minority).
I don't understand. Either Lindsay Vonn has a sponsorship deal with Uvex, in which case they are helping fund her participation in the sport. Or they have no sponsorship deal, and Lindsay (or her representatives) went out and brought Uvex products of her own free will (presumable due to their quality). That actually seems like a better endorsement to me, and I can see no moral reason why Uvex should be banned from mentioning the fact a successful athlete has chosen their kit, that's not taking advantage. If Ms Vonn needs the extra funds (I expect she's one of those not in the struggling category) she could choose to ask for a sponsorship deal or switch to a brand prepared to sponsor her.
Firefox won out over IE not by "hey, we have a clone of IE" but by being -better- than IE.
IE was relatively easy to better. It was a free product which Microsoft had lost motivation to maintain or improve once they had captured the market. It may have been important to the web, but until Mozilla re-awakened competition it wasn't important to MS.
On the other hand Office is one of Microsoft's cash cows and gets an enormous amount of development resource. It will be very hard to beat MS on quality while competing on features and attempting to maintain compatibility with MS document formats. The best approach may be not to try, to build light more focused products which compete with part of Office's capability and do it well. E.g. there is room for a free application which does what keynote does on the Mac.
In my opinion this whole this is a marketing scam for one of the products mentioned. The things that make me suspicious:
- "Blogger, hacker and IT security expert Notrax" 's infosecurityguard blog was started in Dec 2009, just before he started his ambitious series of security reviews.
- There are no details of who he is "for his own safety"
- He calls the systems he's failed to break "secure" and highlights them in reassuring green to attract you attention (only admitting in the small print that he means he hasn't broken them yet). This is not the kind of language security researchers use.
- Most of the the products are "details to be published", including respected software such as Zphone/ZRTP. Just one shines out as both "secure" and "review available". That miracle product is PhoneCrypt. Oooh, I must click on that review now -- oh look at that glowing prose.
"SecurStar is the company behind PhoneCrypt." Now I wonder what relation our mysterious, benevolent friend Notrax has to SecurStar.
To me all the smells lead to a fake marketing blog. Nice story/.
Ubuntu changed the browser settings and default homepage in previous releases. It used to use Google, but benefiting Canonical rather than Mozilla. This particular change is just getting the kick-backs from a higher payer, I don't think Mozilla were getting any revenue to lose.
Yes because it's so much better to get people to use Windows, rather than to get them to use Ubuntu...
I'd venture to suggest that the above AC is proposing to advocate for one of the many Linux distributions that don't have a revenue sharing agreement with Bing, not recommending his friends stay on Windows.
I think I know what you're saying though: I guess you've been putting lots of effort into advocating Ubuntu, and now you feel betrayed?
It is true that Canonical have encouraged an anti-MS attitude within their community. Unlike other distros, bug No 1 in their bug DB makes reference to MS market share.
Personally, I am not too bothered about the default search option (I never liked the search box and usually remove it from my browser profile anyway), but I am increasingly concerned about the gradual pressure that Canonical's extra revenue streams puts on their technical decisions.
They have created their own Ubuntu-branded dropbox-like service (Ubuntu One) and are collecting search share revenue. These things encourage them to make user interface decisions on the user interface which drive people toward revenue generating services rather than for the best technical reasons/user's best interests.
Imagine a future release where the open source version of Chromium provides a clearly better browser than Firefox [I'm only speaking hypothetically, here, Mozilla], would Canonical block a change to the default in Ubuntu as it doesn't generate them Bing revenue. As a user, advocate, and occasional contributor, I'd much prefer these decisions to be entirely technical.
I am somewhat suspicious of this model of making money from associated services rather than support; it's a slippery slope.
"Red Hat" is a singular noun. It is *one* company.
Look at the meaning of the word company itself, surely an indication that you are thinking about a plurality rather than a singular. If you'd used corporation you'd be on firmer ground.
I do think its healthier to think of these commercial entities as the groups of people they are, rather than the singular legal entities the law recognises.
PS: I'm British and have every intention of continuing to use my natural language on slashdot. Annoying ACs is merely a happy side effect.
Others have commented on the problems mozilla have with licensing H.264 decoder distribution. Maybe that could be worked round by relying on a system codec (which licensed or not is the distro/user's responsibility), but there's more to it than that.
The Mozilla foundation's mission is to help the Internet remain an open and accessible global public resource, not to create the browser with the greatest market share at all cost. The MPEG-LA's mission is to extract as much revenue for their member IP "right's holders" as possible, not to further open video on the web.
The MPEG-LA charge software suppliers an IP license to distribute a decoder, but they also have a price sheet for the people providing the content.
- distribute an encoding application they want payment
- use that application to encode and they want a payment (yep two different licenses for both the supplier and user)
- charge for your streamed content they want a per stream payment
Now, as is sensible strategy, they aren't enforcing their charges for internet streaming at the moment. But the current licensing period ends 31st Dec 2010, and the rights holders will want more next time round.
If H.264 works everywhere and becomes the only standard for video on the web, then the web becomes less open and accessible for everyone publishing content.
Now I've no idea what Google pay in licensing for streaming youtube, and what their view is of what they'd have to pay in the future, but they have recently acquired the company responsible for the VP7 and VP8 codecs, so it looks like they do value access to a codec not controlled by the MPEG-LA.
Google (youtube) probably support only H.264 right now on technical merits, they (Chrome) are quite happy to support ogg/theora playback. I'd not be surprised to something new come out from them using the codecs (and people) they got from On2 this year.
Apple are MPEG-LA rights owners; they have no interest in any open AV formats on the web and will probably not implement anything else unless market forces mean they have to.
Mozilla avoid H.264 on licensing cost and support for openness.
Opera avoid H.264 on licensing cost grounds.
Microsoft just wish HTML5 would go away and you'd start using Silverlight (and upgrade to Windows 7 too, please).
There are good arguments for not supporting H.264, at least not until a viable open alternative is widely supported too.
Brendan Eich is JavaScript's father, and there were those who considered his attempt at JavaScript 2.0 was leading it to the dark side. (Mind you that was mainly Microsoft)
It's called pumped storage, and is indeed a natural fit with renewable energy.
In the UK we have approx. 2GW of capacity from pumped energy storage. Mostly at Dinorwig in Snowdonia, where the turbines can go from zero to 1800MW in seconds with the capacity for several hours at that load. While this would be useful for smoothing out variation in renewable energy, it's main use in the UK is to absorb the spike in demand when millions of TV viewers switch on electric kettles to make a cup of tea at the end of a popular soap opera.
The storage and recover of energy involves some losses (it's maybe 75% efficient) but is ideal for absorbing excess renewable energy at low demand periods. While it could help deal with changes in supply in the short term its relatively small capacity means it wouldn't be useful if you had a low wind spell lasting a day or two.
Of course you need to find/construct two lakes near each other but separated in height by hundreds of m, so it only works in certain places, and these may not be the same as the places you could site osmotic power plants.
Re:Its the Intel Lawsuit - Google Style
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I'm pretty confident that HP and Dell were actually paying Intel for chips. Intel was then giving them some proportion back as marketing contributions (nothing per se wrong there). The problem came when getting a good discount didn't depend on how much Intel product you bought, but how little AMD. Using this as a weapon against AMD was the anti-competitive element, not paying HP/Dell towards marketing.
In the same way, if Google were to only offer advertising payments to manufacturers who dropped Win Mobile than that might be anti-competitive.
The answer is Spanish Law will apply in Spain. But, if Spain fail to enact their own legislation to enforce EU regulation then the EU may take the Spanish Government to court (not Spanish citizens).
There are a number of such ongoing cases, including one against the UK government for failure to implement privacy laws (basically for failing to stop the use of Phorm by UK ISPs).
OK, I was with you until that point. An epidemic and pandemic is exactly what this is. What some (particularly the media) are having trouble with is the concept that pandemic is about infection spread and doesn't necessarily equate to "it will kill us all".
I've never heard of Apress before, but they sound really, really shitty. I've never heard of a publisher threatening an author like this. The only times I've seen the clause where an author can create a new edition without the original author used is where the original author either died or had no interest in future editions of the book at all AND didn't object to more authors being brought on board. Looking at our contract, I don't think we could bully someone the way Apress bullied Cooper here... I'm very surprised by this, and would steer people away from Apress.
I don't have as much experience in publishing as you, but I'm guessing that if Wiley signed me up to write "Nose Picking for Dummies," and then after receiving a few royalty cheques my hygiene levels improve and I'm not interested in the 2nd edition, then their contract would allow them to continue the series without me. I don't know, but I'd be surprised if it was otherwise. Certainly you'd have no chance of taking publication of the 2nd edition elsewhere -- such are the breaks of being part of the series. On the plus side I'd benefit from my treatise on the art of nose picking being in the Dummies section of bookshops, and from the brand recognition from potential readers in comparison to "John's Guide to Introductory Level Nose Picking."
Similarly, though at much smaller scale than Dummies, Apress have a series "Beginning....". It would not strike me as that odd that they would have rights in the contract to have a "Beginning Ruby" second edition regardless of the inclinations of the author. It's quite possible that this is different from the contract they'd use if they'd signed him up for a random Ruby book outside of their series.
D would appear to have the same drawback that Culture20 mentioned for A: it "gives [visitors] a false sense of security unless you can contact the site owner off channel and verify the cert manually."
Sure, but I'm trying to address the "I need a no cost solution for my non-commercial site and I don't like FF3's annoying interface" scenario of the GP. At least the user has to manually do something different to initiate the cert install, though I'm sure someone will find a way to persuade people that they must click the right boxes to access their bank account and it will be game over.
I do think we need a wider range of key management options in browsers, and more research on the right/wrong interfaces and features. Even with multiple clicks, allowing exceptions to EXPIRED certs without having to use some separate command-line debug option is crazy. EV is a step in the right direction, but options that also go the other direction and tie into web of trust (looks even more ready for widespread use in these days of social networking) and/or persistence of identity.
The latter has worked well for SSH, and is being copied by Zimmermann in ZRTP. You could have a mechanism (visually distinct from an either an ordinary signed cert, or an EV cert) where when you first contact a website it will use the cert without warning but without giving the reassuring key/blue blob/etc. Once you've signed up for your account to access "Bob's cool fishing tackle forum", what you really care about is that it's the SAME site you go back to and enter your password next time, not that someone once paid VeriSign. Let the browser store the info and warn if it changes; there would need to be some standardised mechanism to handle cert updates so they look/act different to bad site warnings.
A user agent that makes it hard to use a web site with a self-signed TLS certificate will also make it hard to install a self-signed CA certificate, especially one not downloaded from an already trusted HTTPS site, for the same reasons.
You'd think so wouldn't you, but it doesn't seem to be the case. The copy of FF3 on which I'm writing this requires fewer clicks to install a CA cert than to add an exception for a site with a self-signed cert. This despite the fact that if I do persuade you to trust my CA cert I can go wild and start signing my own certs for paypal.com. But then Mozilla are not the worst.
the fact that so many domain name registrars are also CAs for traditional TLS certificates would appear to act as an incentive against implementing DNSSEC.
I'm feeling irrationally optimistic about DNSSEC at the moment, I think that those who have huge business interests protecting their somewhat-dubious-in-the-first-place CA operations will slow down DNSSEC, but probably can't stop it. And once the.com is signed, I get to choose which registrar to use; I can avoid those that make it hard to publish certificates.
Why not create you own signing certificate, and use this to sign your key for https://my-hobby-site.example.org/. You can then install the signing cert in your browser and be happy and secure.
But what about when you want to log in from an internet cafe half-way across the world? Why, just publish your CA cert at http://my-toy-site.example.net/cacert.crt and link from your home page; you'll be prompted to install it in your browsers trusted key-ring. (Of course someone could have MITM'd your certificate install, but then that's the risk you've chosen to take by going for a self-signed cert)
Now you can have a secure connection without paying a so-called "Trusted Third Party" for the privilege, and without requiring the browser to support the easy use of self-signed certs (which we know causes damage to many people's ability to use https web-sites safely).
Personally, I hope that, in the medium term, widespread key distribution based on DNS-SEC will side step this whole issue.
It's also pretty much completely ignored by the pirate community, preferring mkv/H.264.
Well that's rather obvious. The entire point of theora is to create a patent-free codec, so content can be encoded and distributed without owing royalties. Movie pirates, by definition, are not going to worry about the IPR status of their activities.
While possibly FUD, not everyone is willing to ship this codec because they fear submarine patents
This is a shame, and it probably is FUD, some of the companies questioning Theora have an interest in their own proprietary codecs.
That's what Firefox with the IE Tab add-in is for. If you have control of your IT infrastructure, why settle for the intrusive kludge of Chrome Frame?
You've just decried one 'cludge' then suggested another very similar one. I can't see how embedding chrome's renderer in IE is inherently less cludgy than embedding trident in Firefox.
I do, in fact I don't use twitter (or any other microblog) at all.
I do frequently make use of a recent piece of communications equipment called the telephone (popularised by that chap Bell). For real time conversation I've found it provides a much better experience than email/text chat and "conveys real meaning" well. I can actually hear the voice of a person from a distance -- amazing. Unfortunately it doesn't offer a text side channel so the only means of communicating URLs is to dictate them letter by letter while the recipient makes a note.
I also have occasion to distribute information by totally non-electronic means. I often achieve this by a technique of printing words and graphics onto plain paper. The only means recipients have of using a URL is to manually type it into their browser (ignoring various bar-code schemes which almost no-one is setup to use).
In both these cases (and in the case of distributing links in plain text emails going to mailling lists) if the URL is long or complex, then a URL shortening service is useful. I don't use them everyday but they're a useful trade-off on occasion.
Twitter isn't everything and tinyurl has been around for a long time.
It's the other way round. Once you've formally proven things you care about for your application (security, correctness, whatever), and people are doing this though much less than they might. What do you run it on to maintain your guarantees, if there is no formally proven kernel?
So far the current answer seems to be you compile your code down to bare metal and run as an embedded app without an OS, but that only gets you so far. Mind you I can't see a fully fledged web browser based on formal methods coming along any time soon.
This is not about getting rid of the stamp of being published in a peer reviewed journal; it's about making sure MIT has a copy of the peer reviewed papers stored in its own Institutional Repository.
Some journals allow this (check out a list at http://www.doaj.org/). Many, especially the more established high ranking journals owned by large publishing operations, don't for fear of losing expensive subscriptions from libraries. Libraries have seen huge increases in the cost of journals as the publishers (who have seen the writing on the wall) seek to make money while they can.
This announcement along with the similar decisions by several funding bodies is all about forcing the publishers to change business model and accept papers without exclusive copyright transfer (or face not being able to publish papers from MIT, or research supported by the Welcome, NIH, etc.). If enough others join in then the fraction of research output covered will be too high for closed access journals to do without.
Models to fund open journals usually involve some number of:
- don't produce a printed version, online only
- automate as much of the peer review co-ordination process as possible to keep costs low (peer review and editorial boards are generally unpaid even at traditional journals)
- charge costs to the submitter (usually only charge those at established institutions in developed countries so submissions from less traditional routes are not blocked). Note many closed-access journal also charge, sometimes for bizarre things like a colour figure charge even for online-only material.
- rely on more volunteer effort in running managing the journal
The real name is 9.10. Slashdot is the most depressing when a new Ubuntu release is being announced. It's all about the color brown and names, like in fucking kindergarten.
Ubuntu do rather ask for it by making their codenames so prominent (a habit inherited from Debian) and by talking so much about the colour themselves (Mark even mentioned it again in the announcement).
Personally, I'm rather excited to see Eucalyptus given this level of support by a major distro; it's a project I've been interested by recently and full support in Ubuntu would be great for setting up internal 'clouds'.
I also rather like the brown theme. I don't really like the cool-blue tones of most desktop environments and appreciate the warmth of Ubuntu themes. Not that it makes a huge amount of difference anyway, the whole of my monitor is covered with terminal windows and web pages.
...overall it has been estimated that the global loss due to proprietary software is "in excess of $1 trillion a year."
That's the same kind of lame-ass no-evidence silly figure pushing that the RIAA and MPAA uses to sell their Anti-Piracy measures
Actually, it is not quite the same. I have no idea about the methodology behind the $1 trillion figure, but there is a difference between investing in software and consuming music.
When a company deploys more cost effective software they save money which can be invested in growing their business. When a broke student downloads 3000 songs they would never have bought otherwise through bitTorrent, nothing has been added to the economy.
I'm not saying the claim is valid but, if Open Source Software can indeed provide equivalent or better functionality at lower cost, then in principle its widespread deployment would save money and increase the size of the economy.
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If the company is using it without her knowledge, then good on the IOC. Because that means the athlete is being taken advantage of by the company. If the company wants to be associated with the athlete, they should pay!
Most olympians have to work part time (with large amounts of unpaid holidays), and their sporting pursuit costs them MAJOR money to do. So they NEED every dollar they can get (yes some olympians are cashed up but they are a minority).
I don't understand. Either Lindsay Vonn has a sponsorship deal with Uvex, in which case they are helping fund her participation in the sport. Or they have no sponsorship deal, and Lindsay (or her representatives) went out and brought Uvex products of her own free will (presumable due to their quality). That actually seems like a better endorsement to me, and I can see no moral reason why Uvex should be banned from mentioning the fact a successful athlete has chosen their kit, that's not taking advantage. If Ms Vonn needs the extra funds (I expect she's one of those not in the struggling category) she could choose to ask for a sponsorship deal or switch to a brand prepared to sponsor her.
Firefox won out over IE not by "hey, we have a clone of IE" but by being -better- than IE.
IE was relatively easy to better. It was a free product which Microsoft had lost motivation to maintain or improve once they had captured the market. It may have been important to the web, but until Mozilla re-awakened competition it wasn't important to MS.
On the other hand Office is one of Microsoft's cash cows and gets an enormous amount of development resource. It will be very hard to beat MS on quality while competing on features and attempting to maintain compatibility with MS document formats. The best approach may be not to try, to build light more focused products which compete with part of Office's capability and do it well. E.g. there is room for a free application which does what keynote does on the Mac.
In my opinion this whole this is a marketing scam for one of the products mentioned. The things that make me suspicious:
- "Blogger, hacker and IT security expert Notrax" 's infosecurityguard blog was started in Dec 2009, just before he started his ambitious series of security reviews.
- There are no details of who he is "for his own safety"
- He calls the systems he's failed to break "secure" and highlights them in reassuring green to attract you attention (only admitting in the small print that he means he hasn't broken them yet). This is not the kind of language security researchers use.
- Most of the the products are "details to be published", including respected software such as Zphone/ZRTP. Just one shines out as both "secure" and "review available". That miracle product is PhoneCrypt. Oooh, I must click on that review now -- oh look at that glowing prose.
"SecurStar is the company behind PhoneCrypt." Now I wonder what relation our mysterious, benevolent friend Notrax has to SecurStar.
To me all the smells lead to a fake marketing blog. Nice story /.
Ubuntu changed the browser settings and default homepage in previous releases. It used to use Google, but benefiting Canonical rather than Mozilla. This particular change is just getting the kick-backs from a higher payer, I don't think Mozilla were getting any revenue to lose.
Yes because it's so much better to get people to use Windows, rather than to get them to use Ubuntu...
I'd venture to suggest that the above AC is proposing to advocate for one of the many Linux distributions that don't have a revenue sharing agreement with Bing, not recommending his friends stay on Windows.
I think I know what you're saying though: I guess you've been putting lots of effort into advocating Ubuntu, and now you feel betrayed?
It is true that Canonical have encouraged an anti-MS attitude within their community. Unlike other distros, bug No 1 in their bug DB makes reference to MS market share.
Personally, I am not too bothered about the default search option (I never liked the search box and usually remove it from my browser profile anyway), but I am increasingly concerned about the gradual pressure that Canonical's extra revenue streams puts on their technical decisions.
They have created their own Ubuntu-branded dropbox-like service (Ubuntu One) and are collecting search share revenue. These things encourage them to make user interface decisions on the user interface which drive people toward revenue generating services rather than for the best technical reasons/user's best interests.
Imagine a future release where the open source version of Chromium provides a clearly better browser than Firefox [I'm only speaking hypothetically, here, Mozilla], would Canonical block a change to the default in Ubuntu as it doesn't generate them Bing revenue. As a user, advocate, and occasional contributor, I'd much prefer these decisions to be entirely technical.
I am somewhat suspicious of this model of making money from associated services rather than support; it's a slippery slope.
"Red Hat" is a singular noun. It is *one* company.
Look at the meaning of the word company itself, surely an indication that you are thinking about a plurality rather than a singular. If you'd used corporation you'd be on firmer ground.
I do think its healthier to think of these commercial entities as the groups of people they are, rather than the singular legal entities the law recognises.
PS: I'm British and have every intention of continuing to use my natural language on slashdot. Annoying ACs is merely a happy side effect.
Others have commented on the problems mozilla have with licensing H.264 decoder distribution. Maybe that could be worked round by relying on a system codec (which licensed or not is the distro/user's responsibility), but there's more to it than that.
The Mozilla foundation's mission is to help the Internet remain an open and accessible global public resource, not to create the browser with the greatest market share at all cost. The MPEG-LA's mission is to extract as much revenue for their member IP "right's holders" as possible, not to further open video on the web.
The MPEG-LA charge software suppliers an IP license to distribute a decoder, but they also have a price sheet for the people providing the content.
- distribute an encoding application they want payment
- use that application to encode and they want a payment (yep two different licenses for both the supplier and user)
- charge for your streamed content they want a per stream payment
Now, as is sensible strategy, they aren't enforcing their charges for internet streaming at the moment. But the current licensing period ends 31st Dec 2010, and the rights holders will want more next time round.
If H.264 works everywhere and becomes the only standard for video on the web, then the web becomes less open and accessible for everyone publishing content.
Now I've no idea what Google pay in licensing for streaming youtube, and what their view is of what they'd have to pay in the future, but they have recently acquired the company responsible for the VP7 and VP8 codecs, so it looks like they do value access to a codec not controlled by the MPEG-LA.
Google (youtube) probably support only H.264 right now on technical merits, they (Chrome) are quite happy to support ogg/theora playback. I'd not be surprised to something new come out from them using the codecs (and people) they got from On2 this year.
Apple are MPEG-LA rights owners; they have no interest in any open AV formats on the web and will probably not implement anything else unless market forces mean they have to.
Mozilla avoid H.264 on licensing cost and support for openness.
Opera avoid H.264 on licensing cost grounds.
Microsoft just wish HTML5 would go away and you'd start using Silverlight (and upgrade to Windows 7 too, please).
There are good arguments for not supporting H.264, at least not until a viable open alternative is widely supported too.
Brendan Eich is JavaScript's father, and there were those who considered his attempt at JavaScript 2.0 was leading it to the dark side. (Mind you that was mainly Microsoft)
It's called pumped storage, and is indeed a natural fit with renewable energy.
In the UK we have approx. 2GW of capacity from pumped energy storage. Mostly at Dinorwig in Snowdonia, where the turbines can go from zero to 1800MW in seconds with the capacity for several hours at that load. While this would be useful for smoothing out variation in renewable energy, it's main use in the UK is to absorb the spike in demand when millions of TV viewers switch on electric kettles to make a cup of tea at the end of a popular soap opera.
The storage and recover of energy involves some losses (it's maybe 75% efficient) but is ideal for absorbing excess renewable energy at low demand periods. While it could help deal with changes in supply in the short term its relatively small capacity means it wouldn't be useful if you had a low wind spell lasting a day or two.
Of course you need to find/construct two lakes near each other but separated in height by hundreds of m, so it only works in certain places, and these may not be the same as the places you could site osmotic power plants.
I'm pretty confident that HP and Dell were actually paying Intel for chips. Intel was then giving them some proportion back as marketing contributions (nothing per se wrong there). The problem came when getting a good discount didn't depend on how much Intel product you bought, but how little AMD. Using this as a weapon against AMD was the anti-competitive element, not paying HP/Dell towards marketing.
In the same way, if Google were to only offer advertising payments to manufacturers who dropped Win Mobile than that might be anti-competitive.
The answer is Spanish Law will apply in Spain. But, if Spain fail to enact their own legislation to enforce EU regulation then the EU may take the Spanish Government to court (not Spanish citizens).
There are a number of such ongoing cases, including one against the UK government for failure to implement privacy laws (basically for failing to stop the use of Phorm by UK ISPs).
This is not an epidemic or pandemic.
OK, I was with you until that point. An epidemic and pandemic is exactly what this is. What some (particularly the media) are having trouble with is the concept that pandemic is about infection spread and doesn't necessarily equate to "it will kill us all".
I've never heard of Apress before, but they sound really, really shitty. I've never heard of a publisher threatening an author like this. The only times I've seen the clause where an author can create a new edition without the original author used is where the original author either died or had no interest in future editions of the book at all AND didn't object to more authors being brought on board. Looking at our contract, I don't think we could bully someone the way Apress bullied Cooper here... I'm very surprised by this, and would steer people away from Apress.
I don't have as much experience in publishing as you, but I'm guessing that if Wiley signed me up to write "Nose Picking for Dummies," and then after receiving a few royalty cheques my hygiene levels improve and I'm not interested in the 2nd edition, then their contract would allow them to continue the series without me. I don't know, but I'd be surprised if it was otherwise. Certainly you'd have no chance of taking publication of the 2nd edition elsewhere -- such are the breaks of being part of the series. On the plus side I'd benefit from my treatise on the art of nose picking being in the Dummies section of bookshops, and from the brand recognition from potential readers in comparison to "John's Guide to Introductory Level Nose Picking."
Similarly, though at much smaller scale than Dummies, Apress have a series "Beginning ....". It would not strike me as that odd that they would have rights in the contract to have a "Beginning Ruby" second edition regardless of the inclinations of the author. It's quite possible that this is different from the contract they'd use if they'd signed him up for a random Ruby book outside of their series.
D would appear to have the same drawback that Culture20 mentioned for A: it "gives [visitors] a false sense of security unless you can contact the site owner off channel and verify the cert manually."
Sure, but I'm trying to address the "I need a no cost solution for my non-commercial site and I don't like FF3's annoying interface" scenario of the GP. At least the user has to manually do something different to initiate the cert install, though I'm sure someone will find a way to persuade people that they must click the right boxes to access their bank account and it will be game over.
I do think we need a wider range of key management options in browsers, and more research on the right/wrong interfaces and features. Even with multiple clicks, allowing exceptions to EXPIRED certs without having to use some separate command-line debug option is crazy. EV is a step in the right direction, but options that also go the other direction and tie into web of trust (looks even more ready for widespread use in these days of social networking) and/or persistence of identity.
The latter has worked well for SSH, and is being copied by Zimmermann in ZRTP. You could have a mechanism (visually distinct from an either an ordinary signed cert, or an EV cert) where when you first contact a website it will use the cert without warning but without giving the reassuring key/blue blob/etc. Once you've signed up for your account to access "Bob's cool fishing tackle forum", what you really care about is that it's the SAME site you go back to and enter your password next time, not that someone once paid VeriSign. Let the browser store the info and warn if it changes; there would need to be some standardised mechanism to handle cert updates so they look/act different to bad site warnings.
A user agent that makes it hard to use a web site with a self-signed TLS certificate will also make it hard to install a self-signed CA certificate, especially one not downloaded from an already trusted HTTPS site, for the same reasons.
You'd think so wouldn't you, but it doesn't seem to be the case. The copy of FF3 on which I'm writing this requires fewer clicks to install a CA cert than to add an exception for a site with a self-signed cert. This despite the fact that if I do persuade you to trust my CA cert I can go wild and start signing my own certs for paypal.com. But then Mozilla are not the worst.
the fact that so many domain name registrars are also CAs for traditional TLS certificates would appear to act as an incentive against implementing DNSSEC.
I'm feeling irrationally optimistic about DNSSEC at the moment, I think that those who have huge business interests protecting their somewhat-dubious-in-the-first-place CA operations will slow down DNSSEC, but probably can't stop it. And once the .com is signed, I get to choose which registrar to use; I can avoid those that make it hard to publish certificates.
D. Create your own CA cert
Why not create you own signing certificate, and use this to sign your key for https://my-hobby-site.example.org/. You can then install the signing cert in your browser and be happy and secure.
But what about when you want to log in from an internet cafe half-way across the world? Why, just publish your CA cert at http://my-toy-site.example.net/cacert.crt and link from your home page; you'll be prompted to install it in your browsers trusted key-ring. (Of course someone could have MITM'd your certificate install, but then that's the risk you've chosen to take by going for a self-signed cert)
Now you can have a secure connection without paying a so-called "Trusted Third Party" for the privilege, and without requiring the browser to support the easy use of self-signed certs (which we know causes damage to many people's ability to use https web-sites safely).
Personally, I hope that, in the medium term, widespread key distribution based on DNS-SEC will side step this whole issue.
It's also pretty much completely ignored by the pirate community, preferring mkv/H.264.
Well that's rather obvious. The entire point of theora is to create a patent-free codec, so content can be encoded and distributed without owing royalties. Movie pirates, by definition, are not going to worry about the IPR status of their activities.
While possibly FUD, not everyone is willing to ship this codec because they fear submarine patents
This is a shame, and it probably is FUD, some of the companies questioning Theora have an interest in their own proprietary codecs.
That's what Firefox with the IE Tab add-in is for. If you have control of your IT infrastructure, why settle for the intrusive kludge of Chrome Frame?
You've just decried one 'cludge' then suggested another very similar one. I can't see how embedding chrome's renderer in IE is inherently less cludgy than embedding trident in Firefox.
I do, in fact I don't use twitter (or any other microblog) at all.
I do frequently make use of a recent piece of communications equipment called the telephone (popularised by that chap Bell). For real time conversation I've found it provides a much better experience than email/text chat and "conveys real meaning" well. I can actually hear the voice of a person from a distance -- amazing. Unfortunately it doesn't offer a text side channel so the only means of communicating URLs is to dictate them letter by letter while the recipient makes a note.
I also have occasion to distribute information by totally non-electronic means. I often achieve this by a technique of printing words and graphics onto plain paper. The only means recipients have of using a URL is to manually type it into their browser (ignoring various bar-code schemes which almost no-one is setup to use).
In both these cases (and in the case of distributing links in plain text emails going to mailling lists) if the URL is long or complex, then a URL shortening service is useful. I don't use them everyday but they're a useful trade-off on occasion.
Twitter isn't everything and tinyurl has been around for a long time.
It's the other way round. Once you've formally proven things you care about for your application (security, correctness, whatever), and people are doing this though much less than they might. What do you run it on to maintain your guarantees, if there is no formally proven kernel?
So far the current answer seems to be you compile your code down to bare metal and run as an embedded app without an OS, but that only gets you so far. Mind you I can't see a fully fledged web browser based on formal methods coming along any time soon.
Perhaps you shouldn't use Google to search for evidence for the exposure of Google's competitor. Did you try Yahoo?
</conspiracy>
It's going to be fun when your bank merges with another (foreign) bank isn't it?
This is not about getting rid of the stamp of being published in a peer reviewed journal; it's about making sure MIT has a copy of the peer reviewed papers stored in its own Institutional Repository.
Some journals allow this (check out a list at http://www.doaj.org/). Many, especially the more established high ranking journals owned by large publishing operations, don't for fear of losing expensive subscriptions from libraries. Libraries have seen huge increases in the cost of journals as the publishers (who have seen the writing on the wall) seek to make money while they can.
This announcement along with the similar decisions by several funding bodies is all about forcing the publishers to change business model and accept papers without exclusive copyright transfer (or face not being able to publish papers from MIT, or research supported by the Welcome, NIH, etc.). If enough others join in then the fraction of research output covered will be too high for closed access journals to do without.
Models to fund open journals usually involve some number of:
- don't produce a printed version, online only
- automate as much of the peer review co-ordination process as possible to keep costs low (peer review and editorial boards are generally unpaid even at traditional journals)
- charge costs to the submitter (usually only charge those at established institutions in developed countries so submissions from less traditional routes are not blocked). Note many closed-access journal also charge, sometimes for bizarre things like a colour figure charge even for online-only material.
- rely on more volunteer effort in running managing the journal
The real name is 9.10. Slashdot is the most depressing when a new Ubuntu release is being announced. It's all about the color brown and names, like in fucking kindergarten.
Ubuntu do rather ask for it by making their codenames so prominent (a habit inherited from Debian) and by talking so much about the colour themselves (Mark even mentioned it again in the announcement).
Personally, I'm rather excited to see Eucalyptus given this level of support by a major distro; it's a project I've been interested by recently and full support in Ubuntu would be great for setting up internal 'clouds'.
I also rather like the brown theme. I don't really like the cool-blue tones of most desktop environments and appreciate the warmth of Ubuntu themes. Not that it makes a huge amount of difference anyway, the whole of my monitor is covered with terminal windows and web pages.
From TFA:
...overall it has been estimated that the global loss due to proprietary software is "in excess of $1 trillion a year."
That's the same kind of lame-ass no-evidence silly figure pushing that the RIAA and MPAA uses to sell their Anti-Piracy measures
Actually, it is not quite the same. I have no idea about the methodology behind the $1 trillion figure, but there is a difference between investing in software and consuming music.
When a company deploys more cost effective software they save money which can be invested in growing their business. When a broke student downloads 3000 songs they would never have bought otherwise through bitTorrent, nothing has been added to the economy.
I'm not saying the claim is valid but, if Open Source Software can indeed provide equivalent or better functionality at lower cost, then in principle its widespread deployment would save money and increase the size of the economy.