The difference between the two is for the library to have more than one copy of Harry Potter available to loan out they must purchase them. For one to offer digital copies they need only right-click the ebook file and select copy, no extra purchases necessary.
Which for the library would be a good thing. Since they'd no longer have to cope with issues, returns, repairs, books being misshelved, books being stolen, books being vandalised, etc.
Since duplication is a violation of intellectual property law the latter is illegal.
The concept of "copyright" was invented to allow regulation of the printing press. Prior to then the only way books could be duplicated was by hand. The printing press made it cheap and easy to produce many copies of a book. Which was worrying to the people in authority, even more worrying was that the same technology could also be applied to producing leaflets and news papers. The idea of copyright being something to protect the author was a later revision after it became clear that whilst publishers were getting very rich authors wern't getting much out of their works being widly available.
The complete text of all 5 Potter books and a copy of the Hulk are readily available online in multiple formats.
Even with a couple of thefts and a few places putting the books of sale HP:OotP wasn't available to be downloaded until nearly a day after it went on sale worldwide. Whereas The Hunk was most likely available for download before it's official release data, isn't released everywhere at once and isn't yet available on video tape/DVD anywhere.
Why should they need to work this out in the first place? What's wrong with a situation where they select "print" and it comes out of the printer nearest the workstation they are using...
yeah, because linux doesn't have a native GUI you think it's use would be hard to understand? Someone that's been running linux any amount of time could setup a machine for you that would have a GUI with only buttons for office apps, internet, and mail.
This need not be a mouse driven GUI with overlapping windows either.
If the army mandated a free operating system,
N.B. "free" here meaning that they are free to do whatever they liked with it once they got it.
The problems you described do not happen with a properly configured system. If the system is setup correctly, the end user would not have the ability to make changes that would require downtime to fix.
This can often be very difficult to do with Windows, since it goes against one of the basic design assumptions of Windows. That is that the person sat in front of the machine should be able to do whatever they like.
I FULLY DISAGREE! Yes, I work in the industry too and all I can say is MOST of the problems are MICROSOFT (and poorly trained IT staff). Word crashes on a daily basis, DLL hell...
Part of the problem is design of Windows which allows (even expects) the end user to carry out admin tasks. Even though the NT derived versions of Windows have file system protection often this needs to be turned off to enable any application which was written on the assumption it can do what it likes to work... A lot of problems just cannot happen when the end user (or a program run by them) cannot modify all sorts of things which don't need changing in the first place.
I strongly disagree that Linux is inappropriate for the average user. 95% of the defence force use Word, Excel and Powerpoint - PERIOD! Now, Linux can hose that in easily with something like Open Office!!!
Other common activities are email and web browsing. These can be set up to "just work" with Linux. As opposed to expecting the user to know what POP3, IMAP, SMTP, proxy servers, their own email address, etc are.
In my unit (B Co. 1/509th Abn.) we have I think 7 systems. They all run Windows 2000 and are connected to a network, through which we can access printers, other systems, and the Internet. You would be *amazed* at how many people come in a day with problems printing, getting the Internet to work, or just getting a certain program to run. You want infantrymen who at least have some familiarty with office and windows to try learning bash or mutt?
Maybe they'd have more problems, maybe the same number, maybe even fewer.
In cases where open source meets the need, I'll gladly evangelize open source. But it's crazy to think that any one solution will work in every given scenario.
Someone should tell Microsoft this, since they apparently believe that their stuff is the solution to every single senario... Including applications where Windows major selling point, the GUI desktop, is either irrelevent or unwanted baggage.
Windows boxes require constant care and feeding, fixpacks, IE patches and the like. This is due to the origins of DOS as a standalone system.
It also dosn't help when Microsoft deliberatly sets out to write spahgetti code and calls the result "integration".
For very specific systems such as point-of-sales (think HomeDepot, or your basic chain department store, etc), etc, you will definitely find they run Unix or even on a mainframe, as it's vastly easier to administer.
Though you do see Windows machines being used to emulate ANSI terminals.
That's because you are S-T-U-P-I-D. If it came with XP on it, Why the hell did you reinstall the same OS from a different set of disks?
Probably because the OEM setup was useless for the environment the machine needed to be used in. With it being less work to install a pre-tweaked and configured image than to mess around with the OEM setup until it was usable. Outside of the Home and SOHO environments OEM preloads tend to be pointless.
By the way the whole Hindenberg disaster was caused by the compounds infused into the outer covering: powdered aluminum and iron.
IIRC someone worked out that the covering is not unlike rocket fuel. Also the pictures of the accident are not consistent with the fire starting in the hydrogen cells.
EVERY religous text is propogated through modern day because of its' utter vagueness. It's so open to intreptation that people can twist nearly any passage around into whatever they want it to mean.
It's not unknown for different groups of people to come to mutually exclusive points of view starting from the same text.
That's why christianity has hundreds of sects from the benign non-denominational to the radically racist world church of the creator.
I wouldn't characterise creationists as the worst example. Since they don't go as far as to use their "religion" as justification for killing people.
While the majority of people are now convinced of evolution, there still remain pockets of faithful that follow creationist theory. A discover of a developed life form on another planet, however insignificant, would give undisputable proof of the ability of life to develop and adapt to the circumstances it finds. Bacteria found in this region, however, would prove very little, as bacteria can be found everywhere,
About the easiest organisms to demonstrate evolution are bacteria. Specifically antibiotic resistance amongst disease causing bacteria. In the natural scheme of things both the bacteria and the antibiotic producing organisms would be evolving.
One thing absent from this thread is the notion that the music industry is not trying to stop people from listening to music. They are dealers just like those sharing files. The RIAA just wants to make sure they are the only dealers around. They don't want to stem the demand for music (imagine those commercials - "Parents who listen to Sabbath have kids who listen to Sabbath"), they want to keep the supply of music limited to what they provide.
When they want to provide it, in the way they want to provide it. Really all the RIAA are are "middlemen" between people who want to make music and people who want to listen to music. But they have such an overinflated opinion of themselves that they want to control both of these groups of people.
That's the conventional wisdom certainly. It's also incredibly stupid. Level of drug use is unaffected; the demand is still there, but supply is down, so dealing becomes more profitable. Dealing is taken over by those with less to lose and/or greater desperation. Haven't had a lot of violent gang wars over alchohol selling turf since the end of prohibition have we? Nor did prohibition put any dent in alchoholism (expansion of treatment programs has).
If anything the "experiment" in making alcohol an illegal drug in the US made alchol abuse a worst problem. Since the stuff was illegal no-one was regulating what went into the product. Bootleggers prefered to produce concentrated spirits rather than weak beers. Users would tend towards "binge" usage...
But so many copyrights aren't actively maintained at all.
Even after a lot less than 50 years. A third party publisher isn't going to keep trying to publish something which does not make them money for very long.
1) Works derived primarily from a public domain work are themselves in the public domain.
1.1) Up the reasonable ammount of quoting that falls under fair use (and thus doesn't put the new work into the public domain).
A commentary on Shakespeare's Hamlet should be copyrightable, but a new printing of Hamlet with the odd footnote shouldn't be.
Maybe in something like this example the text of the play should be public domain, whilst the footnotes are copyright of whoever wrote them.
2) Add a "moral attribution" clause that means you can't take credit for a work in the public domain (unless you base a new work on it and change it enough to deserve a copyright) and so that you don't claim your work is someone else's.
If Bush can decide that he wants to pull out of treaties designed to keep the peace, I have no problem pulling out of treaties designed by corporations to keep the profits.
Nothing special about Bush here, given that the US government has been selectivly ignoring treaties for the past century or so. About since winning the Spanish American war.
Regardless of whether it would actually ever come into play, businesses who are hung up on trade secrets and proprietary information will balk at the terms of the GPL, because they're not sure *what* it will oblige them to release (remember, lots of people don't actually know what "source code" is... and this article doesn't explain it, either).
What's really needed, IMHO, is an article which explains software licences. Including the difference between an ELUA and a copyright material distribution licence. As well as the consequences of using them. Some proprietary licences can be very nasty in obliging users to disclose confidential information.
Why someone would want to run Linux on a GS1280, Superdome, E10k, or S/390 is completely beyond me. If you can afford the big hardware, you can afford the OS licensing.
One obvious reason is that with Linux you are free to do with it what you want. You can just as easily afford to pay someone to configure and alter it to do what you want it to do. Something you don't get simply handing over money for proprietary software licences.
Enterprise systems are all about one thing: guaranteed reliability. IMHO reliability on the long term is best guaranteed by using Open Source; what good is an enterprise-ready system with a planned lifespan of 25 years with absolutely no guarantee that the platform it's based on will still be around in 10 years? MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 and NT3.51 failed here; if your enterprise was depending on one of these, an upgrade was forced upon you and all you can do is pray your software works with the new version.
Assuming that an upgrade is possible. You could have something like CP/M where not only is the platform dead the company which made it ceased to exist.
With Open Source Software, this is not a problem at all; support can be done by anyone that has a brain to understand the source and you pretty much get the guarantee it'll work as long as you want.
Without having to hope that some other company is still both in busines and wants to support it.
Closed Source Software in the enterprise IMHO is a short-term solution to a long-term problem. It's basicly based on trusting a few people and then feeling safe because it has cost you a lot of money. And paying others is a lot easier than using your brain.
You can just as easily pay others to work on open source software. Be they employees or contractors. With less risk of your company's fortunes being tied to those of a software company.
The windows solutions are as hard to use at this point, it's just a matter of what you already are familiar with. The windows way of managing servers seems optimized for keyboard and mouse at each server, much different from the unix setup which is optimized for text usage and much more scriptable.
Or a KVM port, but either way you are likely to be winding up with additional hardware for Windows. How easy is it to operate a Windows server with just a power and network lead plugged into it...
Re:Like it or not, managers default to commercial
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What is Open Source?
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· Score: 1
When a commercial support organization for an open-source application gets a bug report, they can analyze the source code to gain an understanding of the app design, troubleshoot to the best of their understanding,
With an open source product it's perfectly possible that their customer has given them more useful information than "XYZ dosn't do ABC". Since they have access to the code too.
Re:Like it or not, managers default to commercial
on
What is Open Source?
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· Score: 1
Going to the maintainer or a major developer for the project and saying "hey, I have this problem and will pay you $x to fix it" would probably be plenty of leverage on an OS project, and would probably still be cheaper than the CS solution
Possibly quicker too. Since there is plenty of software the CS option cannot touch.
Slashdot Mirror
Did anyone else think of that subject as the title of a new Harry Potter book instead?
:)
Wouldn't "Dolores Umbridge and the Entertainment Industry" be a better match. I hear she's looking for a new job
The difference between the two is for the library to have more than one copy of Harry Potter available to loan out they must purchase them. For one to offer digital copies they need only right-click the ebook file and select copy, no extra purchases necessary.
Which for the library would be a good thing. Since they'd no longer have to cope with issues, returns, repairs, books being misshelved, books being stolen, books being vandalised, etc.
Since duplication is a violation of intellectual property law the latter is illegal.
The concept of "copyright" was invented to allow regulation of the printing press. Prior to then the only way books could be duplicated was by hand. The printing press made it cheap and easy to produce many copies of a book. Which was worrying to the people in authority, even more worrying was that the same technology could also be applied to producing leaflets and news papers. The idea of copyright being something to protect the author was a later revision after it became clear that whilst publishers were getting very rich authors wern't getting much out of their works being widly available.
The complete text of all 5 Potter books and a copy of the Hulk are readily available online in multiple formats.
Even with a couple of thefts and a few places putting the books of sale HP:OotP wasn't available to be downloaded until nearly a day after it went on sale worldwide.
Whereas The Hunk was most likely available for download before it's official release data, isn't released everywhere at once and isn't yet available on video tape/DVD anywhere.
In an open operating system, you can design the user interface, and hide all of the complexity.
As well as making it as difficult as possible for the end user to alter anything they don't need to alter. (Especially things which could break it.)
Linux as a standard distribution *would* be a lot harder for computer illiterates to use.
Compared with what? A "computer illiterate" would struggle with more or less any "off the shelf" system.
However, if you design a custom user interface, you can keep everything nice and simple, and hide all the advanced features from the user.
Maybe you can take quite a few "features" out because they are of no use to you and there is little point dragging software you don't need around.
People don't forget passwords
Which would happen with any operating system
or forget which printer is theirs in Linux?
Why should they need to work this out in the first place? What's wrong with a situation where they select "print" and it comes out of the printer nearest the workstation they are using...
yeah, because linux doesn't have a native GUI you think it's use would be hard to understand? Someone that's been running linux any amount of time could setup a machine for you that would have a GUI with only buttons for office apps, internet, and mail.
This need not be a mouse driven GUI with overlapping windows either.
If the army mandated a free operating system,
N.B. "free" here meaning that they are free to do whatever they liked with it once they got it.
The problems you described do not happen with a properly configured system. If the system is setup correctly, the end user would not have the ability to make changes that would require downtime to fix.
This can often be very difficult to do with Windows, since it goes against one of the basic design assumptions of Windows. That is that the person sat in front of the machine should be able to do whatever they like.
I FULLY DISAGREE! Yes, I work in the industry too and all I can say is MOST of the problems are MICROSOFT (and poorly trained IT staff). Word crashes on a daily basis, DLL hell...
Part of the problem is design of Windows which allows (even expects) the end user to carry out admin tasks. Even though the NT derived versions of Windows have file system protection often this needs to be turned off to enable any application which was written on the assumption it can do what it likes to work...
A lot of problems just cannot happen when the end user (or a program run by them) cannot modify all sorts of things which don't need changing in the first place.
I strongly disagree that Linux is inappropriate for the average user. 95% of the defence force use Word, Excel and Powerpoint - PERIOD! Now, Linux can hose that in easily with something like Open Office!!!
Other common activities are email and web browsing. These can be set up to "just work" with Linux. As opposed to expecting the user to know what POP3, IMAP, SMTP, proxy servers, their own email address, etc are.
In my unit (B Co. 1/509th Abn.) we have I think 7 systems. They all run Windows 2000 and are connected to a network, through which we can access printers, other systems, and the Internet. You would be *amazed* at how many people come in a day with problems printing, getting the Internet to work, or just getting a certain program to run. You want infantrymen who at least have some familiarty with office and windows to try learning bash or mutt?
Maybe they'd have more problems, maybe the same number, maybe even fewer.
In cases where open source meets the need, I'll gladly evangelize open source. But it's crazy to think that any one solution will work in every given scenario.
Someone should tell Microsoft this, since they apparently believe that their stuff is the solution to every single senario... Including applications where Windows major selling point, the GUI desktop, is either irrelevent or unwanted baggage.
Windows boxes require constant care and feeding, fixpacks, IE patches and the like. This is due to the origins of DOS as a standalone system.
It also dosn't help when Microsoft deliberatly sets out to write spahgetti code and calls the result "integration".
For very specific systems such as point-of-sales (think HomeDepot, or your basic chain department store, etc), etc, you will definitely find they run Unix or even on a mainframe, as it's vastly easier to administer.
Though you do see Windows machines being used to emulate ANSI terminals.
That's because you are S-T-U-P-I-D. If it came with XP on it, Why the hell did you reinstall the same OS from a different set of disks?
Probably because the OEM setup was useless for the environment the machine needed to be used in. With it being less work to install a pre-tweaked and configured image than to mess around with the OEM setup until it was usable. Outside of the Home and SOHO environments OEM preloads tend to be pointless.
By the way the whole Hindenberg disaster was caused by the compounds infused into the outer covering: powdered aluminum and iron.
IIRC someone worked out that the covering is not unlike rocket fuel. Also the pictures of the accident are not consistent with the fire starting in the hydrogen cells.
EVERY religous text is propogated through modern day because of its' utter vagueness. It's so open to intreptation that people can twist nearly any passage around into whatever they want it to mean.
It's not unknown for different groups of people to come to mutually exclusive points of view starting from the same text.
That's why christianity has hundreds of sects from the benign non-denominational to the radically racist world church of the creator.
I wouldn't characterise creationists as the worst example. Since they don't go as far as to use their "religion" as justification for killing people.
While the majority of people are now convinced of evolution, there still remain pockets of faithful that follow creationist theory. A discover of a developed life form on another planet, however insignificant, would give undisputable proof of the ability of life to develop and adapt to the circumstances it finds. Bacteria found in this region, however, would prove very little, as bacteria can be found everywhere,
About the easiest organisms to demonstrate evolution are bacteria. Specifically antibiotic resistance amongst disease causing bacteria. In the natural scheme of things both the bacteria and the antibiotic producing organisms would be evolving.
One thing absent from this thread is the notion that the music industry is not trying to stop people from listening to music. They are dealers just like those sharing files. The RIAA just wants to make sure they are the only dealers around. They don't want to stem the demand for music (imagine those commercials - "Parents who listen to Sabbath have kids who listen to Sabbath"), they want to keep the supply of music limited to what they provide.
When they want to provide it, in the way they want to provide it. Really all the RIAA are are "middlemen" between people who want to make music and people who want to listen to music. But they have such an overinflated opinion of themselves that they want to control both of these groups of people.
That's the conventional wisdom certainly. It's also incredibly stupid. Level of drug use is unaffected; the demand is still there, but supply is down, so dealing becomes more profitable. Dealing is taken over by those with less to lose and/or greater desperation. Haven't had a lot of violent gang wars over alchohol selling turf since the end of prohibition have we? Nor did prohibition put any dent in alchoholism (expansion of treatment programs has).
If anything the "experiment" in making alcohol an illegal drug in the US made alchol abuse a worst problem. Since the stuff was illegal no-one was regulating what went into the product. Bootleggers prefered to produce concentrated spirits rather than weak beers. Users would tend towards "binge" usage...
But so many copyrights aren't actively maintained at all.
Even after a lot less than 50 years. A third party publisher isn't going to keep trying to publish something which does not make them money for very long.
1) Works derived primarily from a public domain work are themselves in the public domain.
1.1) Up the reasonable ammount of quoting that falls under fair use (and thus doesn't put the new work into the public domain).
A commentary on Shakespeare's Hamlet should be copyrightable, but a new printing of Hamlet with the odd footnote shouldn't be.
Maybe in something like this example the text of the play should be public domain, whilst the footnotes are copyright of whoever wrote them.
2) Add a "moral attribution" clause that means you can't take credit for a work in the public domain (unless you base a new work on it and change it enough to deserve a copyright) and so that you don't claim your work is someone else's.
Also tougher penalties for "copyright fraud".
If Bush can decide that he wants to pull out of treaties designed to keep the peace, I have no problem pulling out of treaties designed by corporations to keep the profits.
Nothing special about Bush here, given that the US government has been selectivly ignoring treaties for the past century or so. About since winning the Spanish American war.
Regardless of whether it would actually ever come into play, businesses who are hung up on trade secrets and proprietary information will balk at the terms of the GPL, because they're not sure *what* it will oblige them to release (remember, lots of people don't actually know what "source code" is... and this article doesn't explain it, either).
What's really needed, IMHO, is an article which explains software licences. Including the difference between an ELUA and a copyright material distribution licence. As well as the consequences of using them. Some proprietary licences can be very nasty in obliging users to disclose confidential information.
Why someone would want to run Linux on a GS1280, Superdome, E10k, or S/390 is completely beyond me. If you can afford the big hardware, you can afford the OS licensing.
One obvious reason is that with Linux you are free to do with it what you want. You can just as easily afford to pay someone to configure and alter it to do what you want it to do. Something you don't get simply handing over money for proprietary software licences.
Enterprise systems are all about one thing: guaranteed reliability. IMHO reliability on the long term is best guaranteed by using Open Source; what good is an enterprise-ready system with a planned lifespan of 25 years with absolutely no guarantee that the platform it's based on will still be around in 10 years? MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 and NT3.51 failed here; if your enterprise was depending on one of these, an upgrade was forced upon you and all you can do is pray your software works with the new version.
Assuming that an upgrade is possible. You could have something like CP/M where not only is the platform dead the company which made it ceased to exist.
With Open Source Software, this is not a problem at all; support can be done by anyone that has a brain to understand the source and you pretty much get the guarantee it'll work as long as you want.
Without having to hope that some other company is still both in busines and wants to support it.
Closed Source Software in the enterprise IMHO is a short-term solution to a long-term problem. It's basicly based on trusting a few people and then feeling safe because it has cost you a lot of money. And paying others is a lot easier than using your brain.
You can just as easily pay others to work on open source software. Be they employees or contractors. With less risk of your company's fortunes being tied to those of a software company.
The windows solutions are as hard to use at this point, it's just a matter of what you already are familiar with. The windows way of managing servers seems optimized for keyboard and mouse at each server, much different from the unix setup which is optimized for text usage and much more scriptable.
Or a KVM port, but either way you are likely to be winding up with additional hardware for Windows. How easy is it to operate a Windows server with just a power and network lead plugged into it...
When a commercial support organization for an open-source application gets a bug report, they can analyze the source code to gain an understanding of the app design, troubleshoot to the best of their understanding,
With an open source product it's perfectly possible that their customer has given them more useful information than "XYZ dosn't do ABC". Since they have access to the code too.
Going to the maintainer or a major developer for the project and saying "hey, I have this problem and will pay you $x to fix it" would probably be plenty of leverage on an OS project, and would probably still be cheaper than the CS solution
Possibly quicker too. Since there is plenty of software the CS option cannot touch.