Ya know, I just thought of something. These legal maneuverings by SCO are just SO absurd that the lawyers involved HAVE to know that. So I'm wondering - is SCO just being taken advantage of by unscrupulous lawyers, wanting to bilk stupid-ass SCO execs into thinking they can win anything?
I think that the devaluation would only occur because the current amount of text it shows is way too much. Once (if?) they fix that problem, then it doesn't devalue the property at all - quite the opposite. The whole point of this is to make it easier to find what you want to BUY it; thus, the author (and the publisher) benefit greatly. The problem as I see it is not the concept (which is genius), but the implementation (which is somewhat ridiculous). A relatively simple fine-tuning of the process should be enough to make this a win-win for everyone, especially authors.
re: opt-in
If they fix the problems with the implementation, I'd be surprised if any reasonable author (I am a published author, btw), would be opposed to this at all, but rather, be chomping at the bit to get in on this. Trust me, authors like to sell books, and this is WAY harder to copy content than, say, Baen Books current trend with some authors (like David Weber) of putting CD-ROMs of the entire unprotected content of not only the current book you just bought, and in several forms, but all the previous books in the series, and books from other authors. They've been doing that for awhile now, and don't seem to have a problem with it.
If the content is 'formmated' correctly (paragraphs, tabs, & whatnot), then changing the font and/or size isn't going to do anything to damage the 'spirit' of the work. If someone happens to prefer a sans serif type to a serif one, and it helps them actually READ the work in question, that's only to the better. Yes, people can and will do stupid things with fonts - but then that would be their problem, would it not? Personal responsibility.
As far as messing up the page numbering, so what? Many books are printed in hardback, trade paperback, paperback, abridged, & audio cassette form, many now come with a CD-ROM of the full text of the book included in multiple format (PDF, text, Word.DOC, HTML), and the page numbers are certainly going to differ between many or most of them.
Ah, yeah, that's way too much content to be displaying, then. If they merely cut back the amount of text displayed to, say, a paragraph or less, then I think everything would be hunky-dory.
Or, they could change the amount of text displayed based on the type of content. Less for a cookbook or reference book, and more for a novel. This is the first time anyone's done this, so hopefully a little finetuning will be forthcoming. Demonizing Amazon.com has historically had NO effect on their behaviour, so hopefully a more intelligent & reasoned approach will work.
Certainly, bitching about it on Slashdot won't do a damned thing.
My understanding is they're not making the content 'available', only 'searchable'. You type in the text you're looking for, it shows you what books they have (scanned & OCR'd) that match the hits. How much OF that matching text they display I dunno - my understanding is they're NOT showing the entire text of the books. Is this incorrect?
It depends on how much info of the 'hit' that Amazon displays. It's going to be a balance between showing 'just enough' for the searcher to verify that's the right book, but not so much that valuable content is being given away. If it's handled correctly, this can be a huge boon to everyone, authors included. If authors want to bitch about something, they should be bugging their publishers to make their back catalogs available in electronic, print-on-demand format, so that when someone *does* want to buy their book, they can, no matter what.
The ultimate goal would be to have electronic (and thus print-on-demand if you want) access to every published work, translated on the fly into any language you want. Print on demand could allow you to choose binding options, paper quality, paper dimensions, font & font size, etc. Anything that works toward this goal is a Good Thing(tm).
Publishers don't have to _let_ Amazon do this. Amazon can do this without anybody's permission - they're not making content available to the public, merely letting the public find the right product to then buy. From my understanding, no content is being sold, or made available, outside of book form. Author should be shouting for friggin' JOY at this. Ugh.
Deep Space. Well, it's all a matter of perspective as to what's "far away" or "takes a long time to get to". You may think it's a long way down to the corner drugstore, but that's peanuts compared to space! (bonus points for identifying the source, you big buncha nerds)
That would depend on your definition of 'deep space.'
But that's only one dimension of space - what about 'tall space' and 'wide space'? We're ignoring two of the 3 dimensions - maybe there's where all that 'missing matter' is...I should call Prof. Hawking about this.
Okay, but will the principal & the teachers have RFID tags to track their attendance, too? And perhaps GPS systems tracking their cars to make sure they're not speeding to work in the morning? And Internet filters on their computers? And let's check the length of the male teacher's hair to make sure it's not too long, and the length of the female teacher's skirts, to make sure they're not too short, and oh yeah, let's have them blow into a breathalyzer each morning before they're allowed to enter the school, and by the way, the "Civil Liberties" class has been cancelled due to obsolescence. We've put the "Don't Be a Pirate" class in its place.
> Dont knock the security thru obscurity. It seems to work well for Linux, BSD, OSX, etc.
You don't seem to know what "security through obscurity" _means_, if you think that's what Linux & the *BSDs rely on.
re: insurance
If the security problem (whatever it is) becomes publicly known, that could damage business, insurance or no, and could cause insurance premiums to go up, conceivably, so it's in their best interests to fix this ASAP, whether they go public with that knowledge or not.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you mean - African or European?
It's the true ecologist's dream - it's powered by your own sense of self-satisfaction.
(thank you, Simpsons)
Forget a SATA CD burner - go with FireWire (FW800, 1394.b). Yum.
With all those extra people crawling around, reading Slashdot, it's going to make getting 'First Post' that much harder. :)
And I don't even wanna _think_ how much worse the Slashdot Effect would get!
Then again, BitTorrent would be that much better!
> It's crap, he's lying, whoring for karma. Hello!!!
That's "Hello World" to you, punk. Either that or HELO. Please to remember, this _is_ Slashdot.
> So the Doctor told me, "...okay so you can live for 500 years. All we have to do is remove your nads."
:)
Well, that would certainly cure the nasty overpopulation side-effect, wouldn't it?
I just got an Atari 800 off eBay a few weeks ago. *sweet*
Oh, I forgot - I was gonna gut it for another project. Guess I'll have to get another. Good thing they're cheap!
Ah, no weakness there - the ports only go up to 48! :)
> max. 190 kByte/s.
Well hell, that's still about 10x faster than the Zaurus website after a Slashdotting.
Ya know, I just thought of something. These legal maneuverings by SCO are just SO absurd that the lawyers involved HAVE to know that. So I'm wondering - is SCO just being taken advantage of by unscrupulous lawyers, wanting to bilk stupid-ass SCO execs into thinking they can win anything?
I think that the devaluation would only occur because the current amount of text it shows is way too much. Once (if?) they fix that problem, then it doesn't devalue the property at all - quite the opposite. The whole point of this is to make it easier to find what you want to BUY it; thus, the author (and the publisher) benefit greatly. The problem as I see it is not the concept (which is genius), but the implementation (which is somewhat ridiculous). A relatively simple fine-tuning of the process should be enough to make this a win-win for everyone, especially authors.
re: opt-in
If they fix the problems with the implementation, I'd be surprised if any reasonable author (I am a published author, btw), would be opposed to this at all, but rather, be chomping at the bit to get in on this. Trust me, authors like to sell books, and this is WAY harder to copy content than, say, Baen Books current trend with some authors (like David Weber) of putting CD-ROMs of the entire unprotected content of not only the current book you just bought, and in several forms, but all the previous books in the series, and books from other authors. They've been doing that for awhile now, and don't seem to have a problem with it.
Oh please.
.DOC, HTML), and the page numbers are certainly going to differ between many or most of them.
If the content is 'formmated' correctly (paragraphs, tabs, & whatnot), then changing the font and/or size isn't going to do anything to damage the 'spirit' of the work. If someone happens to prefer a sans serif type to a serif one, and it helps them actually READ the work in question, that's only to the better. Yes, people can and will do stupid things with fonts - but then that would be their problem, would it not? Personal responsibility.
As far as messing up the page numbering, so what? Many books are printed in hardback, trade paperback, paperback, abridged, & audio cassette form, many now come with a CD-ROM of the full text of the book included in multiple format (PDF, text, Word
The text is the thang. Deal.
Ah, yeah, that's way too much content to be displaying, then. If they merely cut back the amount of text displayed to, say, a paragraph or less, then I think everything would be hunky-dory.
Or, they could change the amount of text displayed based on the type of content. Less for a cookbook or reference book, and more for a novel. This is the first time anyone's done this, so hopefully a little finetuning will be forthcoming. Demonizing Amazon.com has historically had NO effect on their behaviour, so hopefully a more intelligent & reasoned approach will work.
Certainly, bitching about it on Slashdot won't do a damned thing.
My understanding is they're not making the content 'available', only 'searchable'. You type in the text you're looking for, it shows you what books they have (scanned & OCR'd) that match the hits. How much OF that matching text they display I dunno - my understanding is they're NOT showing the entire text of the books. Is this incorrect?
It depends on how much info of the 'hit' that Amazon displays. It's going to be a balance between showing 'just enough' for the searcher to verify that's the right book, but not so much that valuable content is being given away. If it's handled correctly, this can be a huge boon to everyone, authors included. If authors want to bitch about something, they should be bugging their publishers to make their back catalogs available in electronic, print-on-demand format, so that when someone *does* want to buy their book, they can, no matter what.
The ultimate goal would be to have electronic (and thus print-on-demand if you want) access to every published work, translated on the fly into any language you want. Print on demand could allow you to choose binding options, paper quality, paper dimensions, font & font size, etc. Anything that works toward this goal is a Good Thing(tm).
If Google doesn't HAVE that info indexed (and Amazon doesn't allow search engines to index that info), then you don't have much choice.
Publishers don't have to _let_ Amazon do this. Amazon can do this without anybody's permission - they're not making content available to the public, merely letting the public find the right product to then buy. From my understanding, no content is being sold, or made available, outside of book form. Author should be shouting for friggin' JOY at this. Ugh.
So is their website *hosted* on a Zaurus? Sad.
Dude, that was the BEST PART of the the new design! :)
Even the recently-released A80 has spot-metering. The Digital Rebel is crippled. *sigh*
Only influential to server bandwidth.
Deep Space. Well, it's all a matter of perspective as to what's "far away" or "takes a long time to get to". You may think it's a long way down to the corner drugstore, but that's peanuts compared to space! (bonus points for identifying the source, you big buncha nerds)
That would depend on your definition of 'deep space.'
But that's only one dimension of space - what about 'tall space' and 'wide space'? We're ignoring two of the 3 dimensions - maybe there's where all that 'missing matter' is...I should call Prof. Hawking about this.
Okay, but will the principal & the teachers have RFID tags to track their attendance, too? And perhaps GPS systems tracking their cars to make sure they're not speeding to work in the morning? And Internet filters on their computers? And let's check the length of the male teacher's hair to make sure it's not too long, and the length of the female teacher's skirts, to make sure they're not too short, and oh yeah, let's have them blow into a breathalyzer each morning before they're allowed to enter the school, and by the way, the "Civil Liberties" class has been cancelled due to obsolescence. We've put the "Don't Be a Pirate" class in its place.
</rant>
> Dont knock the security thru obscurity. It seems to work well for Linux, BSD, OSX, etc.
You don't seem to know what "security through obscurity" _means_, if you think that's what Linux & the *BSDs rely on.
re: insurance
If the security problem (whatever it is) becomes publicly known, that could damage business, insurance or no, and could cause insurance premiums to go up, conceivably, so it's in their best interests to fix this ASAP, whether they go public with that knowledge or not.