You appear to be incorrectly assuming that/. readers actually read articles being highlighted, rather than simply charging in to the comments area ready to display their preconcieved prejudices.
I agree about the collusion, but I'd be willing to bet it's actually aimed at the black market in exporting PS2s.
I was recently in Melbourne, and some guy in a market stall was displaying an (illegally imported) PS2, and happily offered to get me one in if I gave a week's notice. People doing this are presumably bringing them back by flying to Japan, buying a couple for personal use and flying out again. By limiting it to one per person, you gut the traders.
So why wouldn't you release EP 1 on a digital format?
Because the film sucked rocks?
Seriously, I find it odd that there seems (based on people I know personally, not reading/. comments) that there are a whole bunch of people who want to buy Episode I, even though they hated it. No wonder crap films keep tumbling out of Hollywood.
The reason it is a copyright issue is because people forget that they are buying a license to use the material, not ownership thereof. If a company chooses to license content in certain ways, then they are quite right to be concerned about breaches of licencing schemes.
Of course, where the entertainmeent iondustry is lousy is that it treats items as licensed when it suits them, and physical objects when it doesn't. For example, if I buy a copy of Microsoft Office and the CD gets scratched, Microsoft will generally replace it for the cost of the media, since I've already paid for the license to use the software. A music seller, will, however, refuse to do the same, insisting you buy a new license to get new media.
Perl will be, when released. Which saves you one build. When you can get it (I don't rate not-yet-shipping products).
Of course, that still leaves you pulling down gcc so you can compile stuff, and all the wierd and wonderful tools most people get used to.
IME, setting up Solaris as a productive environent takes about a day starting from scratch. Setting up a productive free *ix environment takes an hour or two.
Of course, free *ixen don't run on E10000s, but for workstation and small server use (the Intel world, in other words), Solaris has a pretty marginal value, if any.
FYI, Solaris on Intel systems pretty much will now cost the same as Linux, thanks to Suns new idea about licensing.
That depends on one's idea of cost. Personally, I find installing Solaris on Intel costs a damn sight more than Linux, mainly because it is slower and comes without such basic tools as perl.
Back when I was a Mac guy, I quizzed Apple reps about the amount of 68k code left in the Mac OS Apple's line was that most of their effor was going into converting the most-used paths over to PPC, since it was the most productive use of programmer time. They never expected the Mac OS to be completely 68k free, since some of the code would never be worth replacing.
Public libraries have been a standard in the US for so long that free access to information is now taken for granted. The only thing offered by this repository is convenience. It is an advance, with advantages, but not a revolution.
There are a fre points to address here:
The world is not the United States. There are plenty of places in the world (and the United States, for that matter) that cannot afford reasonable libraries. PG can be read on low-end (archaic!) PCs, printed for people and so forth whose community would never provide them with public library facilities. And we're not talking just the third world here a friend just came back from the UK with horror stories of the impoverished state of most public libraries.
Libraries are subject to all manner of political machinations, and if one lives in a conservative community, one may find a well-funded public library with certain gaps in its collection. Consider the pressure to keep Catcher in the Rye, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn out of public libraries, and that's before one considers material which might arouse controversy in a more liberal community (such as the Diaries of Walter or the sundry works of de Sade). Unpopularity can easily result in material being quashed.
Just because something may be reproduced (be in the public domain) doesn't mean in will. PG includes any number of texts which are out of print. Even if a public library wanted to stock them, it may well not be able to find editions. I have this problem with my favourite poet, Wilfred Owen, who is no longer in print - the last edition of his work I can find is one published 10 years ago as a limited edition, and the rest of his work is available only trawling second hand bookstores or getting his more popular stuff in collections of WW I poetry.
Fundamentally, Gutenberg is about giving people the power to make choices about their reading material, and to put a large corpus thereof in a form people can actually use.
The revolution of Gutenberg's press, incidentally, was not allowing reproduction of books. Anyone could do that before. It was to make it affordable, and take it out of the hands of the clergy and make it an activity anyoine in secular society could participate in. The comparison to publishing over the net as an enabler is quite apt.
The choice of books to be included in the project is made by the people involved in the project, Hart has no say in this and will do everything within his power to avoid suggesting a book for you to work on, he serves more as an administrator of the whole project, keeping it working and from falling off the ends of the earth.
What I found interesting was the criticism levelled by other academics towards the project - it rather mirrors some of the pissy whining in the free software world. Lots of people complaining about choices of editions, editorial quality, and so forth, but none of them willing to get off their butts and help the project do it better.
Is that it renders Gutenberg absolutely useless for a vast body of texts. How does one mark up Beowulf, or other Old English texts, without an eth (ð) character? How does one markup Old Norse? French without the cedilla? Central European and Russian character sets present even more problems, and that's before we get to ideographic writing.
Don't get me wrong - I admire Project Gutenberg and the myriad contributors for their work, but I think ASCII, while possibly a sensible choice when Gutenberg was founded, is flawed in the long run. And SGML or XML DTD that allows use of non-Roman character sets would be a boon to Project Gutenberg and its potential audience.
Talk is cheap. Perhaps you should spend a little time reviewing IBM's contributions to Linux and free software to date before you go shooting your mouth off, given they have ported various of their proprietary products (DB2, for example), adopted free software in place of their own closed alternatives (Apache), freed software they own (Java tools), and enhanced existing free software (JFS for Linux, and the DB2 team's regular flow of kernel patches when DB2 was being ported).
So some code hasn't come across yet? Perhaps IBM don't percieve a need or interest yet.
For some time, the big problem hasn't been resolution, but frame rates and realistic eought rendering. There's no point in having a 1600x1200 monitor to play games with if the games render at 2 fps and are still just big ol' blobby polygons. Much better to get an interlaces 50-60Hz display with high-quality rendering and rapid refresh.
Secondly, there's the target market. Marrying up a graphics card to a monitor and getting refresh, sync, etc has been annoying in the PC world. More annoying than just plugging a console into a TV and having it work, anyway.
And lastly, I do't know about TVs in your neighbourhood, but these days, TV manufacturers are pushing bigger screens cheaper. A 21" TV costs less than a 17" monitor, and for the price of a 20-21" monitor, I can probably get a 30"+.
The main reason I rag on MCSEs is because most of the people I know who actually have a clue about NT - that is, can actually make it work tolerably reliably in a production environment - consider it a waste of time. Most of the people I know who have or have studied towards an MCSE are weenies trying to get a few extra bucks without actually enhancing their knowledge any.
My perception isn't helped by the number of cyniocal ds for things like "NT Boot camps" which promise to give you a week-long cram session where you learn everything you need to pass the exams and sit them straight away. Yeah, that really convinces me that the MCSE is a credible qualification that tells me someone is one of the rare people who can actually make NT perform adequately.
Speaking of which, I've used Photoshop on SGI.. what's the big deal with porting from Irix to Linux? What's the hold-up?
Last I checked, active PhotoShop for Unix (Irix and Solaris) development finished at around 2.5.1 or 3.0. So ther isn't a contemporary code base to port to Linux (unlike FrameMaker and Distiller). Moreover, Adobe have only decided Linux constitutes some sort of real platform they can make money with in the last few months, with the aforementioned Frame and Distiller ports (as opposed to the Acrobat Reader ports, which are to nearly every platform that still has any kind of ongoing development).
Even with Adobe moving some of their existing Unix products to Linux, I still can't see them porting PhotoShop any time soon. If they didn't think it was worth keeping on the heavily graphics-desktop oriented Irix, I doubt they'll see much value in Linux. BICBW.
On-topic, it is nice to see more Gimp documentation - one of the big problems anyone trying to provide a PShop alternative has is that most people in the graphic arts industry aren't taught about image manipulation (as they were in the pre-digital area), they are taught "PhotoShop"; most courses and books purporting to be about image manipulation and the liek are little more than PhotoShop HOWTOs, so its gratifying to see some substantive alternatives.
Many moons ago (at the time First World War), the ancestor of the FBI arose in the US. It was intended, in the panic of war and the subsequent Russian Revolution and rise of Communism in Eastern Europe, to stamp out any chance of the emergence of Communist and Socialist groups in the US, with the main risk allegedly being foreigners importing their ideas. We'll gloss over the question of whether the US government has any business supervising the political beliefs of its own citizens for a moment.
The Bureau of Investigation of the Justice department did such a fine job of stamping out the danger of undersirable political thought and enforcing the recently minted Mann act (aimed at the White Slave trade) that it had a problem byu the 1920's - too little to do within the brief it was formed under. So it began expanding, using organised crime and interstate commerce to justify a widening scope into what would eventually become the FBI - which subsequently gained notoriety for spying on US citizens, carrying out dubious covert operations in Latin America, opposing the Civil Rights movement (hey, once you're sanctioned to decide what it is acceptable for US citizens to believe in, whi stop at Communism?).
Spy agencies are like any other hierarchical organisation, private or public. They attract people who wish to exercise power within the context of the organisation, and who wish the organisation to grow in scope and size, to increase their own power. The FBI is a good case study of a relatively narrow-focus group ballooning out of control (not an exaggeration - oversight of the FBI by elected representitives was a joke until after the death of Hoover). The CIA is seeking to expand its brief? Hardly surprising - you're not likely to see the CIA declare, "Hey, the Cold War is over, and we've been grossly incompetant in maintaining US interests in the posr-Cold War world, just disestablish us and set up a new agency!" No, one is seeing the CIA try to justify its size and still expand further by expanding the terms of its mission. And, like the FBI, one should be wary of lending a jingoistic support. I'm sure plenty of people who were happy to see the FBI frame immigrants for selling secrets, oops, catching Communist traitors, were less happy to hear of the FBI blackmailing Martin Luther King, or waste tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money spying on dangerous revolutionaries like Kris Kristofferson.
And that's even before considering the morality of it all...
And during WWII, Henry Ford sold the Nazis the vehicales they used to assist in killing thousands of US soldiers - drafted citizens. Corporations are, more often than not, run in such a fashion that they will happily endager or kill people on a grand scale for a few bucks, all the while chanting the mantra of maximising shareholder returns. It's hardly related to the nationality of the corporation.
For that matter, US alphabet soup agencies are hardly squeeky clean. Ever hear of arms for hostages f'rinstance?
Does the USB in Linux support Ethernet adpaters yet?
Not in the stable backport. I haven't kept abreast of USB in the unstable kernels.
Another option would be to use PPP over USB, which would give adequate performance for using the devices in a CyberCafe type setup, where they could be clustered around a USBEthernet router box built out of a PC.
Re:another long slashdot review
on
Database Nation
·
· Score: 1
1) Really long;
What would you prefer? "This book good. Thag like. You buy?" The book reviews on/. are certainly no longer than those in most decent newspapers. Besides which, your next point,
2) Usually just [really long] chapter-by-chapter summaries of the book, rather than analytical reviews that tell you why you should read the book;
...suggests that what really bugs you is that the reviews don't do much with the space, something I'd agree with. It would be nice to see more analysis of the book, rather than information anyone flipping through a copy in a bookstore can glean. For example, how well does the technique of mixing fictional scenarios with factual information work? Does it enhance this book, or do the what-if scenarios undermine the credibility of the factual information? Do the premises seem sound?
The point is, only the guy who installs software has "assented" to the EULA. The next guy who sits down at the console would seem to be legally immune. This is a lapse, I suppose, on the part of those anal-compulsive types who dream up all that legal rubbish.
Actually, Office 2K require users who log in to Windows to "sign" the EULA if they have not done so already. And whilst trying to work around that is still possible, it won't be for anyone who wishes to maintain a credible profile.
Did you know that the NT Server EULA now prohibits benchmark testing without prior approval by the Microsoft Corporation? I guess it's Mindcraft or no craft at all.
This has existed for quite some time, and most database vendors have similar clauses in their licensing. The difference is that under UCITA they will be legally enforcable - probably by the FBI or similar if the DCMA cases we've seen recently are any indication.
Capitalism has nothing to do with sharing information. It is simply an economic system allowing regulated free trade among individuals.
Capitalism has nothing to do with free trade - it is a description of how the means of production are owned (capital, in the modern world, as opposed to land in fuedal Europe a few hundred years ago). Whilst it is often convenient for proponents of capitalist systems to conflate free markets with capitalism, there is simply no connection.
If capitalism was linked to free markets, there would be no drive by companies toward monopolies and oligopolies, since they would be harmful to capitalism itself.
"Corporatism" is a nonsense word created by people who don't understand what corporations are. It means absolutely nothing.
In my experience, it is a word used by people who see that so-called free market capitalism regularly produces results which seem unsound, but are unwilling to question whether capitalism itself provides incentives toward sub-optimal outcomes.
Not only does UCITA make a direct attack on free software, by given the weight of law to any attempts by a company to frustrate hackers who try to reverse engineer protocol and file format capabilities, it provides a tool to prevent proponents of free software even discussing its advantages.
Under UCITA, a software company can make it an actionable breach of contract to say anything they don't like about their product. One of the reasons that free software has become more and more popular is that it has moved beyond being interesting to people who want to hack on source code or who care about freedom as a political concept; people are now using free software because proponents of Linux, *BSD, Apache, etc, have managed to convince people that free products can do the job better than non-free ones.
Consider: if UCITA had existed, Larry Wall might have found himself violating a license arrangement in developing Perl by including sh, awk, and sed features in the language. And even if he didn't, he wouldn't have been able to tell people about the virtues of Perl unless owners of the awk code had been prepared to allow him to explain that Perl is like awk, only better.
Likewise, how do you explain that Linux+Apache works better as a high-volume web server than Windows 95 + Personal Web Server? Microsoft could claim that the latter was suitable to run an ecommerce site with - and no-one who actually used the software would be able to disagree without being targeted for legal action. Oh, and a sudden inability to use the machine Windows was on.
Or, for a more concrete example, when it became apparent an early Service Pack for NT (1 or 2, I forget now) was corrupting NTFS volumes under certain circumstances, Microsoft refused to admit there was a problem. It was only after mainly Internet based lobbying and discussion of real world use of the SP that Microsoft were eventually forced to admit there was a mistake and correct it. Free software advocates can cite this as an example of why not to put data at the mercy of a closed-source company. Under UCITA, Microsoft could have sued anyone who claimed that the Service Pack was faulty, ignored the problem, and prevented anyone thereafter using it as PR. Sure, a bunch of people would have lost their data, but they're only customers.
The FSF: while this might go against the grain for a BSD guy, the FSF have done and continue to do a bunch of useful stuff, have a proven track record, and most of their major projects (GCC, OpenStep, a free Display PostScript) are usefull on a variety of platforms.
The EFF: a bunch of people doing good and fighting stupid laws. Which might not sound like much to do with free software, but if you think about the DCMA and the like, the ramifications are pretty scary.
The XFree86 project: A free X system is pretty important - one of the factors allowing Linux and the BSDs to be taken seriously as alternatives to commercial *ixen for workstation/desktop users. Unlike a lot of improtant projects, the XFree guys are perpetually underfunded and always need more hardware and cash (as well as programmer time).
Scholarships: One of the things needed are programmers to do stuff. A scholarship for a thesis which involves work on useful free software has got to be a winner, and may get the most bang for your buck.
Documentation: Documentation is one of the worst areas for free software. Hire a tech writer to document popular, poorly understood applications and give the docs away.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what I think a lot of you are missing....
You appear to be incorrectly assuming that /. readers actually read articles being highlighted, rather than simply charging in to the comments area ready to display their preconcieved prejudices.
I agree about the collusion, but I'd be willing to bet it's actually aimed at the black market in exporting PS2s.
I was recently in Melbourne, and some guy in a market stall was displaying an (illegally imported) PS2, and happily offered to get me one in if I gave a week's notice. People doing this are presumably bringing them back by flying to Japan, buying a couple for personal use and flying out again. By limiting it to one per person, you gut the traders.
So why wouldn't you release EP 1 on a digital format?
Because the film sucked rocks?
Seriously, I find it odd that there seems (based on people I know personally, not reading /. comments) that there are a whole bunch of people who want to buy Episode I, even though they hated it. No wonder crap films keep tumbling out of Hollywood.
just like Britney Spears' bellybutton, Shania Twain's cleavage,
Surely some mistake. Isn't it the other way around?
The reason it is a copyright issue is because people forget that they are buying a license to use the material, not ownership thereof. If a company chooses to license content in certain ways, then they are quite right to be concerned about breaches of licencing schemes.
Of course, where the entertainmeent iondustry is lousy is that it treats items as licensed when it suits them, and physical objects when it doesn't. For example, if I buy a copy of Microsoft Office and the CD gets scratched, Microsoft will generally replace it for the cost of the media, since I've already paid for the license to use the software. A music seller, will, however, refuse to do the same, insisting you buy a new license to get new media.
Perl will be, when released. Which saves you one build. When you can get it (I don't rate not-yet-shipping products).
Of course, that still leaves you pulling down gcc so you can compile stuff, and all the wierd and wonderful tools most people get used to.
IME, setting up Solaris as a productive environent takes about a day starting from scratch. Setting up a productive free *ix environment takes an hour or two.
Of course, free *ixen don't run on E10000s, but for workstation and small server use (the Intel world, in other words), Solaris has a pretty marginal value, if any.
FYI, Solaris on Intel systems pretty much will now cost the same as Linux, thanks to Suns new idea about licensing.
That depends on one's idea of cost. Personally, I find installing Solaris on Intel costs a damn sight more than Linux, mainly because it is slower and comes without such basic tools as perl.
Back when I was a Mac guy, I quizzed Apple reps about the amount of 68k code left in the Mac OS Apple's line was that most of their effor was going into converting the most-used paths over to PPC, since it was the most productive use of programmer time. They never expected the Mac OS to be completely 68k free, since some of the code would never be worth replacing.
Public libraries have been a standard in the US for so long that free access to information is now taken for granted. The only thing offered by this repository is convenience. It is an advance, with advantages, but not a revolution.
There are a fre points to address here:
Fundamentally, Gutenberg is about giving people the power to make choices about their reading material, and to put a large corpus thereof in a form people can actually use.
The revolution of Gutenberg's press, incidentally, was not allowing reproduction of books. Anyone could do that before. It was to make it affordable, and take it out of the hands of the clergy and make it an activity anyoine in secular society could participate in. The comparison to publishing over the net as an enabler is quite apt.
The choice of books to be included in the project is made by the people involved in the project, Hart has no say in this and will do everything within his power to avoid suggesting a book for you to work on, he serves more as an administrator of the whole project, keeping it working and from falling off the ends of the earth.
What I found interesting was the criticism levelled by other academics towards the project - it rather mirrors some of the pissy whining in the free software world. Lots of people complaining about choices of editions, editorial quality, and so forth, but none of them willing to get off their butts and help the project do it better.
Is that it renders Gutenberg absolutely useless for a vast body of texts. How does one mark up Beowulf, or other Old English texts, without an eth (ð) character? How does one markup Old Norse? French without the cedilla? Central European and Russian character sets present even more problems, and that's before we get to ideographic writing.
Don't get me wrong - I admire Project Gutenberg and the myriad contributors for their work, but I think ASCII, while possibly a sensible choice when Gutenberg was founded, is flawed in the long run. And SGML or XML DTD that allows use of non-Roman character sets would be a boon to Project Gutenberg and its potential audience.
Talk is cheap. Perhaps you should spend a little time reviewing IBM's contributions to Linux and free software to date before you go shooting your mouth off, given they have ported various of their proprietary products (DB2, for example), adopted free software in place of their own closed alternatives (Apache), freed software they own (Java tools), and enhanced existing free software (JFS for Linux, and the DB2 team's regular flow of kernel patches when DB2 was being ported).
So some code hasn't come across yet? Perhaps IBM don't percieve a need or interest yet.
For some time, the big problem hasn't been resolution, but frame rates and realistic eought rendering. There's no point in having a 1600x1200 monitor to play games with if the games render at 2 fps and are still just big ol' blobby polygons. Much better to get an interlaces 50-60Hz display with high-quality rendering and rapid refresh.
Secondly, there's the target market. Marrying up a graphics card to a monitor and getting refresh, sync, etc has been annoying in the PC world. More annoying than just plugging a console into a TV and having it work, anyway.
And lastly, I do't know about TVs in your neighbourhood, but these days, TV manufacturers are pushing bigger screens cheaper. A 21" TV costs less than a 17" monitor, and for the price of a 20-21" monitor, I can probably get a 30"+.
The main reason I rag on MCSEs is because most of the people I know who actually have a clue about NT - that is, can actually make it work tolerably reliably in a production environment - consider it a waste of time. Most of the people I know who have or have studied towards an MCSE are weenies trying to get a few extra bucks without actually enhancing their knowledge any.
My perception isn't helped by the number of cyniocal ds for things like "NT Boot camps" which promise to give you a week-long cram session where you learn everything you need to pass the exams and sit them straight away. Yeah, that really convinces me that the MCSE is a credible qualification that tells me someone is one of the rare people who can actually make NT perform adequately.
Speaking of which, I've used Photoshop on SGI.. what's the big deal with porting from Irix to Linux? What's the hold-up?
Last I checked, active PhotoShop for Unix (Irix and Solaris) development finished at around 2.5.1 or 3.0. So ther isn't a contemporary code base to port to Linux (unlike FrameMaker and Distiller). Moreover, Adobe have only decided Linux constitutes some sort of real platform they can make money with in the last few months, with the aforementioned Frame and Distiller ports (as opposed to the Acrobat Reader ports, which are to nearly every platform that still has any kind of ongoing development).
Even with Adobe moving some of their existing Unix products to Linux, I still can't see them porting PhotoShop any time soon. If they didn't think it was worth keeping on the heavily graphics-desktop oriented Irix, I doubt they'll see much value in Linux. BICBW.
On-topic, it is nice to see more Gimp documentation - one of the big problems anyone trying to provide a PShop alternative has is that most people in the graphic arts industry aren't taught about image manipulation (as they were in the pre-digital area), they are taught "PhotoShop"; most courses and books purporting to be about image manipulation and the liek are little more than PhotoShop HOWTOs, so its gratifying to see some substantive alternatives.
Many moons ago (at the time First World War), the ancestor of the FBI arose in the US. It was intended, in the panic of war and the subsequent Russian Revolution and rise of Communism in Eastern Europe, to stamp out any chance of the emergence of Communist and Socialist groups in the US, with the main risk allegedly being foreigners importing their ideas. We'll gloss over the question of whether the US government has any business supervising the political beliefs of its own citizens for a moment.
The Bureau of Investigation of the Justice department did such a fine job of stamping out the danger of undersirable political thought and enforcing the recently minted Mann act (aimed at the White Slave trade) that it had a problem byu the 1920's - too little to do within the brief it was formed under. So it began expanding, using organised crime and interstate commerce to justify a widening scope into what would eventually become the FBI - which subsequently gained notoriety for spying on US citizens, carrying out dubious covert operations in Latin America, opposing the Civil Rights movement (hey, once you're sanctioned to decide what it is acceptable for US citizens to believe in, whi stop at Communism?).
Spy agencies are like any other hierarchical organisation, private or public. They attract people who wish to exercise power within the context of the organisation, and who wish the organisation to grow in scope and size, to increase their own power. The FBI is a good case study of a relatively narrow-focus group ballooning out of control (not an exaggeration - oversight of the FBI by elected representitives was a joke until after the death of Hoover). The CIA is seeking to expand its brief? Hardly surprising - you're not likely to see the CIA declare, "Hey, the Cold War is over, and we've been grossly incompetant in maintaining US interests in the posr-Cold War world, just disestablish us and set up a new agency!" No, one is seeing the CIA try to justify its size and still expand further by expanding the terms of its mission. And, like the FBI, one should be wary of lending a jingoistic support. I'm sure plenty of people who were happy to see the FBI frame immigrants for selling secrets, oops, catching Communist traitors, were less happy to hear of the FBI blackmailing Martin Luther King, or waste tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money spying on dangerous revolutionaries like Kris Kristofferson.
And that's even before considering the morality of it all...
And during WWII, Henry Ford sold the Nazis the vehicales they used to assist in killing thousands of US soldiers - drafted citizens. Corporations are, more often than not, run in such a fashion that they will happily endager or kill people on a grand scale for a few bucks, all the while chanting the mantra of maximising shareholder returns. It's hardly related to the nationality of the corporation.
For that matter, US alphabet soup agencies are hardly squeeky clean. Ever hear of arms for hostages f'rinstance?
Could be a winner. Although PPP over a 2 meg link should give adequate performance...
Does the USB in Linux support Ethernet adpaters yet?
Not in the stable backport. I haven't kept abreast of USB in the unstable kernels.
Another option would be to use PPP over USB, which would give adequate performance for using the devices in a CyberCafe type setup, where they could be clustered around a USBEthernet router box built out of a PC.
1) Really long;
What would you prefer? "This book good. Thag like. You buy?" The book reviews on /. are certainly no longer than those in most decent newspapers. Besides which, your next point,
2) Usually just [really long] chapter-by-chapter summaries of the book, rather than analytical reviews that tell you why you should read the book;
...suggests that what really bugs you is that the reviews don't do much with the space, something I'd agree with. It would be nice to see more analysis of the book, rather than information anyone flipping through a copy in a bookstore can glean. For example, how well does the technique of mixing fictional scenarios with factual information work? Does it enhance this book, or do the what-if scenarios undermine the credibility of the factual information? Do the premises seem sound?
The point is, only the guy who installs software has "assented" to the EULA. The next guy who sits down at the console would seem to be legally immune. This is a lapse, I suppose, on the part of those anal-compulsive types who dream up all that legal rubbish.
Actually, Office 2K require users who log in to Windows to "sign" the EULA if they have not done so already. And whilst trying to work around that is still possible, it won't be for anyone who wishes to maintain a credible profile.
Did you know that the NT Server EULA now prohibits benchmark testing without prior approval by the Microsoft Corporation? I guess it's Mindcraft or no craft at all.
This has existed for quite some time, and most database vendors have similar clauses in their licensing. The difference is that under UCITA they will be legally enforcable - probably by the FBI or similar if the DCMA cases we've seen recently are any indication.
No, but the credibility of someone who claims to be an authority on a topic because they looked over the shoulder of another person is minimal.
Capitalism has nothing to do with sharing information. It is simply an economic system allowing regulated free trade among individuals.
Capitalism has nothing to do with free trade - it is a description of how the means of production are owned (capital, in the modern world, as opposed to land in fuedal Europe a few hundred years ago). Whilst it is often convenient for proponents of capitalist systems to conflate free markets with capitalism, there is simply no connection.
If capitalism was linked to free markets, there would be no drive by companies toward monopolies and oligopolies, since they would be harmful to capitalism itself.
"Corporatism" is a nonsense word created by people who don't understand what corporations are. It means absolutely nothing.
In my experience, it is a word used by people who see that so-called free market capitalism regularly produces results which seem unsound, but are unwilling to question whether capitalism itself provides incentives toward sub-optimal outcomes.
Not only does UCITA make a direct attack on free software, by given the weight of law to any attempts by a company to frustrate hackers who try to reverse engineer protocol and file format capabilities, it provides a tool to prevent proponents of free software even discussing its advantages.
Under UCITA, a software company can make it an actionable breach of contract to say anything they don't like about their product. One of the reasons that free software has become more and more popular is that it has moved beyond being interesting to people who want to hack on source code or who care about freedom as a political concept; people are now using free software because proponents of Linux, *BSD, Apache, etc, have managed to convince people that free products can do the job better than non-free ones.
Consider: if UCITA had existed, Larry Wall might have found himself violating a license arrangement in developing Perl by including sh, awk, and sed features in the language. And even if he didn't, he wouldn't have been able to tell people about the virtues of Perl unless owners of the awk code had been prepared to allow him to explain that Perl is like awk, only better.
Likewise, how do you explain that Linux+Apache works better as a high-volume web server than Windows 95 + Personal Web Server? Microsoft could claim that the latter was suitable to run an ecommerce site with - and no-one who actually used the software would be able to disagree without being targeted for legal action. Oh, and a sudden inability to use the machine Windows was on.
Or, for a more concrete example, when it became apparent an early Service Pack for NT (1 or 2, I forget now) was corrupting NTFS volumes under certain circumstances, Microsoft refused to admit there was a problem. It was only after mainly Internet based lobbying and discussion of real world use of the SP that Microsoft were eventually forced to admit there was a mistake and correct it. Free software advocates can cite this as an example of why not to put data at the mercy of a closed-source company. Under UCITA, Microsoft could have sued anyone who claimed that the Service Pack was faulty, ignored the problem, and prevented anyone thereafter using it as PR. Sure, a bunch of people would have lost their data, but they're only customers.
The FSF: while this might go against the grain for a BSD guy, the FSF have done and continue to do a bunch of useful stuff, have a proven track record, and most of their major projects (GCC, OpenStep, a free Display PostScript) are usefull on a variety of platforms.
The EFF: a bunch of people doing good and fighting stupid laws. Which might not sound like much to do with free software, but if you think about the DCMA and the like, the ramifications are pretty scary.
The XFree86 project: A free X system is pretty important - one of the factors allowing Linux and the BSDs to be taken seriously as alternatives to commercial *ixen for workstation/desktop users. Unlike a lot of improtant projects, the XFree guys are perpetually underfunded and always need more hardware and cash (as well as programmer time).
Scholarships: One of the things needed are programmers to do stuff. A scholarship for a thesis which involves work on useful free software has got to be a winner, and may get the most bang for your buck.
Documentation: Documentation is one of the worst areas for free software. Hire a tech writer to document popular, poorly understood applications and give the docs away.