Should be able to buy for whichever format we want
on
Why Nobody Likes E-Books
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· Score: 4, Insightful
My idea of utilising the network for distributing literature involves getting the book in print as an option.
I would like to go into a book store, and ask for any book, which would be printed on demand.
Or, I would like to go into a book store, transfer my ebook token, for which I paid $4 for to the book store. Then for an additional $3, I would
receive a cheap pulp/paperback print copy of the same book. Or I could add $11 for a original printed copy from the publisher/printer, which normally would have cost $15 withot the token.
30 years after, the print copy would still be functional, while all the other gadgets and content delivery schemes would long since have been obsolete and thrown away.
Not only that, but you could get free access to "premium content". Why pay real bucks to some pr0n site, when you can let the neighbor carry the cost. Maybe the internet will be free ( as in beer ) again?
The weird thing was that machine had been a pure Windows machine for months and didn't usually boot through LILO at all.
Spooky. Wonder if that was what the recent MS FUD about opensource was about. Not only viral software licences, but viral install and boot process, facilitated by lightning. No wonder they're scared.
I really don't know enough to say whether the palm cradle is causing this. However, people should not dismiss the possibility just because they find it unlikely. Things can break in very unlikely ways, and when the bad ducks are lined up, stuff happens.
Some early microcomputers could burn up, literally catch fire, when issued certain instructions. Monitors could blow up when given the wrong sync rates. Punch cards could jam the readers when some of them had too many bits set. Hard drives could walk if exposed to a malicious seeking program.
A faulty gadget able to break a motherboard doesn't sound too far fetched to me.
Apropos Kevin, does anyone remember the best apology scene ever in "A Fish Called Wanda", with John Cleese giving this long speech, end then the camera rotates and zooms out , and we see Cleese being held out a window by Kevin Kline.
That's probably the position Kevin was in when giving this apology to the LT readers, and explains the grammar errors.
nope. I think it's because everybody's got it, so the likelyhood that anybody will bother doing anyting really nasty to any given machine is small. We now have a millions of machines excercising security by obscurity. I wish I just don't hope all the IIS machines now gang up on the rest of the net.
I'd just hope they'll have more imagination with their hacks. "Hacked by chinese" WTF? Spending all that time devising a crufty virus, and that's all they have to say? What a complete waist of human effort. Blackhats wearing diapers?
Re:Man, I wish...
on
Code Redux
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· Score: 5, Funny
You're not lame for running IIS if you've patched it. You're lame if you aren't paying attention to the patches out there.
Sorry for being such a troll, but what makes you believe that this patch is the ultimate cure of IIS security bugs? You may not be lame, but you do posess an impressive threshold for pain.
This isn't a DCMA issue. It's a patent issue, and it's a good patent. They actually created something new and protected it. It's not like
many of the bogus patents of late. The ability to encode 6 channels of discrete audio in one signal doesn't qualify as "obvious".
You're right about the DMCA part. This is not about circumventing copyright protection devices.
In my view it has much more in common with Rambus. Dolby has been pushing their solution as a "standard" sic!. They are trying to push all content providers towards their solution. This means you can buy a copy of a movie with dolby, and you have to pay dolby licence money to get access to that copy. In that sense, they're playing the same game as RIAA.
They are also playing the same game as rambus.
Dolby is making a bunch by getting a slice of the cake both for the encoding and decoding. We shold only have to pay at one of the ends. Content providers should pay dolby tax, and content consumers should get to decode for free, since they've already paid the tax indirectly through the content provider.
Legally everything Dolby did is just fine, but I don't have to like it.
Since it's been months since I last logged on to a windows machine, I am blissfully unafected. Go Gator!
Another nail in the coffin for Microsoft. They've introduced so many horrible technologies under the pretext of providing extra value to the customer. As the saying goes: "what comes around, goes around". Or "as you sow, you reap", etc.
Code red, sircam, gator,.NET, powerpoint, bsod. At some point the users, and the MIS departments will figure out the real cost of ownership for these wonderful features, technologies, and unintended (but anticipated) side effects, and real operating systems can once more rule the day.
Maybe Microsoft will have no choice but slim down their office apps, and release them on BSD and Linux to make a buck.
Maybe 15 years down the road, we can refer to the 90's as the dark middle age of computing.
The arrogance of saying "I just know it" for a kid who presumes to know everything you need to know about a professional field people
spend years in graduate school for rather efficiently reveals that this kid's attitude probably won't take him far in serious academic study.
If memory serves me right, he was rated among the top experts on the site, competing against real lawyers. You may be overrating the value of university study. If you add up the hours, way too much time is spent smoking pot, taking non-essentials classes, sports, drinking beer, wasting time taking useless notes at a boring lecture, and on and on.
If you have an area of interest, it being stamp collection, beanie babies, astronomy, medicine, law, programming, politics, history, math, finance, journalism, there have always been shitloads of sources out there. If you dedicate some time and focus on a field, at some point there are only minor details that makes you different from a certified expert. You don't even have to be a genious to be a know-it-all, or a good performer in your field.
You are the one serving up bullshit. Just because someone didn't follow a curricilum from a to Z does not mean they're not experts. I've run into many amateurs, some very young, who can run circles around professionals in their field. The professionals tend to have a complacent attitide to their field of expertise. Amateurs make up for that with focus and dedication.
I read the story about the legal whiz kid, and was a bit annoyed by his "I just know" answer myself. But my conclusion is different from yours. He may be a wiz at law, but less educated about society at large, and how to deal with're journalists. And probably some bad lawyer attitude has rubbed off on him. Lawyers don't like to admit that the advice they're giving came easy.
I bet 80% of legal advice given could be compressed into a fairly small F.A.Q. Lawyers need to make money, even off the FAQ's which is why they frown upon somebody giving it away for free.
Wiz kids who appear to be experts don't amaze me, though. These kids have always existed. There's not more wizardry now than before. It's just that the internet have given them a much larger audience. So, instead of being the neighborhood's annoying besserwissers, with maybe one or two likeminded souls in the each town, these kids now may have thousands of readers.
If the kid spent his weekends looking up answers to questions in the local univeristy legal library, then I'd think he was a industrious
worker with a promising future. But this kid is quite full of BS, and his answer on askme.com are engineered into piles of BS, so its mildly
rediculous that he's getting all this positive attention.
So, you're saying paper and ink are more valuable sources of information than television, bits and bytes?
Extrapolating on that, we must expect something big to happen within the next billion milliseconds. Which is roughly 10 days from now.
Anyone care to make a guess? And a billion my, micro, or microseconds after that(about 15 minutes), another major event will occur.
You are, of course, as wrong as they come. In any criminal case, the prosecutors, and the investigators are the first judges of a case. If they believe a case can not stick, or is too weak, or is not considered important, they'll just take your fingerprints and let you go.
Bringing a bad case to court is considered a loss of face for any prosecutor, and they hate to do that. So our criticism of FBI for blindly charging into this case stands.
Yep. $50000 for bail is a well-deserved slap in the face of FBI. I wonder what's going on inside FBI now. The agents are not stupid, just following orders. I am sure they know as well as all of us that this law is bogus. Must suck to be them.
Yes, according to your story, and the article writer Kevin must be in a very far stage of a neurosis. He has lost touch with reality, but is not in a full blown psychosis yet. Poeple in a full psychosis can normally not take care of themselves. The other possibillity is that the guy is a psychopath, in which case he could be dengerous.
What amazes me is that other executives never noticed and made sure the guy got the proper health care for his illness.
IANAP (I am not a pshycologist), but
based on this story, and another posted by a freelancer, it sounds like this Kevin guy has some clinical mental problems. The way he became less and less available, probably not showing up for work, slowly losing touch with employees, it sounds verymuch like a psychosis in development. He was losing touch with reality.
The scary part though, is that when he was found out, he did not have a breakdown. Most people have a certain level of shame. When they do something really bad and are found out, they run away or break down to confess. They can also go into denial. But unless they're far gne, they'll not do the same thing again, either out of fear of being exposed again, or ot of genuine shame.
Now this guy, every time he is exposed, he manages to get his whistleblowers fired. Only psychopaths can pull that sort of thing off. Only psychopaths have that kind of superiority, and no fear of being caught. That he had the pull to get these people fired probably only has fuelled the runaway ego of this Kevin guy.
The article writer can count himself lucky that he is out of it. There's no telling what a guy like Kevin could do if pushed into a corner.
My mind does not wander to the eternal hunting fields of gizmos. It's more like the ultimate professional wear for your typical "special deal" watch salesman. Open the vest and display your goods. Sir, how about this nice Visor, only 29.90? This Rolex is only 129.50. No, my gold rings and chains are NOT for sale.
We pointed out this flaw to Microsoft. Microsoft indicated they were already aware of the flaw, and it was fixed that same day.
So, they had been aware of the flaw, but did nothing about it untill it was publicly known? Call me paranoid, but how about this: Exploits are OK as long as they are known only to Microsoft people? Are they leaving some easter eggs so that a bunch of MS employees can gain access to other people's information and money?
It's bad enough that so many untrustworthy commerce sites are out there, running broken versions of MS web servers. Now we are supposed to have microshit as a "trusted" third party for all our commerce and authentication. No way Jose. My webshoppin days est fini. I'll be usng the phone from now on.
The BSA tactics lines up extremely well with the methods used by Hitler, and later Stalin, and teh Chinese gang of 4, to weed out non-conforming citizens.
It's almost funny. Especially where the MS spokesperson says that Microsoft is commited to help their custumers achieve compliance(The ultimate happiness!). That one sounds a bit like the chinese cultural revoution. The BSA will help you achieve compliance and happiness for your own good. You'll hate us today, but with enough time and schooling you will become a good chinese. When we let you out of the camp, you will be new person and you will love us.
Well, Hitler and Stalin are out, the chinese got rid of the gang of 4. The way BSA are forging ahead, they won't last much longer either.
And even though the Egyptians were a very advanced society, how could they make rope that could withstand the pressures of a huge rock being thrown around in the wind?
Good point. Another thing to consider: If they used this method to raise huge rocks into the air, why didn't they also use it for warfare? Remember that most new technology usually ends up as weapons. A legion of obelisk kite-flyers would be a powerful force against besieged cities, or against armies that had advantage of higher terrain.
This Norman Matloff fellow is not interested in programmers. Put his name into Google and find an array of anti-immigration articles and sites. It seems that this person is just a hard core protectionist worried about them dang forners takin' jobs from honest
'muricans.
'Tis true. People tend to assume that reports issued from a university has to adhere to certain scientific standards. Another assumption people have is that University staff are radical hippie academics. This report however, reads like a conspiracy theory from someone with a bone to grind. Probably based on a revenge motive after some job he got fired from many years ago. All the facts that go against him are dismissed as "anecdotal", and all the facts for him are evidence, no matter how anecdotal they are.
The report is only a proof that Universities have very liberal hiring practices, and even University sponsored "research" can be pseudoscience.
I am afraid you put too much trust in the suprtior court. The superior court is an extension of the political system, with roughly 50/50 democrats and republicans. The law was passed with a democrat president and republican congress.
For the forseeable future (10-20 years?) this law will stand, and the only way to get some breathing room is to force the corporations to keep themselves in check. This will get a lot worse before it gets any better. I guarantee it.
Continuing effors against Adobe is only vindictive. It will only take away resources from getting Sklyarov out of prison, and reforming (killing) the DCMA. don't forget your priorities.
Fighting the DMCA will require more stick than carrot. By using the stick on Adobe, a signal is sent to other companies. If you try to use DMCA against the people, it will cost you a lot of money and good will. If the boycott is called off the day after it started, the message is: "Milk DMCA for all that it's worth. It won't cost you a penny". For that reason, a boycott of Adobe should be intensified.
If we punish adobe enough, they might even find it in their interest to lobby against the DMCA. That's what moves DC lawmakers: lobbyists and money. They don't care squat about protesters. The protesters are political deviants as far as DC and the grey masses is conserned..
I bolted the parts all into a cardboard box (it works, just find a stiff box, poke holes in it with a screw driver, and use washers with
your screws).
A cardbox box? What extravaganza! In my day we were lucky to find a grocery bag to throw the parts in.
A grocery bag? What luxury! When I was a kid, we were lucky if we had a nail to bolt the motherboard to the wall.
Nail and board? When I was a kid, we had to make our own transistors, write an assembler, nick a car battery, and if we were lucky, we'd find a piece of string to hold the bits together.
Wrong. It spreads because people are dumb enough to write email clients that autorun attachments, and because people are dumb enough to buy software from a company that makes such dumb software.
So, we're talking about the CTO's and the IS departments. THEY are the ones supposed to be smart and educated about computers and security. They need to assume that their USERs are like 3 year olds when it comes to computer security, or educate the users to be as smart as they are.
By purchasing and using such inherently insecure software, the IS departments and CTO's are doing the same as a parents handing loaded guns to their infants.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to go into a book store, and ask for any book, which would be printed on demand.
Or, I would like to go into a book store, transfer my ebook token, for which I paid $4 for to the book store. Then for an additional $3, I would receive a cheap pulp/paperback print copy of the same book. Or I could add $11 for a original printed copy from the publisher/printer, which normally would have cost $15 withot the token.
30 years after, the print copy would still be functional, while all the other gadgets and content delivery schemes would long since have been obsolete and thrown away.
Not only that, but you could get free access to "premium content". Why pay real bucks to some pr0n site, when you can let the neighbor carry the cost. Maybe the internet will be free ( as in beer ) again?
Spooky. Wonder if that was what the recent MS FUD about opensource was about. Not only viral software licences, but viral install and boot process, facilitated by lightning. No wonder they're scared.
Some early microcomputers could burn up, literally catch fire, when issued certain instructions. Monitors could blow up when given the wrong sync rates. Punch cards could jam the readers when some of them had too many bits set. Hard drives could walk if exposed to a malicious seeking program.
A faulty gadget able to break a motherboard doesn't sound too far fetched to me.
Apropos Kevin, does anyone remember the best apology scene ever in "A Fish Called Wanda", with John Cleese giving this long speech, end then the camera rotates and zooms out , and we see Cleese being held out a window by Kevin Kline.
That's probably the position Kevin was in when giving this apology to the LT readers, and explains the grammar errors.
I'd just hope they'll have more imagination with their hacks. "Hacked by chinese" WTF? Spending all that time devising a crufty virus, and that's all they have to say? What a complete waist of human effort. Blackhats wearing diapers?
Sorry for being such a troll, but what makes you believe that this patch is the ultimate cure of IIS security bugs? You may not be lame, but you do posess an impressive threshold for pain.
You are absolutely right. What as I thinking. ActiveX has nothing to do with Microsoft.
You're right about the DMCA part. This is not about circumventing copyright protection devices.
In my view it has much more in common with Rambus. Dolby has been pushing their solution as a "standard" sic!. They are trying to push all content providers towards their solution. This means you can buy a copy of a movie with dolby, and you have to pay dolby licence money to get access to that copy. In that sense, they're playing the same game as RIAA.
They are also playing the same game as rambus.
Dolby is making a bunch by getting a slice of the cake both for the encoding and decoding. We shold only have to pay at one of the ends. Content providers should pay dolby tax, and content consumers should get to decode for free, since they've already paid the tax indirectly through the content provider.
Legally everything Dolby did is just fine, but I don't have to like it.
Another nail in the coffin for Microsoft. They've introduced so many horrible technologies under the pretext of providing extra value to the customer. As the saying goes: "what comes around, goes around". Or "as you sow, you reap", etc.
Code red, sircam, gator, .NET, powerpoint, bsod. At some point the users, and the MIS departments will figure out the real cost of ownership for these wonderful features, technologies, and unintended (but anticipated) side effects, and real operating systems can once more rule the day.
Maybe Microsoft will have no choice but slim down their office apps, and release them on BSD and Linux to make a buck.
Maybe 15 years down the road, we can refer to the 90's as the dark middle age of computing.
If memory serves me right, he was rated among the top experts on the site, competing against real lawyers. You may be overrating the value of university study. If you add up the hours, way too much time is spent smoking pot, taking non-essentials classes, sports, drinking beer, wasting time taking useless notes at a boring lecture, and on and on.
If you have an area of interest, it being stamp collection, beanie babies, astronomy, medicine, law, programming, politics, history, math, finance, journalism, there have always been shitloads of sources out there. If you dedicate some time and focus on a field, at some point there are only minor details that makes you different from a certified expert. You don't even have to be a genious to be a know-it-all, or a good performer in your field.
You are the one serving up bullshit. Just because someone didn't follow a curricilum from a to Z does not mean they're not experts. I've run into many amateurs, some very young, who can run circles around professionals in their field. The professionals tend to have a complacent attitide to their field of expertise. Amateurs make up for that with focus and dedication.
I read the story about the legal whiz kid, and was a bit annoyed by his "I just know" answer myself. But my conclusion is different from yours. He may be a wiz at law, but less educated about society at large, and how to deal with're journalists. And probably some bad lawyer attitude has rubbed off on him. Lawyers don't like to admit that the advice they're giving came easy. I bet 80% of legal advice given could be compressed into a fairly small F.A.Q. Lawyers need to make money, even off the FAQ's which is why they frown upon somebody giving it away for free.
Wiz kids who appear to be experts don't amaze me, though. These kids have always existed. There's not more wizardry now than before. It's just that the internet have given them a much larger audience. So, instead of being the neighborhood's annoying besserwissers, with maybe one or two likeminded souls in the each town, these kids now may have thousands of readers.
If the kid spent his weekends looking up answers to questions in the local univeristy legal library, then I'd think he was a industrious worker with a promising future. But this kid is quite full of BS, and his answer on askme.com are engineered into piles of BS, so its mildly rediculous that he's getting all this positive attention.
So, you're saying paper and ink are more valuable sources of information than television, bits and bytes?
Extrapolating on that, we must expect something big to happen within the next billion milliseconds. Which is roughly 10 days from now. Anyone care to make a guess? And a billion my, micro, or microseconds after that(about 15 minutes), another major event will occur.
Bringing a bad case to court is considered a loss of face for any prosecutor, and they hate to do that. So our criticism of FBI for blindly charging into this case stands.
Yep. $50000 for bail is a well-deserved slap in the face of FBI. I wonder what's going on inside FBI now. The agents are not stupid, just following orders. I am sure they know as well as all of us that this law is bogus. Must suck to be them.
What amazes me is that other executives never noticed and made sure the guy got the proper health care for his illness.
The scary part though, is that when he was found out, he did not have a breakdown. Most people have a certain level of shame. When they do something really bad and are found out, they run away or break down to confess. They can also go into denial. But unless they're far gne, they'll not do the same thing again, either out of fear of being exposed again, or ot of genuine shame.
Now this guy, every time he is exposed, he manages to get his whistleblowers fired. Only psychopaths can pull that sort of thing off. Only psychopaths have that kind of superiority, and no fear of being caught. That he had the pull to get these people fired probably only has fuelled the runaway ego of this Kevin guy.
The article writer can count himself lucky that he is out of it. There's no telling what a guy like Kevin could do if pushed into a corner.
My mind does not wander to the eternal hunting fields of gizmos. It's more like the ultimate professional wear for your typical "special deal" watch salesman. Open the vest and display your goods. Sir, how about this nice Visor, only 29.90? This Rolex is only 129.50. No, my gold rings and chains are NOT for sale.
So, they had been aware of the flaw, but did nothing about it untill it was publicly known? Call me paranoid, but how about this: Exploits are OK as long as they are known only to Microsoft people? Are they leaving some easter eggs so that a bunch of MS employees can gain access to other people's information and money?
It's bad enough that so many untrustworthy commerce sites are out there, running broken versions of MS web servers. Now we are supposed to have microshit as a "trusted" third party for all our commerce and authentication. No way Jose. My webshoppin days est fini. I'll be usng the phone from now on.
It's almost funny. Especially where the MS spokesperson says that Microsoft is commited to help their custumers achieve compliance(The ultimate happiness!). That one sounds a bit like the chinese cultural revoution. The BSA will help you achieve compliance and happiness for your own good. You'll hate us today, but with enough time and schooling you will become a good chinese. When we let you out of the camp, you will be new person and you will love us.
Well, Hitler and Stalin are out, the chinese got rid of the gang of 4. The way BSA are forging ahead, they won't last much longer either.
Good point. Another thing to consider: If they used this method to raise huge rocks into the air, why didn't they also use it for warfare? Remember that most new technology usually ends up as weapons. A legion of obelisk kite-flyers would be a powerful force against besieged cities, or against armies that had advantage of higher terrain.
'Tis true. People tend to assume that reports issued from a university has to adhere to certain scientific standards. Another assumption people have is that University staff are radical hippie academics. This report however, reads like a conspiracy theory from someone with a bone to grind. Probably based on a revenge motive after some job he got fired from many years ago. All the facts that go against him are dismissed as "anecdotal", and all the facts for him are evidence, no matter how anecdotal they are.
The report is only a proof that Universities have very liberal hiring practices, and even University sponsored "research" can be pseudoscience.
Seems Matloff is ripe for some debunking.
For the forseeable future (10-20 years?) this law will stand, and the only way to get some breathing room is to force the corporations to keep themselves in check. This will get a lot worse before it gets any better. I guarantee it.
Fighting the DMCA will require more stick than carrot. By using the stick on Adobe, a signal is sent to other companies. If you try to use DMCA against the people, it will cost you a lot of money and good will. If the boycott is called off the day after it started, the message is: "Milk DMCA for all that it's worth. It won't cost you a penny". For that reason, a boycott of Adobe should be intensified.
If we punish adobe enough, they might even find it in their interest to lobby against the DMCA. That's what moves DC lawmakers: lobbyists and money. They don't care squat about protesters. The protesters are political deviants as far as DC and the grey masses is conserned..
A cardbox box? What extravaganza! In my day we were lucky to find a grocery bag to throw the parts in.
A grocery bag? What luxury! When I was a kid, we were lucky if we had a nail to bolt the motherboard to the wall.
Nail and board? When I was a kid, we had to make our own transistors, write an assembler, nick a car battery, and if we were lucky, we'd find a piece of string to hold the bits together.
So, we're talking about the CTO's and the IS departments. THEY are the ones supposed to be smart and educated about computers and security. They need to assume that their USERs are like 3 year olds when it comes to computer security, or educate the users to be as smart as they are.
By purchasing and using such inherently insecure software, the IS departments and CTO's are doing the same as a parents handing loaded guns to their infants.