"ebooks" are a ghetto. They're a little mini-subset of digital text. I don't need it.
We have HTML, and that presents a fine enough format for presenting digital text. Those who want a higher resolution can use a truetype font of their choice. PDF isn't bad either. The web was designed for digital text, and has been refined to pretty darn useful status in that application niche.
Increasingly, proprietary DRM formats are do little more than lock content out of the market, rather than pirates out of the content.
If more books were released under licenses I could afford, I'd read them.
In every case I've actually needed backups to date, I find that, if I did them instantly instead of nightly, I'd end up losing data. The most common need for a backup for me comes when I've made a mistake with the main data, and I need to go back to what I had, say, yesterday.
This isn't to say that instant backups wouldn't be nice for failover architectures, though. I just don't deal with systems that large, yet.
Why the hell is everything some whiner doesn't like "stealing"? First it's copying music, now it's open Wifi? Gimme a break.
I would tend to leave mine open, outside the firewall, when I had it. On the odd occasion someone was hogging badnwidth, I'd turn it off. Nobody was depriving me of the use of my services, never mind property.
This tendency to insinuate theft into everything rude is getting ridiculous.
"Oracle Corp's CEO, Larry Ellison, has maintained that open source projects are only successful when major technology corporations get involved"
Not to be confused with the assertion that major technology corporations only get involved with FOSS projects that are already successful. They wouldn't want to suggest to anyone that they were late to the MySQL party they just got stiffed on, now would they?
The headline says "OSS needs big business". Whenever I see the word "need", it requires clarification: for what? It doesn't need big business to survive, that's for certain. When Oracle's assets (and even MySQL AB's, for that matter) finally go up for auction, MySQL will still be Free as in you. FOSS might need industry for better exposure or faster development than could be had otherwise, of course - but that's true of anyone's contribution, which has nothing to do with whether or not it's a "big business".
"It seems to me that RMS views are no longer connected with where Open Source should go..."
And where, pray tell, is that? Last time I checked, freedom meant letting people make their own decisions about where to go. By that estimation, "where OS should go" isn't one direction - it's the myriad directions that individuals resolve to go, given their freedom.
I don't know what you've been reading, but I sure do see a lot of people (eg, Slashdot, and... well YOU) listening to what RMS has to say. How that qualifies as 'no longer connected' I'm not sure.
Imagine the flop Apple (Sony) would have (will) faced if the iPod (ebook reader) was released without the ability to play (read) plain old DRM-free mp3 (text). People already have a massive collection of music (books); they want a player (reader) that will play (read) that.
For every money grubbing pig of a media conglomerate, there are thousands of writers that people want to read who give away their writing. As such, they look at DRM and go, "what the hell is this for?" Any media display device that doesn't display DRM-Free content is pretty useless to consumers. No one will buy it.
"Every other form of media has gone digital -- music, newspapers, movies," says Joni Evans, a top literary agent who just left the William Morris Agency to start her own company that will focus on books and technology. "We're the only industry that hasn't lived up to the pace of technology. A revolution is around the corner."
I hate to tell you this, but text was the FIRST medium to go online, not the last. I realize that pretty pictures make nice eye candy, but the the web is essentially MADE of it. The reason is that text has a tremendous meaning/bit ratio - it's extremely heavily compressed. Images are next, followed by music, and now video. You are WAY, way behind if you think you're the last medium to get online.
Text is already everywhere - PCs, web pages, email,//text// messages (CLUE!), PDAs, phones, etc. Hell, even the iPod can read plain text files as it is - it's just not so pleasant as an e-ink screen. It will be ridiculous if an iPod could read more extant media than this ebook reader.
Maybe you're the last//industry//, but that's not saying much. media is not industry - it's information. Your prospective customers have better things to do with their time than pay you for things they can't use.
I'm operating on a bare bones life support income, so I can afford to be picky and think long-term for the position I really want. That means having data in one place: a folder of my inbox (I use rss2email for my feed reading).
"Need" or "necessity", in use, always seem to imply a goal or desire. In Maslow's context(s), we wer talking about sustaining life. But the term is flexible enough to be used with any goal, eg: you need x//in order to y//.
I don't think addiction implies any particular goal or desire, so much as it describes the occurrence of repeated compulsive or habitual behaviour. whether that definition is expanded to include the criteria of whether that behaviour is detrimental to that person's life or functioning in society is debatable to some.
We poked through BASIC on TRS-80's in the school's gifted ed program, but not much.
My brother actually got first turn at the new box when it came in. Instead, I read the manual. By the time he finally gave up in frustration, I had actually learned something about how to use it.:)
Software, movies, and music are just information. Private industry groups have been working very hard to get the legislative and law enforcement help they need to corner their markets.
nanofactories and their larger-than-molecular-scale recursive fabs (any machine that can make things and copies of itself) will help people make much more dangerous//physical stuff//. Blades, bombs, guns, springs, mines, etc. Even if it can't make chemical explosives, there's a lot you can do with simple, malleable mechanical devices. Human grass-roots ingenuity is always surprising: just ask any hacker.
This problem won't just be opposed by entrenched manufacturing interests - it will be a national security issue. The war on terror fucknuts are going to have a field day scaring us out of our freedoms with this one. It will either force us to ban fabs with heavy penalties, creating a pretty dim draconian future, or actually retake control of our governments.
You'd better get started now. Projects like http://reprap.org/ are likely to produce primitive self-replicating fabricators by the end of the decade.
I tend to think the cost of innovation should be a major criteria for patentability. Granting monopolies on the deployment of innovations only encourages innovation when the innovation would otherwise collapse for lack of R&D funding. Such a case would indicate that the R&D is too risky for the current state of the market unless a patent can be granted to exclude competition.
This makes some sense for things like drugs that require large investments to develop. Take away the patents, and, yes, you do solve the generics problem - but you dismantle the incentives for private companies to develop these medicines.
For software, on the other hand, this is ridiculous. the costs of developing software are pretty trivial. This results in an innovation explosion for very little money. granting monopolies does nothing to encourage innovation, because the costs of such innovation are not too risky for the market - they're cheap! In this kind of environment, patents actually backfire and//retard// innovation instead, by resitricting the ability to improve existing technologies.
As technologies of all kinds develop, costs continuously decrease. Periodically, patent adminsitrations should re-evaluate the costs of innovation in each market sector, and think about changing the kinds of innovations that are permitted patents based on the costs of innovation in each segment, rather than carte blanche.
Maybe Congress should have thought of this before acquiescing to industry moving its manufacturing base there over the past 20 years.
Given the tremendous economic interdependencies between China and the US in the manufacturing sector, there's absolutely nothing they can do in the form of economic sanctions in order to correct China's human rights problems without committing economic suicide - and probably starting a war, to boot.
Is Google squeaky clean? Hell no. But it's also in no position to effect any improvements from the communists.
Is anybody else uncomfortable with the idea of buggy computers and insecure networks controlling the operations of appliances that are known to be fire hazards?
I'd much rather be home to monitor the operation of my cooking, frankly. Unless I can use one of those smellometer devices with my cell phone to tell whether or not something's burning.:)
The other irony is if we have all these mobile devices that make it unnecessary to be in the office, why wouldn't I just stay home with my oven in the first place?
Of course the reality is that for most people, mobile devices are actually excuses not to stay home.
The real economic influence that helped tear down Apartheid was in the form of economic//sanctions// imposed by other countries, probably including//prohibitions// against investing in South African industry. This is quite the opposite of what you're saying.
Slashdot Mirror
"ebooks" are a ghetto. They're a little mini-subset of digital text. I don't need it.
We have HTML, and that presents a fine enough format for presenting digital text. Those who want a higher resolution can use a truetype font of their choice. PDF isn't bad either. The web was designed for digital text, and has been refined to pretty darn useful status in that application niche.
Increasingly, proprietary DRM formats are do little more than lock content out of the market, rather than pirates out of the content.
If more books were released under licenses I could afford, I'd read them.
In every case I've actually needed backups to date, I find that, if I did them instantly instead of nightly, I'd end up losing data. The most common need for a backup for me comes when I've made a mistake with the main data, and I need to go back to what I had, say, yesterday.
This isn't to say that instant backups wouldn't be nice for failover architectures, though. I just don't deal with systems that large, yet.
Why the hell is everything some whiner doesn't like "stealing"? First it's copying music, now it's open Wifi? Gimme a break.
I would tend to leave mine open, outside the firewall, when I had it. On the odd occasion someone was hogging badnwidth, I'd turn it off. Nobody was depriving me of the use of my services, never mind property.
This tendency to insinuate theft into everything rude is getting ridiculous.
My Name is Al Gore, and I live at 1600 Pennsylvania avenue, Washington, DC. Happy now?
Or better yet, they'd take the money, then go join the fork.
I have one thing to say to that:
Bullshit!
"Oracle Corp's CEO, Larry Ellison, has maintained that open source projects are only successful when major technology corporations get involved"
Not to be confused with the assertion that major technology corporations only get involved with FOSS projects that are already successful. They wouldn't want to suggest to anyone that they were late to the MySQL party they just got stiffed on, now would they?
The headline says "OSS needs big business". Whenever I see the word "need", it requires clarification: for what? It doesn't need big business to survive, that's for certain. When Oracle's assets (and even MySQL AB's, for that matter) finally go up for auction, MySQL will still be Free as in you. FOSS might need industry for better exposure or faster development than could be had otherwise, of course - but that's true of anyone's contribution, which has nothing to do with whether or not it's a "big business".
"It seems to me that RMS views are no longer connected with where Open Source should go..."
And where, pray tell, is that? Last time I checked, freedom meant letting people make their own decisions about where to go. By that estimation, "where OS should go" isn't one direction - it's the myriad directions that individuals resolve to go, given their freedom.
I don't know what you've been reading, but I sure do see a lot of people (eg, Slashdot, and... well YOU) listening to what RMS has to say. How that qualifies as 'no longer connected' I'm not sure.
What do you mean everything isn't about money? Who'da thunk it?
Imagine the flop Apple (Sony) would have (will) faced if the iPod (ebook reader) was released without the ability to play (read) plain old DRM-free mp3 (text). People already have a massive collection of music (books); they want a player (reader) that will play (read) that.
//text// messages (CLUE!), PDAs, phones, etc. Hell, even the iPod can read plain text files as it is - it's just not so pleasant as an e-ink screen. It will be ridiculous if an iPod could read more extant media than this ebook reader.
//industry//, but that's not saying much. media is not industry - it's information. Your prospective customers have better things to do with their time than pay you for things they can't use.
For every money grubbing pig of a media conglomerate, there are thousands of writers that people want to read who give away their writing. As such, they look at DRM and go, "what the hell is this for?" Any media display device that doesn't display DRM-Free content is pretty useless to consumers. No one will buy it.
"Every other form of media has gone digital -- music, newspapers, movies," says Joni Evans, a top literary agent who just left the William Morris Agency to start her own company that will focus on books and technology. "We're the only industry that hasn't lived up to the pace of technology. A revolution is around the corner."
I hate to tell you this, but text was the FIRST medium to go online, not the last. I realize that pretty pictures make nice eye candy, but the the web is essentially MADE of it. The reason is that text has a tremendous meaning/bit ratio - it's extremely heavily compressed. Images are next, followed by music, and now video. You are WAY, way behind if you think you're the last medium to get online.
Text is already everywhere - PCs, web pages, email,
Maybe you're the last
I'll second this feature, just to emphasize it.
I'm operating on a bare bones life support income, so I can afford to be picky and think long-term for the position I really want. That means having data in one place: a folder of my inbox (I use rss2email for my feed reading).
So, Google launches Google.cn to comply with Chinese censorship laws, but doesn't comply with with a US DoJ subpeona?
This is getting confusing.
Peek-a-booty is also aimed at helping those in speech-embattled nations avoid censoring firewalls.
"Need" or "necessity", in use, always seem to imply a goal or desire. In Maslow's context(s), we wer talking about sustaining life. But the term is flexible enough to be used with any goal, eg: you need x //in order to y//.
I don't think addiction implies any particular goal or desire, so much as it describes the occurrence of repeated compulsive or habitual behaviour. whether that definition is expanded to include the criteria of whether that behaviour is detrimental to that person's life or functioning in society is debatable to some.
What's next? Prohibitions on manufacturing for all the stuff "Made in China"?
Yeah. Suuure.
We poked through BASIC on TRS-80's in the school's gifted ed program, but not much.
:)
My brother actually got first turn at the new box when it came in. Instead, I read the manual. By the time he finally gave up in frustration, I had actually learned something about how to use it.
"Can you please forward me a copy of your resume in Word format?"
.doc format. Even Word doesn't seem to have any problems with plaintext.
# cp Nato_Welch_resume.txt Nato_Welch_resume.doc
There. One resume in
I've also thought about sending people who don't take links an html mail with an iframe that points to the published URL.
Software, movies, and music are just information. Private industry groups have been working very hard to get the legislative and law enforcement help they need to corner their markets.
//physical stuff//. Blades, bombs, guns, springs, mines, etc. Even if it can't make chemical explosives, there's a lot you can do with simple, malleable mechanical devices. Human grass-roots ingenuity is always surprising: just ask any hacker.
nanofactories and their larger-than-molecular-scale recursive fabs (any machine that can make things and copies of itself) will help people make much more dangerous
This problem won't just be opposed by entrenched manufacturing interests - it will be a national security issue. The war on terror fucknuts are going to have a field day scaring us out of our freedoms with this one. It will either force us to ban fabs with heavy penalties, creating a pretty dim draconian future, or actually retake control of our governments.
You'd better get started now. Projects like http://reprap.org/ are likely to produce primitive self-replicating fabricators by the end of the decade.
I tend to think the cost of innovation should be a major criteria for patentability. Granting monopolies on the deployment of innovations only encourages innovation when the innovation would otherwise collapse for lack of R&D funding. Such a case would indicate that the R&D is too risky for the current state of the market unless a patent can be granted to exclude competition.
//retard// innovation instead, by resitricting the ability to improve existing technologies.
This makes some sense for things like drugs that require large investments to develop. Take away the patents, and, yes, you do solve the generics problem - but you dismantle the incentives for private companies to develop these medicines.
For software, on the other hand, this is ridiculous. the costs of developing software are pretty trivial. This results in an innovation explosion for very little money. granting monopolies does nothing to encourage innovation, because the costs of such innovation are not too risky for the market - they're cheap! In this kind of environment, patents actually backfire and
As technologies of all kinds develop, costs continuously decrease. Periodically, patent adminsitrations should re-evaluate the costs of innovation in each market sector, and think about changing the kinds of innovations that are permitted patents based on the costs of innovation in each segment, rather than carte blanche.
Maybe Congress should have thought of this before acquiescing to industry moving its manufacturing base there over the past 20 years.
Given the tremendous economic interdependencies between China and the US in the manufacturing sector, there's absolutely nothing they can do in the form of economic sanctions in order to correct China's human rights problems without committing economic suicide - and probably starting a war, to boot.
Is Google squeaky clean? Hell no. But it's also in no position to effect any improvements from the communists.
I propose The Unity Fallacy to name the phenomenon of people calling hypocrisy on groups of people who simply disagree.
Once more, with feeling:
Slashdotters don't all think alike.
http://n8o.r30.net/doku.php/unityfallacy
If those are your priorities, sounds like you're in the wrong business. Perhaps you should be a chef! :)
Is anybody else uncomfortable with the idea of buggy computers and insecure networks controlling the operations of appliances that are known to be fire hazards?
:)
I'd much rather be home to monitor the operation of my cooking, frankly. Unless I can use one of those smellometer devices with my cell phone to tell whether or not something's burning.
The other irony is if we have all these mobile devices that make it unnecessary to be in the office, why wouldn't I just stay home with my oven in the first place?
Of course the reality is that for most people, mobile devices are actually excuses not to stay home.
The real economic influence that helped tear down Apartheid was in the form of economic //sanctions// imposed by other countries, probably including //prohibitions// against investing in South African industry. This is quite the opposite of what you're saying.
Wikipedia on Apartheid