So if their are 250,000 patentable inventions in a phone, and that phone retails for $600, by my math each of those inventions are worth about a quarter of a cent per device. So it looks like Apple has a justifiable claim to 1.25 cents per phone.
A slim column of text lost in a sea of ads. But that's okay, I rarely come to Slashdot any more, so I doubt I'll miss it.
The name Ethernet is 40 years old...
on
Ethernet Turns 40
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...but what happens to the bits is almost completely different. The original layer 1 (physical) layer stuff has evolved from the original idea of a shared broadcast medium (thick and thin coax up through the age of hubs) to nowadays being a point-to-point network managed through a centralized intelligent switch. And the layer 2 stuff (data link) evolved from the original spec of 1973 to the notably different 802.2 spec in 1983. In some ways, the great success of Ethernet is that it became the name we gave to whatever technology won out.
While Games Workshop are the main villains here, this does highlight the problem with buying DRM encrusted books from an entity with unaccountable censorship powers. I note that this ebook is available from Smashwords in open, unencumbered formats: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/26359 - as is usual in situations like this, I immediately purchased a copy to give the finger to bullies, and support an author.
Well, I'd been meaning to check out Moon Reader, ever since Aldiko blocked the third party plugin that was providing Dropbox sync. This will likely push me over the edge.
Do I think it's bogus that Google pulled the app with seemingly no warning or no review? Yes. But, thanks to the fact that Android allows users to sideload (unless further blocked by horrible carriers like AT&T) this developer at least has recourse to continue providing his app by direct channels, and users can continue using it. Had this happened to a developer on the iOS app store (as it does all the time) that developer would have no recourse at all.
I hope that this gets resolved quickly, and I hope that this developer winds up getting more attention from this publicity in the end.
I carried a Windows Phone in place of my usual Android device for about 45 days at the start of the year to understand what the experience was like. My take away is that while it is a serviceable OS, it still has many of the shortcoming that the other smartphone platforms have grown out of. Also, it occasionally errs on the side of "pretty graphic design" over usability. I wrote up a full article on my experience here: https://plus.google.com/100566622327534003774/posts/RyT3Ajwd1GX
I've put this on my Galaxy Tab 10.1, which I recently updated to a developer release of CyanogenMod9 (The forthcoming ICS based Cyanogen). It really is nice. I can load up the full desktop version of Google+, which only sorta-kinda worked under the standard ICS browsers, and sorta-kinda worked differently under Firefox mobile, and it works 100%, no compromises. And doesn't feel much slower than my desktop either. That's great! The only annoyance is that it does seem to identify itself as a mobile browser, and I haven't yet found an option to change the user agent. No problem for sites like Wikipedia or G+ that give you a link to escape their mobile versions, but could be annoying elsewhere, since so many mobile sites are terrible. Surprising overside, since the stock browser in ICS includes an option to "request desktop site".
I have the Galaxy Tab myself, and really like it, but I've also played with an Eee Transformer and was very impressed. I previously had the Xoom, and it was okay, but it's screen wasn't as good as the former two. The 10.1" Android Tablets have higher resolution screens than the current crop of iPads (1200x800 vs 1024x768), meaning a slightly higher DPI, meaning slightly easier on the eyes for reading.
Honeycomb gives you lots of flexibility as to how you get PDFs on to the device (e.g. via Dropbox, local file transfer, etc) combined with the freedom to then view those PDFs with the app of your choice. Android has a version of Adobe Reader, which while feature light, is pretty much guaranteed to correctly render any PDF you throw at it. For my own purposes though, I typically use RepliGo, which handles most things, is notably faster, and lets you view and add notes in PDFs.
Wait a minute here, the linked article says "A new study from open source services vendor OpenLogic reports that 71 percent of Apple iOS and Google Android apps are not in compliance." Yet the headline for this story mentions only Android. I understand it's become fashionable to bash Android lately, but this seems a bit egregious. The problem appears to be endemic across all mobile devices.
I highly doubt I could get running on any machine I currently can boot up.
Actually, unless that software you were referring to was "copy-protected" in some fashion (just an early form of DRM), with the plethora of emulators & virtual machines available, you probably could get that old software running on your modern hardware if you needed or wanted to. And that's because you do own it, and have the ability to use those bits you purchased in any manner you see fit, including transferring them to machines and environments that could not have been forseen when they were first sold.
That's really all I want from my ebooks (and my music, and my video), to be able to keep moving it forward on to new platforms.
If you look around, you can find stuff, usually from the smaller stores, or direct from smaller publishers. For Science Fiction & Fantasy, Baen offers quite a lot of books through their Webscriptions service (although I think newer stuff is now getting funneled into the "rental" market and thus not showing up on Webscriptions). Daniel Keyes Moran just started fsand.com to publish the back catalog of several of his SF writer buddies in open formats. I've also found open books on places like Fictionwise (you have to read carefully to determine which books are being sold in open formats and which come encrusted).
Pragmatic Programmers sells all their technical books direct in open formats. Role playing game books from most publishers can now be found in unrestricted formats from drivethrurpg.com. It's pretty much only the popular fiction market (and the large sellers) that are locked into customer hostile practices.
A recent insight that came to me is that when paying money to access any content encrusted with DRM, you should never think of the transaction as a sale, but merely as a rental. You have not purchased anything you can own, merely gotten the temporary (long or short term) use of it, and under limited circumstances (use on particular devices, or in particular programs).
Consider the reasonableness of what you are paying according that formula. For my part, I might be willing to pay 2 or 3 dollars to rent a book that I might otherwise purchase for 10 dollars in hard copy, but I have no interest in paying that same price or more to rent a book that I could pay to own it (whether that ownership be in hardcopy, or unencumbered electronic file that I may use when, where and how I see fit).
The FSF "Defective by Design" campaign has promoted the idea of reading DRM as "Digital Restrictions Management", but I propose you could also call it "Digital Rental Management". Once consumers begin to understand the nature of transactions involving DRM (that they are not making a purchase in traditional sense, and that having paid their money, they own nothing as a result) then I think they will be begin to demand pricing in line with what is actually being offered to them.
Indeed, the basic concept is good, but reading the "quick" manual reveals a usability disaster, with overloaded inobvious functionality, and my favorite, it apparently freaks out if you move the switches too fast. And yeah, it's ugly as hell. Turns out simplicity is hard, and this company clearly didn't put in the effort.
"And the biggest bulls-eye appears to be on Android, in large part because its architecture is most like that of the desktop PC"
This seems like a very dubious claim to me. From my perspective, iOS seems much more similar in architecture to the desktop than Android.
iOS apps are native compiled, written in dialect of a language that is famous for buffer overruns (C), and the userland is a modified version of a desktop operating system.
Android, while also based on a desktop OS (Linux) at the kernel level, has much of the application code (and all third party apps) running in a manage VM environment, which while not invulnerable, seems much less likely to fall victim to poor coding practices. The exceptions would be of course apps that embed native libraries (I'm guessing these are the exception, not the rule).
Author Iam Bogus responds to the furor that arose over Moleskine's recent announcements that the end user agreement for their notebooks prohibits writing in them with anything other than approved Cross pens:
"[A] large number of writers seem to think that they have the right to compose essays in their Moleskine notebooks (or for anything else) in using Bic pens, or another writing instrument of their choosing. Literally, the right, not just the convenience or the opportunity. And many of them are quite churlish about the matter. This strikes me as a very strange sort of attitude to adopt. There's no question that Bic pens are useful and popular, and they have a large and committed user base. There's also no question that it's often convenient to be able to compose on different kinds of paper using writing instruments one already has. And likewise, there's a long history of cutting out items written on paper alien to a notebook and pasting it in in a fashion that makes it feel like it belongs there. But what does it say about the state of written composition at large when so many writers believe that their 'rights' are trampled because they cannot write in a particular notebook with a particular pen? Or that their 'freedom' as creators is squelched for the same reason?"
D&D is certainly going strong and chugging along, but I've been most excited about the huge boom in small press RPGs over the past 5 or so year, much of which is fueled by the internet. When game authors can market and sell directly via the web, many things become possible.
I've very eager to see the results of the restoration. A local theater here in Seattle ran all three films on successive weekends a few years ago, and for the first one (Raiders of the Lost Ark) they had signs up letting people know that the copy they were going to see contained significant degredation, yet it was the BEST SURVIVING COPY. And it really was badly faded in many parts.
My understanding is that the film stock that was popular during the period that the first movie was filmed turned out to degrade much more quickly than older stocks. Use of that kind of stock has since been discontinued, and the difference between the ROTLA and TOD was very significant, even though they were only shot a few years apart, since TOD is on better original stock.
Slashdot Mirror
So if their are 250,000 patentable inventions in a phone, and that phone retails for $600, by my math each of those inventions are worth about a quarter of a cent per device. So it looks like Apple has a justifiable claim to 1.25 cents per phone.
A slim column of text lost in a sea of ads. But that's okay, I rarely come to Slashdot any more, so I doubt I'll miss it.
...but what happens to the bits is almost completely different. The original layer 1 (physical) layer stuff has evolved from the original idea of a shared broadcast medium (thick and thin coax up through the age of hubs) to nowadays being a point-to-point network managed through a centralized intelligent switch. And the layer 2 stuff (data link) evolved from the original spec of 1973 to the notably different 802.2 spec in 1983. In some ways, the great success of Ethernet is that it became the name we gave to whatever technology won out.
"Air Cavalry" must keep you awake at nights ;)
While Games Workshop are the main villains here, this does highlight the problem with buying DRM encrusted books from an entity with unaccountable censorship powers. I note that this ebook is available from Smashwords in open, unencumbered formats: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/26359 - as is usual in situations like this, I immediately purchased a copy to give the finger to bullies, and support an author.
Well, I'd been meaning to check out Moon Reader, ever since Aldiko blocked the third party plugin that was providing Dropbox sync. This will likely push me over the edge.
Do I think it's bogus that Google pulled the app with seemingly no warning or no review? Yes. But, thanks to the fact that Android allows users to sideload (unless further blocked by horrible carriers like AT&T) this developer at least has recourse to continue providing his app by direct channels, and users can continue using it. Had this happened to a developer on the iOS app store (as it does all the time) that developer would have no recourse at all.
I hope that this gets resolved quickly, and I hope that this developer winds up getting more attention from this publicity in the end.
I carried a Windows Phone in place of my usual Android device for about 45 days at the start of the year to understand what the experience was like. My take away is that while it is a serviceable OS, it still has many of the shortcoming that the other smartphone platforms have grown out of. Also, it occasionally errs on the side of "pretty graphic design" over usability. I wrote up a full article on my experience here: https://plus.google.com/100566622327534003774/posts/RyT3Ajwd1GX
A bellicose feller named Teller
That prominent atom bomb seller
Promotes with aplomb
The hydrogen bomb
And tells the uncertain they're yeller!
-- lifted from the back column of a science mag of my childhood
I've put this on my Galaxy Tab 10.1, which I recently updated to a developer release of CyanogenMod9 (The forthcoming ICS based Cyanogen). It really is nice. I can load up the full desktop version of Google+, which only sorta-kinda worked under the standard ICS browsers, and sorta-kinda worked differently under Firefox mobile, and it works 100%, no compromises. And doesn't feel much slower than my desktop either. That's great! The only annoyance is that it does seem to identify itself as a mobile browser, and I haven't yet found an option to change the user agent. No problem for sites like Wikipedia or G+ that give you a link to escape their mobile versions, but could be annoying elsewhere, since so many mobile sites are terrible. Surprising overside, since the stock browser in ICS includes an option to "request desktop site".
To me, this story shows the importance of keeping Project Gutenberg moving forward, slowly but steadily.
...I feel bad these suckers who are lining up to buy "a cheap carbon copy".
I have the Galaxy Tab myself, and really like it, but I've also played with an Eee Transformer and was very impressed. I previously had the Xoom, and it was okay, but it's screen wasn't as good as the former two. The 10.1" Android Tablets have higher resolution screens than the current crop of iPads (1200x800 vs 1024x768), meaning a slightly higher DPI, meaning slightly easier on the eyes for reading.
Honeycomb gives you lots of flexibility as to how you get PDFs on to the device (e.g. via Dropbox, local file transfer, etc) combined with the freedom to then view those PDFs with the app of your choice. Android has a version of Adobe Reader, which while feature light, is pretty much guaranteed to correctly render any PDF you throw at it. For my own purposes though, I typically use RepliGo, which handles most things, is notably faster, and lets you view and add notes in PDFs.
Wait a minute here, the linked article says "A new study from open source services vendor OpenLogic reports that 71 percent of Apple iOS and Google Android apps are not in compliance." Yet the headline for this story mentions only Android. I understand it's become fashionable to bash Android lately, but this seems a bit egregious. The problem appears to be endemic across all mobile devices.
I highly doubt I could get running on any machine I currently can boot up.
Actually, unless that software you were referring to was "copy-protected" in some fashion (just an early form of DRM), with the plethora of emulators & virtual machines available, you probably could get that old software running on your modern hardware if you needed or wanted to. And that's because you do own it, and have the ability to use those bits you purchased in any manner you see fit, including transferring them to machines and environments that could not have been forseen when they were first sold.
That's really all I want from my ebooks (and my music, and my video), to be able to keep moving it forward on to new platforms.
So no, it's not the same thing at all...
While mentioning the FSF, it's also worth pointing out Richard Stallman's old "science fiction" story, _The Right to Read_
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It's worth checking in with it every few years to see how close we've gotten to that particular dystopia.
If you look around, you can find stuff, usually from the smaller stores, or direct from smaller publishers. For Science Fiction & Fantasy, Baen offers quite a lot of books through their Webscriptions service (although I think newer stuff is now getting funneled into the "rental" market and thus not showing up on Webscriptions). Daniel Keyes Moran just started fsand.com to publish the back catalog of several of his SF writer buddies in open formats. I've also found open books on places like Fictionwise (you have to read carefully to determine which books are being sold in open formats and which come encrusted).
Pragmatic Programmers sells all their technical books direct in open formats. Role playing game books from most publishers can now be found in unrestricted formats from drivethrurpg.com. It's pretty much only the popular fiction market (and the large sellers) that are locked into customer hostile practices.
A recent insight that came to me is that when paying money to access any content encrusted with DRM, you should never think of the transaction as a sale, but merely as a rental. You have not purchased anything you can own, merely gotten the temporary (long or short term) use of it, and under limited circumstances (use on particular devices, or in particular programs).
Consider the reasonableness of what you are paying according that formula. For my part, I might be willing to pay 2 or 3 dollars to rent a book that I might otherwise purchase for 10 dollars in hard copy, but I have no interest in paying that same price or more to rent a book that I could pay to own it (whether that ownership be in hardcopy, or unencumbered electronic file that I may use when, where and how I see fit).
The FSF "Defective by Design" campaign has promoted the idea of reading DRM as "Digital Restrictions Management", but I propose you could also call it "Digital Rental Management". Once consumers begin to understand the nature of transactions involving DRM (that they are not making a purchase in traditional sense, and that having paid their money, they own nothing as a result) then I think they will be begin to demand pricing in line with what is actually being offered to them.
...to donate to Wikipedia!
Indeed, the basic concept is good, but reading the "quick" manual reveals a usability disaster, with overloaded inobvious functionality, and my favorite, it apparently freaks out if you move the switches too fast. And yeah, it's ugly as hell. Turns out simplicity is hard, and this company clearly didn't put in the effort.
"And the biggest bulls-eye appears to be on Android, in large part because its architecture is most like that of the desktop PC"
This seems like a very dubious claim to me. From my perspective, iOS seems much more similar in architecture to the desktop than Android.
iOS apps are native compiled, written in dialect of a language that is famous for buffer overruns (C), and the userland is a modified version of a desktop operating system.
Android, while also based on a desktop OS (Linux) at the kernel level, has much of the application code (and all third party apps) running in a manage VM environment, which while not invulnerable, seems much less likely to fall victim to poor coding practices. The exceptions would be of course apps that embed native libraries (I'm guessing these are the exception, not the rule).
Author Iam Bogus responds to the furor that arose over Moleskine's recent announcements that the end user agreement for their notebooks prohibits writing in them with anything other than approved Cross pens:
"[A] large number of writers seem to think that they have the right to compose essays in their Moleskine notebooks (or for anything else) in using Bic pens, or another writing instrument of their choosing. Literally, the right, not just the convenience or the opportunity. And many of them are quite churlish about the matter. This strikes me as a very strange sort of attitude to adopt. There's no question that Bic pens are useful and popular, and they have a large and committed user base. There's also no question that it's often convenient to be able to compose on different kinds of paper using writing instruments one already has. And likewise, there's a long history of cutting out items written on paper alien to a notebook and pasting it in in a fashion that makes it feel like it belongs there. But what does it say about the state of written composition at large when so many writers believe that their 'rights' are trampled because they cannot write in a particular notebook with a particular pen? Or that their 'freedom' as creators is squelched for the same reason?"
Well it certainly makes *me* happy!
D&D is certainly going strong and chugging along, but I've been most excited about the huge boom in small press RPGs over the past 5 or so year, much of which is fueled by the internet. When game authors can market and sell directly via the web, many things become possible.
Some really good stuff to check out:
Burning Wheel:
Dogs in the Vineyard
With Great Power
The Shadow of Yesterday
Primetime Adventures
I've very eager to see the results of the restoration. A local theater here in Seattle ran all three films on successive weekends a few years ago, and for the first one (Raiders of the Lost Ark) they had signs up letting people know that the copy they were going to see contained significant degredation, yet it was the BEST SURVIVING COPY. And it really was badly faded in many parts.
My understanding is that the film stock that was popular during the period that the first movie was filmed turned out to degrade much more quickly than older stocks. Use of that kind of stock has since been discontinued, and the difference between the ROTLA and TOD was very significant, even though they were only shot a few years apart, since TOD is on better original stock.
What is the truth?
There is no fork.