To be fair (given that I am not an American, so this can be rare), there are lots of American-published books that are very well bound and printed on nice paper, and I am perfectly happy (within the limits of my meagre budget) to pay a fair price for them. Being asked to pay full price for the content without all the production work hardly seems fair.
...Which is why I guess I won't be among the early adopters here in Australia. I would welcome a device capable of rendering PDFs nicely, so we could entertain ourselves with the abundance of literature already out there on Project Gutenberg or whatever, without that unnecessary UMTS connection where a USB plug would be perfectly sufficient. Other people are working on these, and their day will come.
I would not be surprised if Amazon finds that it has made a ballocks of their business model and killed off their future markets with their zeal for DRM.
But, you might want to give me your car and house too.
What are you saying? That the GPL is good for making money off your software? Well, hello... how many people actually succeed in that?
As I said in my post, but which you obviously overlooked in your haste to flame it, you will usually need to use some form of commercial licence if you want to use your software to make money. If, however, your purpose is to keep your work open while maintaining your identity as the author, the GPL is just getting too unwieldy to use.
In the past, I never really cared too much about the details of open-source licences, but with every decision being driven now by lawyers, I can no longer ignore them. The main problem with the GPL, as I understand it, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand. The individual clauses are completely unambiguous, but once you have over a certain number they seem to have a habit of cross-infecting, so they become a bean-feast for litigators.
So we tend to be left with a situation where if we want to make any money out of our software, we have to write or clone a commercial agreement. Whereas if we actually want to offer a truly open piece of work, a BSD licence has the advantage of being unambiguous, easily comprehensible and short.
That's fine in itself, but you're making an assumption that other people's phones have the same capabilities as yours, and that the owner knows how to access those capabilities.
Lots of people still have phones that only make calls and do SMS. And that is often plenty. It's totally generic, so there's no requirement for any proprietary interface to cope with all that unnecessary content on Facebook...
Say I'm out in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness I could upload some photos
If you can get a signal out there, then you're a fortunate person. Down in Tasmania we are usually out of luck with mobile broadband signals in our equivalent wilderness regions. Of course, I guess there is the satellite option, but that's outside my budget. Also bear in mind that your upload speed may be orders of magnitude slower than your downstream speed, so you might be better off waiting until you get back home.
I don't (and won't) have a Facebook account, so I might be playing devil's advocate here, but not everything on Facebook is public unless you make it so. You can set it up to allow a reasonable degree of selectivity as regards who it gives out content to.
On the other hand, Facebook is not designed (since it is by definition a "social networking" application) to be a good medium for intimate communications between two individuals like you and your wife. That's not the point of it.
My main reservations about Facebook is that it seems to swallow up the life of its users. I am easily contactable: I have a mobile and home (SIP) phone, I have Skype and I am easily contactable via email. My feeling is that that should be enough. I see no useful purpose in blathering to the world at large about what I had for breakfast.
It also depends largely on what kind of music you're into. If you happen to care for somewhat cerebral jazz, you could probably buy up the entire ECM label catalogue without finding too many dud tracks. And these albums are so stupendously well-recorded, you won't be interested in paying for a piss-poor MP3.
...but honestly I don't think many people will go back to buying whole albums again.
That, of course, is up to you, but if you have even a halfway-decent stereo system, you will be missing out on the quality of your recording. This is (one of the reasons) why I continue to buy CDs and encode my own MP3s for playing on my iPod where high fidelity isn't critical.
Occasionally I find that I really don't like a certain track, so I will make a ripped CD with the offending track removed, but that's another matter. It's still (IMO) worth paying for the redundant data to get decent sound. Of course, there are some labels that offer uncompressed tracks separately (Magnatune, for instance), and good for them...
No, actually it's not. I have worked in sysadmin jobs since the '70s, and there's one thing I learned very early, and that is to keep multiple backups in more than one place, and to verify those backups. In the 30-something years since, I have fucked up once (fortunately not catastrophically) by not having verified a backup when two others were destroyed by fire, and I make no excuses.
Backups are now easier than ever before to manage, so there really is no excuse to not do them properly. It won't wash to tell your customers (or your boss) that your hosting service should have maintained a better backup policy. That'll go down really well when you've managed to lose everything.
This all comes back to the thrust of the OP: whether the apparent loss of all Sidekick users' data is a reflection on the trustworthiness of cloud computing or simply another cautionary tale about poor backup practices.
The simple truth, of course, is that it is both. And the only solution here is the old one: if you want something done properly, you will have to do it yourself. If your data, documents or whatever are in any way important to you, you should not be relying on anyone else to keep them safe. Simple as that, and no excuses.
Getting away from the subject of software for a moment: back in the days, for instance, when music came on those black vinyl discs with all that long-forgotten funky cover art on the cardboard sleeve, piracy was just as rife as it was today. But then, our copies on even the best cassette tapes were never as good as the originals, and if there was any choice at all we would go to much greater lengths to stump up for the original with the groovy sleeve.
Now that 100% exact digital replicas of the media are simple to make, the vendors (record labels etc) need to come up with a means of value-adding (like the old album cover of yore) that can't be downloaded via bittorrent.
No cost to you so any complaints about my squatting are just based on stupid orthodox morality.
Your example is indeed inane, and it it is also inaccurate. Playing devil's advocate here, I could suggest that making an unauthorised duplicate of my software might not cost me any money, but you had better not even fart, let alone throw up in my spare room unless you are tired of living.
It seemed as if they almost meant it to be copied a few times...
Yup. Like when each version of DOS came out, suddenly everybody had a copy of the installation discs. I very rarely met anyone who actually had the originals...
Word Perfect, if I recall correctly had a code number you were supposed to input, but this was easy enough to fudge:
WPnnn123456 where nnn was your country's phone dialling prefix, e.g. 044 for UK and so on.
There are many fine authors whose work would never have seen the light of day if it had not been for Playboy. You want examples? OK: Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, D.M. Thomas, to name but a few. I'm sure Google can supply more than my feeble memory. I've never bought the magazine, but that's not to say there isn't some quality stuff in there.
The most bad-ass calculator is not the TI-83 - I'd say the TI-92 (now the Voyage 200) deserves that title, though it is essentially a QWERTY version of the TI-89, which is what I have. I still sort of miss my old RPN HP48GX, though...
I'd say the chances of this being a gimmick are pretty high.
Given that this gadget is produced by LG, I would lay odds that you are right. I have had many devices made by LG, and the standard of their components can be pretty bad. One would think I might have learned my lesson and not bought any more (they're often quite cheap), but LG's only success story has been with their reverse-cycle air-conditioners.
Other devices (HDD PVR, TV, mobile phones, washing machine) from them have been crap from day one. In addition to cruddy hardware that keeps breaking, their software blows chunks.
BUT, the one alt fuel they are pursuing (ignoring natural gas) is algae. They seem to think it has a real future...
No, as far as Big Oil is concerned it's just a way of keeping the money-go-round happening while not actually doing very much.
Algal cell culture is a comparatively cheap area of biotechnology, since it doesn't need too many really expensive toys, and much of the methodology has been established for decades. But it isn't hard to promote that kind of research in an appropriately favourable light for investors when there is no real demand for results.
All of the oil companies are making a show of conducting research, but "short-termism" dictates that they carry on pumping oil as they always have.
There is a giant difference between doing that in a lab and doing it for commercial use.
True. I got in a bit of trouble in my 3rd year when my little bioreactor full of methanogenetic bacteria got a blocked valve and blew up, spewing stinky sulphurous muck all over the lab ceiling. Just imagine someone letting me loose on a full-grown industrial project.
An aspect of algal cell culture that I consider more interesting than biofuels is its potential as a means of sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere. It would need a lot of cells, but given just how much of the Earth's surface is taken up by water, it should be doable.
Incidentally (and a little OT), when is Slashcode going to implement the ability to use subscript or superscript tags? It should be simple.
You are correct in that plants do make their bodies from cellulose, but algae can be a bit different in that they often use other compounds or elements in their construction. A common case in point is the large number of species of diatoms, which construct their cell walls out of silica - which when the creatures die is deposited over time as clay.
Incidentally, you might be interested to know that it is quite difficult to remove silica as an impurity from water. Experiments in culture of diatoms in the absence of silica sometimes use germanium as an analogue...
Oops, sorry. Algal cell culture is cool, but I can't expect it to rock everybody's boat.:-)
It doesn't take too long to recoup cost of editing if the book sells
That might be a thing of the past. I suspect the majority of books are only actually edited if they are textbooks or other works of non-fiction. Given the kind of howlers that make it through to print in lots of fiction, I am tempted to suppose the text is run through a spellcheck to "correct" spelling for the target market, and that is pretty much it.
If you are worried about your karma, you might want to consider how you make your point. Telling your readers to "put that in your pipe and smoke it" is not exactly an informative approach.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair (given that I am not an American, so this can be rare), there are lots of American-published books that are very well bound and printed on nice paper, and I am perfectly happy (within the limits of my meagre budget) to pay a fair price for them. Being asked to pay full price for the content without all the production work hardly seems fair.
...Which is why I guess I won't be among the early adopters here in Australia. I would welcome a device capable of rendering PDFs nicely, so we could entertain ourselves with the abundance of literature already out there on Project Gutenberg or whatever, without that unnecessary UMTS connection where a USB plug would be perfectly sufficient. Other people are working on these, and their day will come.
I would not be surprised if Amazon finds that it has made a ballocks of their business model and killed off their future markets with their zeal for DRM.
But, you might want to give me your car and house too.
What are you saying? That the GPL is good for making money off your software? Well, hello... how many people actually succeed in that?
As I said in my post, but which you obviously overlooked in your haste to flame it, you will usually need to use some form of commercial licence if you want to use your software to make money. If, however, your purpose is to keep your work open while maintaining your identity as the author, the GPL is just getting too unwieldy to use.
In the past, I never really cared too much about the details of open-source licences, but with every decision being driven now by lawyers, I can no longer ignore them. The main problem with the GPL, as I understand it, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand. The individual clauses are completely unambiguous, but once you have over a certain number they seem to have a habit of cross-infecting, so they become a bean-feast for litigators.
So we tend to be left with a situation where if we want to make any money out of our software, we have to write or clone a commercial agreement. Whereas if we actually want to offer a truly open piece of work, a BSD licence has the advantage of being unambiguous, easily comprehensible and short.
Most modern "smartphones" have a facebook app...
That's fine in itself, but you're making an assumption that other people's phones have the same capabilities as yours, and that the owner knows how to access those capabilities.
Lots of people still have phones that only make calls and do SMS. And that is often plenty. It's totally generic, so there's no requirement for any proprietary interface to cope with all that unnecessary content on Facebook...
Say I'm out in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness I could upload some photos
If you can get a signal out there, then you're a fortunate person. Down in Tasmania we are usually out of luck with mobile broadband signals in our equivalent wilderness regions. Of course, I guess there is the satellite option, but that's outside my budget. Also bear in mind that your upload speed may be orders of magnitude slower than your downstream speed, so you might be better off waiting until you get back home.
I don't (and won't) have a Facebook account, so I might be playing devil's advocate here, but not everything on Facebook is public unless you make it so. You can set it up to allow a reasonable degree of selectivity as regards who it gives out content to.
On the other hand, Facebook is not designed (since it is by definition a "social networking" application) to be a good medium for intimate communications between two individuals like you and your wife. That's not the point of it.
My main reservations about Facebook is that it seems to swallow up the life of its users. I am easily contactable: I have a mobile and home (SIP) phone, I have Skype and I am easily contactable via email. My feeling is that that should be enough. I see no useful purpose in blathering to the world at large about what I had for breakfast.
In any case, if the system has 5 speakers, then it probably isn't stereo.
It also depends largely on what kind of music you're into. If you happen to care for somewhat cerebral jazz, you could probably buy up the entire ECM label catalogue without finding too many dud tracks. And these albums are so stupendously well-recorded, you won't be interested in paying for a piss-poor MP3.
...but honestly I don't think many people will go back to buying whole albums again.
That, of course, is up to you, but if you have even a halfway-decent stereo system, you will be missing out on the quality of your recording. This is (one of the reasons) why I continue to buy CDs and encode my own MP3s for playing on my iPod where high fidelity isn't critical.
Occasionally I find that I really don't like a certain track, so I will make a ripped CD with the offending track removed, but that's another matter. It's still (IMO) worth paying for the redundant data to get decent sound. Of course, there are some labels that offer uncompressed tracks separately (Magnatune, for instance), and good for them...
That's really a rather idiotic statement.
No, actually it's not. I have worked in sysadmin jobs since the '70s, and there's one thing I learned very early, and that is to keep multiple backups in more than one place, and to verify those backups. In the 30-something years since, I have fucked up once (fortunately not catastrophically) by not having verified a backup when two others were destroyed by fire, and I make no excuses.
Backups are now easier than ever before to manage, so there really is no excuse to not do them properly. It won't wash to tell your customers (or your boss) that your hosting service should have maintained a better backup policy. That'll go down really well when you've managed to lose everything.
This all comes back to the thrust of the OP: whether the apparent loss of all Sidekick users' data is a reflection on the trustworthiness of cloud computing or simply another cautionary tale about poor backup practices.
The simple truth, of course, is that it is both. And the only solution here is the old one: if you want something done properly, you will have to do it yourself. If your data, documents or whatever are in any way important to you, you should not be relying on anyone else to keep them safe. Simple as that, and no excuses.
The GP might sort of have a point though.
Getting away from the subject of software for a moment: back in the days, for instance, when music came on those black vinyl discs with all that long-forgotten funky cover art on the cardboard sleeve, piracy was just as rife as it was today. But then, our copies on even the best cassette tapes were never as good as the originals, and if there was any choice at all we would go to much greater lengths to stump up for the original with the groovy sleeve.
Now that 100% exact digital replicas of the media are simple to make, the vendors (record labels etc) need to come up with a means of value-adding (like the old album cover of yore) that can't be downloaded via bittorrent.
No cost to you so any complaints about my squatting are just based on stupid orthodox morality.
Your example is indeed inane, and it it is also inaccurate. Playing devil's advocate here, I could suggest that making an unauthorised duplicate of my software might not cost me any money, but you had better not even fart, let alone throw up in my spare room unless you are tired of living.
It seemed as if they almost meant it to be copied a few times...
Yup. Like when each version of DOS came out, suddenly everybody had a copy of the installation discs. I very rarely met anyone who actually had the originals...
Word Perfect, if I recall correctly had a code number you were supposed to input, but this was easy enough to fudge:
WPnnn123456 where nnn was your country's phone dialling prefix, e.g. 044 for UK and so on.
But only for the articles.
Read, kiddies, and learn.
There are many fine authors whose work would never have seen the light of day if it had not been for Playboy. You want examples? OK: Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, D.M. Thomas, to name but a few. I'm sure Google can supply more than my feeble memory. I've never bought the magazine, but that's not to say there isn't some quality stuff in there.
The most bad-ass calculator is not the TI-83 - I'd say the TI-92 (now the Voyage 200) deserves that title, though it is essentially a QWERTY version of the TI-89, which is what I have. I still sort of miss my old RPN HP48GX, though...
I'd say the chances of this being a gimmick are pretty high.
Given that this gadget is produced by LG, I would lay odds that you are right. I have had many devices made by LG, and the standard of their components can be pretty bad. One would think I might have learned my lesson and not bought any more (they're often quite cheap), but LG's only success story has been with their reverse-cycle air-conditioners.
Other devices (HDD PVR, TV, mobile phones, washing machine) from them have been crap from day one. In addition to cruddy hardware that keeps breaking, their software blows chunks.
BUT, the one alt fuel they are pursuing (ignoring natural gas) is algae. They seem to think it has a real future...
No, as far as Big Oil is concerned it's just a way of keeping the money-go-round happening while not actually doing very much.
Algal cell culture is a comparatively cheap area of biotechnology, since it doesn't need too many really expensive toys, and much of the methodology has been established for decades. But it isn't hard to promote that kind of research in an appropriately favourable light for investors when there is no real demand for results.
All of the oil companies are making a show of conducting research, but "short-termism" dictates that they carry on pumping oil as they always have.
There is a giant difference between doing that in a lab and doing it for commercial use.
True. I got in a bit of trouble in my 3rd year when my little bioreactor full of methanogenetic bacteria got a blocked valve and blew up, spewing stinky sulphurous muck all over the lab ceiling. Just imagine someone letting me loose on a full-grown industrial project.
Exprosions. Very nice. >:-D
Budweiser is cheaper and more consistent than most microbrews.
:-D
That's right. And it has the advantage that nobody will ever be tempted to drink it.
An aspect of algal cell culture that I consider more interesting than biofuels is its potential as a means of sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere. It would need a lot of cells, but given just how much of the Earth's surface is taken up by water, it should be doable.
Incidentally (and a little OT), when is Slashcode going to implement the ability to use subscript or superscript tags? It should be simple.
...and they've removed cyanobacteria from consideration as algae.
...though they are still colloquially (and erroneously) known as blue-green algae, they are not bacteria either, although they are prokaryotes.
You are correct in that plants do make their bodies from cellulose, but algae can be a bit different in that they often use other compounds or elements in their construction. A common case in point is the large number of species of diatoms, which construct their cell walls out of silica - which when the creatures die is deposited over time as clay.
:-)
Incidentally, you might be interested to know that it is quite difficult to remove silica as an impurity from water. Experiments in culture of diatoms in the absence of silica sometimes use germanium as an analogue...
Oops, sorry. Algal cell culture is cool, but I can't expect it to rock everybody's boat.
It doesn't take too long to recoup cost of editing if the book sells
That might be a thing of the past. I suspect the majority of books are only actually edited if they are textbooks or other works of non-fiction. Given the kind of howlers that make it through to print in lots of fiction, I am tempted to suppose the text is run through a spellcheck to "correct" spelling for the target market, and that is pretty much it.
If you are worried about your karma, you might want to consider how you make your point. Telling your readers to "put that in your pipe and smoke it" is not exactly an informative approach.