Sure a Citrix implementation costs a fortune, mostly due to the fact that Microsoft requires three different licenses including a Windows license, a Terminal Server license and then Terminal Server CALs. It's damn expensive but, companies that really need that kind of functionality can easily afford it and once it's in, they won't part with it.
I think your looking at the wrong install base. The regular version of crossover office has never worked well for LTSP/K12LTSP and thin clients. The server version of Crossover office works VERY well with thin clients.
A 25 client version of crossover server is $2380.00. One of these can be placed in a school as an application server serving MSO or other windows only programs, while th rest of the school can be K12LTSP or other LTSP systems and you end up with the best of both worlds.
This is a nice general OSS CD, but I have to ask, who is this really targeted at?
My first thought was that it is targeted at college students. Thats a very good place to start, as its a group that will pop a CD into the drive and play with the new toys, and this contains a nice selection suitable for most college kids. But then why not the P2P apps and a programming suite?
My second thought was that it was targeted at the buisness world. Some nice buisness applications (OOo, ABI, FileZilla), but no flow chart app, no contact management, etc.
I guess I just can't figure out what group in the general non-geek population this is targeting, and and how it is showing them a better way to do what they are doing.
I guess marketing what we have avalible for the larger community really is the one thing that we in OSS will never be able to get right.
I have an easy way to overcome just about all of the limitations this article sites. LTSP. A LTSP server serving up clients who in turn provide services to the network. Problem with a server? reboot it. DNS server stop working? reboot it. Print server no longer working? reboot it. LTSP server goes down? Then you need a tech to restore from the last backup. Manage lots of LTSP's? then set up an extra one that will reimage the LTSP servers if they ever do a network boot.
Server is a bit slow already, so here is the text.
on
Cringely on P2P
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· Score: 1
Resistance is Futile How Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Is Likely to Change Big Media
By Robert X. Cringely
Maybe you saw the story this week about a paper from Microsoft Research analyzing peer-to-peer file sharing networks with the conclusion that they can't be stopped -- not by the law, not by the movie studios and record companies, not even by mighty Microsoft and its Palladium initiative for trusted computing. Swapping songs and maybe movies is about to reach some critical mass beyond which it simply can't be stopped, or so the kids in Redmond think. The story is interesting, that it came from Microsoft is even more interesting, though the authors carefully disassociated themselves from their employer in the paper.
But this all pales in comparison to the implications of their conclusions. These are smart folks, taking a stand that is surely not popular with their company, so I think there is a pretty strong reason to believe they are correct. If so, then what does it mean? Are record companies and movie studios doomed? Am I doomed, as a guy whose work is regularly ripped-off, too? And will the print publishers go away, leaving us with only weblogs to keep us warm? I don't think so, but the world is likely to change some as a result.
Maybe it would help to deconstruct what publishers and broadcasters and movie moguls do that makes them significant contributors to our culture. They take financial risks by backing talented people in the hope of making money. Publishers and broadcasters and film makers and record executives have taken the time and spent the money to build both a commercial infrastructure and a brand identity. The most extreme version of such financial risk-taking is spending tens of millions -- sometimes hundreds of millions -- to make a movie.
Forgetting for the moment that some of these media people are greedy pond dwellers, let's ask the important question -- how are peer-to-peer file sharing systems going to replace $100 million movies? Peer-to-peer systems can share such movies, but since there is no real peer-to-peer business model that can generate enough zeroes, such systems are unlikely to finance any epic films.
Well, right there we have a problem. People LIKE epic films, but even with the best editing and animation software, there is no way some kid with a hopped-up Mac or PC is going to make "Terminator 4." One can only guess, then, that people will continue to go to movies and eat popcorn and watch on the big screen despite how many copies of Divx there are in the world.
Peer-to-peer movie piracy is practical only in the manner that any organized crime is practical: it works only as long as the host remains strong enough to support the parasite. Tony Soprano can't run New Jersey because then everyone would be a crook and there would be nobody to steal from except other crooks. No more innocent victims. Same with movie piracy, which needs a strong movie industry from which to steal. If the industry is weakened too much by piracy, the pirates begin to hurt themselves by drying-up their source of material. It is very doubtful that this will happen simply because the pirates, too, want to go to movies.
But the same is not true for records. This is simply because technology has reached the point where amateurs can make as good a recording as the professionals. The next Christina Aguilera CD could be as easily recorded at her house (or mine) as at some big recording complex out on Abbey Road.
And text, well, text is even worse because it is easiest of all to steal. My columns are published in newspapers and websites and handed-in as college essays all over the world and there is almost nothing I can do about it because tracking down the perps costs me more than does their crime. From the perspective of the established publishers, there is also the horrible possibility that people might actually come to prefer material they find for free on the Internet -- not just pirated material but even original material. This column, after all, is free, and my Mother claims to find some value in it from time to time.
So movies, while they may be hurt by peer-to-peer, won't be killed by it. But print publishing and music recording could be seriously hurt. Maybe this is good, maybe it is bad, but probably, it is inevitable.
Of course, the recording and publishing executives, who often work for the same parent company, aren't going to go without a fight. We are approaching the end of the first stage of that fight, the stage where they try to have their enemy made illegal. But the folks at Microsoft Research now say quite definitively that legal action probably won't be enough. That's when we enter stage two, which begins with guerrilla tactics in which copyright owners use the very hacking techniques they rail against to hurt the peer-to-peer systems. This too shall pass when bad PR gets to the guerrillas. The trick to guerrilla or terrorist campaigns is to not care what people think, but in the end, Sony (just one example) cares what people think.
That's when the record companies and publishers will appear to actually embrace peer-to-peer and try to make it their own.
This will be a ruse, of course, the next step in the death of a corrupt and abusive cultural monopoly. They'll say they will do it for us. They'll say they are building the best peer-to-peer system of all, only this one will cost money and it won't even work that well. There is plenty of precedent for this behavior in other industries.
My favorite historical example of this phenomenon comes from the oil business. In the 1920s, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had a monopoly on oil production in the Middle East, which they generally protected through the use of diplomatic -- and occasionally military -- force against the local monarchies. Then the Gulf Oil Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, literally sneaked into Kuwait and obtained from the Al-Sabah family (who still run the place) a license to search for oil.
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company did not like Gulf's actions, but they were even more dismayed to learn that Gulf couldn't be told to just go to hell. Andrew Mellon, of the Pittsburgh Mellons, was the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and he wasn't about to let his oil company be pushed around by the British Foreign Office. So Anglo-Persian and the Foreign Office did their best to delay Gulf, which worked for several years. They lied a little, lost a few maps, failed to read a telegram or two, and when Gulf still didn't go away, they turned to acting stupid. As the absolute regional experts on oil exploration, they offered to do Gulf's job, to save the Americans the bother if searching for oil in Kuwait by searching for them.
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company searched for oil in Kuwait for 22 years without finding a single drop.
Remember that Kuwait is smaller than Rhode Island, and not only is it sitting atop more than 60 billion barrels of oil, it has places where oil has been known for more than 3,000 years to seep all the way to the surface. Yet Anglo-Persian was able to fulfill its contract with Gulf and keep two oil rigs continually drilling in Kuwait for 22 years without finding oil. To drill this many dry wells required intense concentration on the part of the British drillers. They had to not only be NOT looking for oil, they had to very actively be NOT LOOKING for oil, which is even harder.
Back to music and text publishing. Expect both industries to offer peer-to-peer systems that won't work very well, and will cost us something instead of nothing. In the long run, though, these systems will probably die, too, at which point, the music and the print folks will have to find another way to make their livings. This will not be because of piracy, but because of the origination of material within the peer-to-peer culture, itself. We're not that far from a time when artists and writers can distribute their own work and make a living doing so, which makes the current literary and music establishments a lot less necessary.
But they won't die altogether because of the record company back lists of music, because peer-to-peer doesn't do a very good job of self-organizing, and indicating what is important, and because people won't take tablet computers with them to the bathroom.
So we will have little movies and little records and little magazines on the Internet because the Internet is made up of so many different interest groups. For the larger population, there will still be Brittany Spears and Stephen King singing and writing for big labels. And that will only start to change when the first really big artists jumps from old media to new, trading 15 percent of $30 times 100,000 copies for 100 percent of $0.50 times 1 million copies.
The Grateful Dead showed that it is possible to make a great living even in competition with some of their audience. This is a lesson all old media must learn in time.
Web sites alone are not going to cut it. PressPlay and numerous others have proved that. P2P can help, but its still only part of the answer. Once a band has had some exposure, they need a distribution channel, something that the current economics make next to impossible without the RIAA.
You want to change the economics of the music business, then come up with an easy to use station (something about the size of an arcade game) that will let a user insert there credit card, brows and sample music from its catalog, pick the album or song compilation they want, burn the CD, PROFESSIONALLY print the CD's label on the CD, print the insert and CD case, assemble it all and shrink wrap it, handing it to the customer in just a few minutes.
Now, if you ever make it this far, you still have to convince the music stores to give up floor space for this thing, get them to replenish the parts (CD's, ink, cases, inserts, CD covers, etc), the list goes on and on. Oh, and make sure you make it VERY easy for the end user AND for the store's $6 and hour stock boy to fix the 'minor problems' that will come up.
Now, you've gotten this far. You have built this widget, you spent the money to get it into stores. You signed up a large number of bands to put out music through this thing, hey, maybe you even sign a few big names, and by some miracle you have kept the price per CD down to under $10 while still making a profit for every one. You were smart enough to have built in a technical method of in-store advertising, removing much of the ongoing costs, and are now a minor force in the music business. If you get this far, you may have shot of changing the music world, but then, how long before investors start putting pressure on you to join the RIAA and become just like they are?
Lets look at this from the prospective of trying to foster further commercial acceptance of OSS. As it currently stands, there is NO way to ensure that some one is competent to support OSS. MS has the MCSE certification, novell has its program, and so does Sun (and many others). But there is not any such beast for OSS.
Now, ignore for a minute the political issues that this brings up within the OSS community, how hard would it be for an OSS group to put together a core certification process, and then allow the different OSS projects to build there own add on module for certification in that project on top of the core certification?
This would go a long way in making it easier for OSS to be accepted in commercial settings, as support would no longer be an issue, just a matter of requiring a specific certification be held by the support tech they hire.
IANAL, but having just read the 300+ pages of the opinion, it looks as if MS gets just about everything they were seeking. Any lawyers care to comment on this?
While I agree with you that the patent office will allow just about anything through, and our congress has expanded patent protection well beyond what they should ever have covered, the fact that the constitution includes the issue should serve to high light that fact. To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The following is excerpted from a post made by Tim Phillips to the CNI-Copyright list:
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), in his correspondence with James Madison (1751-1836) was initially hostile to the provision for copyright and patent law in the United States Constitution. On Dec. 20, 1787, Jefferson wrote to Madison from France concerning the recently-drafted Constitution:
I do not like... the omission of a bill of rights
providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms
for freedom of religion, freedom of the press,
protection against standing armies, restriction
against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting
force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by
jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of
the land...
Here Jefferson considers freedom from copyright and patent laws and other monopolies to be of similar importance to freedom of speech, religion, and the press. He repeated this view in his letter to Madison dated July 31, 1788:
I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our
new constitution by nine states. It is a good
canvas, on which some strokes only want
re-touching. What these are, I think are sufficiently
manifested by the general voice from North to South,
which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty
generally understood that this should go to juries,
habeas corpus, standing armies, printing, religion
and monopolies. I conceive there may be difficulty
in finding general modification of these suited to
the habits of all the states. But if such cannot
be found then it is better to establish trials by jury,
the right of Habeas corpus, freedom of the press
and freedom of religion in all cases, and to abolish
standing armies in time of peace, and monopolies, in
all cases, than not to do it in any... The saying
there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitements
to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a
monopoly for a limited time, as of 14 years; but the
benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to
be opposed to that of their general suppression.
Madison, in a letter of October 17, 1788, responded,
With regard to monopolies they are justly
classed among the greates nuisances in government.
But is it clear that as encouragements to literary
works and ingenious discoveries, they are not too
valuable to be wholly renounced? Would it not
suffice to reserve in all cases a right to the public
to abolish the privilege at a price to be specified
in the grant of it? Is there not also infinitely
less danger of this abuse in our governments than in
most others? Monopolies are sacrifices of the many
to the few. Where the power is in the few it is
natural for them to sacrifice the many to their own
partialities and corruptions. Where the power, as
with us, is in the many not in the few, the danger
can not be very great that the few will be thus
favored. It is much more to be dreaded that the
few will be unnecessarily sacrificed to the many.
Jefferson was either convinced by Madision of the utility of copyrights and patents, or he at least prudently decided to cut his losses, for he proposed to Madison the following addition to the bill of rights on August 28, 1789:
I like the declaration of rights as far as it goes,
but I should have been for going further. For
instance, the following alterations and additons would
have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be
allowed to persons for their own productions in literature,
and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not
exceeding ___ years, but for no longer term, and for no
other purpose.
The blank was to be filled with some appropriate number later to be determined. Here again Jefferson considers the protection of the public against unduly long copyrights and patents to be a fundamental right, important enough to be safeguarded by a bill of rights.
Jefferson's own preference for the term of copyright was communicated to Madison a few days afterward, in a letter of September 6, 1789. There he proposed a term of 19 years, based on an actuarial calculation:
The question Whether one generation of men has
a right to bind another seems never to have
been started on this [i.e., the European side --
Jefferson was writing from France] or our [American]
side of the water... that no such obligation can
be so transmitted I think very capable of proof. --
I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be
self evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct
to the living; that the dead have neither powers
nor rights over it... A generation coming in and
going out entire... would have a right on the first
year of their self-dominion to contract a debt
for 33 years, in the 10th for 24, in the 20th for
14, in the 30th for 4, whereas generations, changing
daily by daily deaths and births, have one constant
term, beginning at the date of their contract, and
ending when a majority of those of full age at that
date shall be dead. The length of that term may
be estimated from the tables of mortality. Take,
for instance, the tables of M. de Buffon...
[according to which] half of those of 21 years [of
age] and upwards living at any one instant of time will
be dead in 18 years 8 months, or say 19 years as the
nearest integral number. Then 19 years is the term
beyond which neither the representatives of a nation,
nor even the whole nation itself assembled, can validly
extend a debt... This principle that the earth belongs
to the living, and not to the dead, is of very extensive
application... Turn this subject in your mind, my
dear Sir... Your station in the councils of our country
gives you an opportunity for producing it to public
consideration... Establish the principle... in the
new law to be passed for protecting copyrights and new
inventions, by securing the exclusive right for 19
instead of 14 years.
A Jeffersonian computation using life tables from 1992 gives a Jeffersonian copyright term of 30-35 years. (Vital Statistics of the United States 1992, Volume II--Mortality, Part A, Public Health Service, Hyattsville, 1996, Section 6, Table 6-1.) Note, howver, that at least one edition of Jefferson's works has a much abridged version of this letter, in which the 19-year computation and the proposal for the term of copyright do not occur.
One of Jefferson's most famous statements on patent law was in his often-quoted letter of August 13, 1813 to Isaac McPherson, in which he wrote that, since there is no natural right to property in land, how much less is there a natural right to a property in ideas. I think Jefferson's words apply equally well to copyrights as to patents; to "expression" as well as to "ideas": "he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
As do I. For the buisness world, what I would like to see is the ability to redirect the auto updates feature (of both the OS update, and other software updates) to access a server of the sysadmins choice. This (and the related server side software to do this) could allow sysadmins to test the new patches from MS, agree or disagree with the liceancing, and then role out the patches across the network with relitive ease. This type of a system could also do things like make tracking the software liceancing for a large network easy or make it simple to do things like account for whats on a given system.
Oh, wait, we are talking about M$. They won't ever make it that easy for companies they plan on screw^H^H^H^H selling software assurance to.
In Other News...
on
Airborne Mouse
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Major Airlines across the nation are striving for profitability in these tough times. This drive towards profitability is giving rise to some unique new business models. TWA (Trans World Airlines) is leading this new wave of innovation with a new joint venture called TMA or Trans Mouse Airlines. TMA is a joint venture of TWA and the Mice as Equals in our Social Society (MESS). TWA joined MESS because it sees a unique opportunity to raise revenue on its flight business without adding any extra cost. MESS will begin charging the mouse population of our country to fly on domestic and international flights.
I was recently able to ask Mighty Mouse, president of the whole MESS a series of questions about how this will work.
Rodent News Network: Thank you for granting me this interview Mighty Mouse, let me start by asking you why you think the Mouse Population will use this new service?
Mighty Mouse: Well, mice have always been world travelers. I guess that started with the Roman Empire. We traveled to Roam from South East Asia, the to England and the rest of Europe. We came to the US with the Pilgrims, and have established our selves on virtually every landmass on earth. However, travel for us has always been difficult. Up until now we have been unwanted companions. This is the first airline that will cater to the mice and rats that want to travel the world, and we believe that the mouse population will embrace this new service. While very few of us mice have super powers and are able to fly on our own, this new service will let us get to places we have always had difficulty getting to before.
RNN: Just one more question for you, thus far the airlines have been serving the rodent population a tasty greed pellet for lunch they call n-o-c-e-d, will this remain the food of choice, or will we see an improvement in the quality of the food?
MM: While I do not like n-o-c-e-d product myself, as TWA/TMA points out, its about the same quality of food as the humans get, so I guess its equal, and that meets our mandate.
I posted this the other day, but it seems like I should post it again. I have placed my listing of all of the ebook projects I know about online at http://www.stevensantos.com/misc/ebook.txt This listing includes some 40 ebook projects.
There are some very good reasons to use Novell, and there are some very good reasons not to use it, but the availability of MySQL as a reason either way just seems odd.
There is (and has been for a while now) a MySQL NLM for Netware that is under the GPL (sorry, I can't find the URL at the moment) and I recall seeing a PostgreSQL NLM on a 4.11 server a while back as well. While I applaud Novell for adding MySQL as a part of there base package, as it adds some additional out-of-the-box functionality, I don't see this making a dent in there slow decline.
Now, Novell does have some VERY interesting tech, but they don't sell it well, they never have. Lets take GroupWise as an example. It could be an Outlook Killer. It has just about all of the features of Outlook (and Exchange), and in many a better product. However, they don't push it, and they don't encourage people to try new things with it. I would LOVE to see them take a really bold step and release a version of that in the same way Sun did Star Office (OK, like Sun but without all the associated problems...). OOo plus Groupwise plus an easy to use SQL database front end would be a real alternitive to M$. It would also shine a bright light on Novell for a long time, one that could then be used to help them grow again if they played their cards right.
IANAL, but WestLaw does exactly that, and there have been court cases supporting them.
IANAL either, but I have done a fair amount of time in a law library or two. Westlaw has a patent on their keysite index system and copyright on the analyses they include with the record (I know, these analyses are quoted so often in court briefs that the copyright is questionable, but thats for another rant). The keysite index system makes it a lot easier to do legal research. Any one can take the text of the rulings themselves and use them any way they choose to. They are public domain. The keysite index system and analyses are not public domain.
The real value of Westlaw is in the keysite index system and analyses provided. Nexus-Lexus also provides similarly useful tools in its numbered index system, analyses and Shepard service.
Oh, and a quick online Lexus search of all Federal District Court cases for all available dates did not list a single copyright or patent case listing either West Group or NexusLexis as a plaintiff or defendant. I am curious, exactly what case are you referring to?
This is the my current listing of extext and related projects. Some have photographic studies of old text, photos and maps, others are standard text or marked up text.
I appoligize in advance for the format, but I format this correctly it gets rejected as having too few charictors per line.
The Humanities Text Initiative: www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/p/pd-modeng/pd-modeng-idx, The Internet Sacred Text Archive: www.sacred-texts.com/index.htm,
The Bralyn E-text Archive: www.bralyn.net/etext/, The Early Canadiana Online Archive: www.canadiana.org/cgi-bin/ECO/mtq, The Canada
Digital Collection: collections.ic.gc.ca/, The Online Book Page at the U. of Penn.: onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/,
A Celibration of Women Writers project at the U. of Penn.: digital.library.upenn.edu/women/, The Litrix Reading Room archive: www.litrix.com/,
National Library of Canada Online Etexts: collection.nlc-bnc.ca/e-coll-e/inet-loc-e.htm, The Oxford Text Archive United Kingdom Archive: ota.ahds.ac.uk/index.html,
Jennifer L. Armstrong's Free Online Novels archive: www.free-online-novels.com/, The U. of Calgary Online Children's Stories: www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html,
The Best Children's Literature On The Net project: www.geocities.com/Paris/Jardin/1630/index.html, The Christian Classics Ethereal Library: www.ccel.org/,
The Free Online Inspirational Books Archive: www.inspirationalmedia.com/eBooks.htm, The Internet Christian Library Project: www.iclnet.org/,
The Online Library of Literature: www.literature.org/, Arthur's Classic Novels Archive: members.fortunecity.com/wendover/index.html,
The Bibliomania Archive: www.bibliomania.com/, The Bygosh.com etext archive: bygosh.com/index.html,
The Electronic Literature Foundation: elf.chaoscafe.com/elf_by_Author.htm, The Internet Classics Archive at MIT: classics.mit.edu/,
Project Gutenberg: www.promo.net/pg, The Online Book Initiative: ftp.std.com/OBI,
The Internet Wiretap Project (used to be wiretap.spies.com): wiretap.area.com, The U. of Virginia etext project and sub projects: etext.lib.virginia.edu,
The Chinese Philosophical Etext Archives: angle.web.wesleyan.edu/etext/, The NetLibrary Etext Archive: netlibrary.net,
The johannesen.com collection: www.johannesen.com/OnlineGMD.htm, The Internet Public Library (indexes many other repositories as well): www.ipl.org,
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts (American & English lit as well as Western philosophy): www.infomotions.com/alex/, The University of Texas at Austin online collection: www.lib.utexas.edu/books/booksut.html,
The English Server (and its various subprojects): eserver.org/fiction/, The Making of America project at the U. of Mich.: moa.umdl.umich.edu/index.html,
The University of Chicago Library (3 collections): www.lib.uchicago.edu/eos/html/ www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/ets/efts/ and www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/newhome/texts/,
The SunSite (UC berkley) collection: sunsite.berkeley.edu/Collections/, The Library Of Congress's various projects: www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html,
The Bartleby collection: www.bartleby.com/, The Bielefeld University Library (Germany): www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/english/,
The Camelot Project: www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cphome.stm, The Blake Digital Text Project: virtual.park.uga.edu/wblake/home1.html,
The Schoenberg Project: www.library.upenn.edu/etext/, The Clevland Digital Library: web.ulib.csuohio.edu/SpecColl/cdl/,
The Everglades Digital Library: everglades.fiu.edu/library/index.html, The Historical Text Archive: historicaltextarchive.com/,
The Humanities Text Intitiative (University of Michigan): www.hti.umich.edu/, The University of Virginia etext project and subprojects: etext.virginia.edu/,
The NY Public Library etext project (comming soon): digital.nypl.org/, The Perseus project: www.perseus.tufts.edu/,
The CDC reading library: www.cdc.gov/publications.htm,
The US Army's online libraries: www.adtdl.army.mil/atdls.htm www.dtic.mil/doctrine/ www.libraries.army.mil/ www.tricare.osd.mil/afml/ www.hqda.army.mil/library/ carlisle-www.army.mil/library/,
Marine Corps Publications: www.usmc.mil/marinelink/ind.nsf/publications, The US Air Force e-publishing page: www.e-publishing.af.mil/orgs.asp?type=pubs,
The Thoreau project: www.niulib.niu.edu/thoreau/, The Free Fiction Library: www.free-fiction.com/library/,
The Ancent Greek Literature Project: www.hol.gr/greece/ancwords.htm, The Free Novels Online project at cjb.net: freenovelsonline.cjb.net/,
Could this be that a country has recognized that a PS2 or an Xbox or other high-tech toy is really not any different from a toaster? Sunbeam has no say over what we do with a toaster after we buy it. If we choose to turn a toaster into a robot, or modify it into a rotisserie oven, that's our right. We can modify it in any way we choose to.
If I were to offer a modkit to turn a toaster into a rotisserie oven, that is my right, but more importantly, that is the right the consumer has under common law. Current IP laws are in direct conflict with this, how it ends is any ones guess, but it is an interesting fight.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure a Citrix implementation costs a fortune, mostly due to the fact that Microsoft requires three different licenses including a Windows license, a Terminal Server license and then Terminal Server CALs. It's damn expensive but, companies that really need that kind of functionality can easily afford it and once it's in, they won't part with it.
I think your looking at the wrong install base. The regular version of crossover office has never worked well for LTSP/K12LTSP and thin clients. The server version of Crossover office works VERY well with thin clients.
A 25 client version of crossover server is $2380.00. One of these can be placed in a school as an application server serving MSO or other windows only programs, while th rest of the school can be K12LTSP or other LTSP systems and you end up with the best of both worlds.
This is a nice general OSS CD, but I have to ask, who is this really targeted at?
My first thought was that it is targeted at college students. Thats a very good place to start, as its a group that will pop a CD into the drive and play with the new toys, and this contains a nice selection suitable for most college kids. But then why not the P2P apps and a programming suite?
My second thought was that it was targeted at the buisness world. Some nice buisness applications (OOo, ABI, FileZilla), but no flow chart app, no contact management, etc.
I guess I just can't figure out what group in the general non-geek population this is targeting, and and how it is showing them a better way to do what they are doing.
I guess marketing what we have avalible for the larger community really is the one thing that we in OSS will never be able to get right.
I have an easy way to overcome just about all of the limitations this article sites. LTSP. A LTSP server serving up clients who in turn provide services to the network. Problem with a server? reboot it. DNS server stop working? reboot it. Print server no longer working? reboot it. LTSP server goes down? Then you need a tech to restore from the last backup. Manage lots of LTSP's? then set up an extra one that will reimage the LTSP servers if they ever do a network boot.
Resistance is Futile
How Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Is Likely to Change Big Media
By Robert X. Cringely
Maybe you saw the story this week about a paper from Microsoft Research analyzing peer-to-peer file sharing networks with the conclusion that they can't be stopped -- not by the law, not by the movie studios and record companies, not even by mighty Microsoft and its Palladium initiative for trusted computing. Swapping songs and maybe movies is about to reach some critical mass beyond which it simply can't be stopped, or so the kids in Redmond think. The story is interesting, that it came from Microsoft is even more interesting, though the authors carefully disassociated themselves from their employer in the paper.
But this all pales in comparison to the implications of their conclusions. These are smart folks, taking a stand that is surely not popular with their company, so I think there is a pretty strong reason to believe they are correct. If so, then what does it mean? Are record companies and movie studios doomed? Am I doomed, as a guy whose work is regularly ripped-off, too? And will the print publishers go away, leaving us with only weblogs to keep us warm? I don't think so, but the world is likely to change some as a result.
Maybe it would help to deconstruct what publishers and broadcasters and movie moguls do that makes them significant contributors to our culture. They take financial risks by backing talented people in the hope of making money. Publishers and broadcasters and film makers and record executives have taken the time and spent the money to build both a commercial infrastructure and a brand identity. The most extreme version of such financial risk-taking is spending tens of millions -- sometimes hundreds of millions -- to make a movie.
Forgetting for the moment that some of these media people are greedy pond dwellers, let's ask the important question -- how are peer-to-peer file sharing systems going to replace $100 million movies? Peer-to-peer systems can share such movies, but since there is no real peer-to-peer business model that can generate enough zeroes, such systems are unlikely to finance any epic films.
Well, right there we have a problem. People LIKE epic films, but even with the best editing and animation software, there is no way some kid with a hopped-up Mac or PC is going to make "Terminator 4." One can only guess, then, that people will continue to go to movies and eat popcorn and watch on the big screen despite how many copies of Divx there are in the world.
Peer-to-peer movie piracy is practical only in the manner that any organized crime is practical: it works only as long as the host remains strong enough to support the parasite. Tony Soprano can't run New Jersey because then everyone would be a crook and there would be nobody to steal from except other crooks. No more innocent victims. Same with movie piracy, which needs a strong movie industry from which to steal. If the industry is weakened too much by piracy, the pirates begin to hurt themselves by drying-up their source of material. It is very doubtful that this will happen simply because the pirates, too, want to go to movies.
But the same is not true for records. This is simply because technology has reached the point where amateurs can make as good a recording as the professionals. The next Christina Aguilera CD could be as easily recorded at her house (or mine) as at some big recording complex out on Abbey Road.
And text, well, text is even worse because it is easiest of all to steal. My columns are published in newspapers and websites and handed-in as college essays all over the world and there is almost nothing I can do about it because tracking down the perps costs me more than does their crime. From the perspective of the established publishers, there is also the horrible possibility that people might actually come to prefer material they find for free on the Internet -- not just pirated material but even original material. This column, after all, is free, and my Mother claims to find some value in it from time to time.
So movies, while they may be hurt by peer-to-peer, won't be killed by it. But print publishing and music recording could be seriously hurt. Maybe this is good, maybe it is bad, but probably, it is inevitable.
Of course, the recording and publishing executives, who often work for the same parent company, aren't going to go without a fight. We are approaching the end of the first stage of that fight, the stage where they try to have their enemy made illegal. But the folks at Microsoft Research now say quite definitively that legal action probably won't be enough. That's when we enter stage two, which begins with guerrilla tactics in which copyright owners use the very hacking techniques they rail against to hurt the peer-to-peer systems. This too shall pass when bad PR gets to the guerrillas. The trick to guerrilla or terrorist campaigns is to not care what people think, but in the end, Sony (just one example) cares what people think.
That's when the record companies and publishers will appear to actually embrace peer-to-peer and try to make it their own.
This will be a ruse, of course, the next step in the death of a corrupt and abusive cultural monopoly. They'll say they will do it for us. They'll say they are building the best peer-to-peer system of all, only this one will cost money and it won't even work that well. There is plenty of precedent for this behavior in other industries.
My favorite historical example of this phenomenon comes from the oil business. In the 1920s, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had a monopoly on oil production in the Middle East, which they generally protected through the use of diplomatic -- and occasionally military -- force against the local monarchies. Then the Gulf Oil Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, literally sneaked into Kuwait and obtained from the Al-Sabah family (who still run the place) a license to search for oil.
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company did not like Gulf's actions, but they were even more dismayed to learn that Gulf couldn't be told to just go to hell. Andrew Mellon, of the Pittsburgh Mellons, was the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and he wasn't about to let his oil company be pushed around by the British Foreign Office. So Anglo-Persian and the Foreign Office did their best to delay Gulf, which worked for several years. They lied a little, lost a few maps, failed to read a telegram or two, and when Gulf still didn't go away, they turned to acting stupid. As the absolute regional experts on oil exploration, they offered to do Gulf's job, to save the Americans the bother if searching for oil in Kuwait by searching for them.
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company searched for oil in Kuwait for 22 years without finding a single drop.
Remember that Kuwait is smaller than Rhode Island, and not only is it sitting atop more than 60 billion barrels of oil, it has places where oil has been known for more than 3,000 years to seep all the way to the surface. Yet Anglo-Persian was able to fulfill its contract with Gulf and keep two oil rigs continually drilling in Kuwait for 22 years without finding oil. To drill this many dry wells required intense concentration on the part of the British drillers. They had to not only be NOT looking for oil, they had to very actively be NOT LOOKING for oil, which is even harder.
Back to music and text publishing. Expect both industries to offer peer-to-peer systems that won't work very well, and will cost us something instead of nothing. In the long run, though, these systems will probably die, too, at which point, the music and the print folks will have to find another way to make their livings. This will not be because of piracy, but because of the origination of material within the peer-to-peer culture, itself. We're not that far from a time when artists and writers can distribute their own work and make a living doing so, which makes the current literary and music establishments a lot less necessary.
But they won't die altogether because of the record company back lists of music, because peer-to-peer doesn't do a very good job of self-organizing, and indicating what is important, and because people won't take tablet computers with them to the bathroom.
So we will have little movies and little records and little magazines on the Internet because the Internet is made up of so many different interest groups. For the larger population, there will still be Brittany Spears and Stephen King singing and writing for big labels. And that will only start to change when the first really big artists jumps from old media to new, trading 15 percent of $30 times 100,000 copies for 100 percent of $0.50 times 1 million copies.
The Grateful Dead showed that it is possible to make a great living even in competition with some of their audience. This is a lesson all old media must learn in time.
Either that, or die.
...that or the next over priced luxury preschool...
Web sites alone are not going to cut it. PressPlay and numerous others have proved that. P2P can help, but its still only part of the answer. Once a band has had some exposure, they need a distribution channel, something that the current economics make next to impossible without the RIAA.
You want to change the economics of the music business, then come up with an easy to use station (something about the size of an arcade game) that will let a user insert there credit card, brows and sample music from its catalog, pick the album or song compilation they want, burn the CD, PROFESSIONALLY print the CD's label on the CD, print the insert and CD case, assemble it all and shrink wrap it, handing it to the customer in just a few minutes.
Now, if you ever make it this far, you still have to convince the music stores to give up floor space for this thing, get them to replenish the parts (CD's, ink, cases, inserts, CD covers, etc), the list goes on and on. Oh, and make sure you make it VERY easy for the end user AND for the store's $6 and hour stock boy to fix the 'minor problems' that will come up.
Now, you've gotten this far. You have built this widget, you spent the money to get it into stores. You signed up a large number of bands to put out music through this thing, hey, maybe you even sign a few big names, and by some miracle you have kept the price per CD down to under $10 while still making a profit for every one. You were smart enough to have built in a technical method of in-store advertising, removing much of the ongoing costs, and are now a minor force in the music business. If you get this far, you may have shot of changing the music world, but then, how long before investors start putting pressure on you to join the RIAA and become just like they are?
Your first stop should be Here
Your second stop should be here
Your third stop should be here
Your forth stop should be here
Your fifth stop should be here
Open Office would be my choice for an office suite (that or Star Office)
KDevelop is a decent enough development suite for use in a school, but with
this age group I would use this
project
For a good teaching language This
is a good place to start.
Hope this helps!
Lets look at this from the prospective of trying to foster further commercial
acceptance of OSS. As it currently stands, there is NO way to ensure that
some one is competent to support OSS. MS has the MCSE certification,
novell has its program, and so does Sun (and many others). But there is
not any such beast for OSS.
Now, ignore for a minute the political issues that this brings up within the
OSS community, how hard would it be for an OSS group to put together a core
certification process, and then allow the different OSS projects to build there
own add on module for certification in that project on top of the core
certification?
This would go a long way in making it easier for OSS to be accepted in
commercial settings, as support would no longer be an issue, just a matter of requiring
a specific certification be held by the support tech they hire.
IANAL, but having just read the 300+ pages of the opinion, it looks as if MS gets just about everything they were seeking. Any lawyers care to comment on this?
While I agree with you that the patent office will allow just about anything through, and our congress has expanded patent protection well beyond what they should ever have covered, the fact that the constitution includes the issue should serve to high light that fact. To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The following is excerpted from a post made by Tim Phillips to the CNI-Copyright list:
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), in his correspondence with James Madison (1751-1836) was initially hostile to the provision for copyright and patent law in the United States Constitution. On Dec. 20, 1787, Jefferson wrote to Madison from France concerning the recently-drafted Constitution:
I do not like... the omission of a bill of rights
providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms
for freedom of religion, freedom of the press,
protection against standing armies, restriction
against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting
force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by
jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of
the land...
Here Jefferson considers freedom from copyright and patent laws and other monopolies to be of similar importance to freedom of speech, religion, and the press. He repeated this view in his letter to Madison dated July 31, 1788:
I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our
new constitution by nine states. It is a good
canvas, on which some strokes only want
re-touching. What these are, I think are sufficiently
manifested by the general voice from North to South,
which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty
generally understood that this should go to juries,
habeas corpus, standing armies, printing, religion
and monopolies. I conceive there may be difficulty
in finding general modification of these suited to
the habits of all the states. But if such cannot
be found then it is better to establish trials by jury,
the right of Habeas corpus, freedom of the press
and freedom of religion in all cases, and to abolish
standing armies in time of peace, and monopolies, in
all cases, than not to do it in any... The saying
there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitements
to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a
monopoly for a limited time, as of 14 years; but the
benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to
be opposed to that of their general suppression.
Madison, in a letter of October 17, 1788, responded,
With regard to monopolies they are justly
classed among the greates nuisances in government.
But is it clear that as encouragements to literary
works and ingenious discoveries, they are not too
valuable to be wholly renounced? Would it not
suffice to reserve in all cases a right to the public
to abolish the privilege at a price to be specified
in the grant of it? Is there not also infinitely
less danger of this abuse in our governments than in
most others? Monopolies are sacrifices of the many
to the few. Where the power is in the few it is
natural for them to sacrifice the many to their own
partialities and corruptions. Where the power, as
with us, is in the many not in the few, the danger
can not be very great that the few will be thus
favored. It is much more to be dreaded that the
few will be unnecessarily sacrificed to the many.
Jefferson was either convinced by Madision of the utility of copyrights and patents, or he at least prudently decided to cut his losses, for he proposed to Madison the following addition to the bill of rights on August 28, 1789:
I like the declaration of rights as far as it goes,
but I should have been for going further. For
instance, the following alterations and additons would
have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be
allowed to persons for their own productions in literature,
and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not
exceeding ___ years, but for no longer term, and for no
other purpose.
The blank was to be filled with some appropriate number later to be determined. Here again Jefferson considers the protection of
the public against unduly long copyrights and patents to be a fundamental right, important enough to be safeguarded by a bill of rights.
Jefferson's own preference for the term of copyright was communicated to Madison a few days afterward, in a letter of September 6, 1789. There he proposed a term of 19 years, based on an actuarial calculation:
The question Whether one generation of men has
a right to bind another seems never to have
been started on this [i.e., the European side --
Jefferson was writing from France] or our [American]
side of the water... that no such obligation can
be so transmitted I think very capable of proof. --
I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be
self evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct
to the living; that the dead have neither powers
nor rights over it... A generation coming in and
going out entire... would have a right on the first
year of their self-dominion to contract a debt
for 33 years, in the 10th for 24, in the 20th for
14, in the 30th for 4, whereas generations, changing
daily by daily deaths and births, have one constant
term, beginning at the date of their contract, and
ending when a majority of those of full age at that
date shall be dead. The length of that term may
be estimated from the tables of mortality. Take,
for instance, the tables of M. de Buffon...
[according to which] half of those of 21 years [of
age] and upwards living at any one instant of time will
be dead in 18 years 8 months, or say 19 years as the
nearest integral number. Then 19 years is the term
beyond which neither the representatives of a nation,
nor even the whole nation itself assembled, can validly
extend a debt... This principle that the earth belongs
to the living, and not to the dead, is of very extensive
application... Turn this subject in your mind, my
dear Sir... Your station in the councils of our country
gives you an opportunity for producing it to public
consideration... Establish the principle... in the
new law to be passed for protecting copyrights and new
inventions, by securing the exclusive right for 19
instead of 14 years.
A Jeffersonian computation using life tables from 1992 gives a Jeffersonian copyright term of 30-35 years. (Vital Statistics of the United States 1992, Volume II--Mortality, Part A, Public Health Service, Hyattsville, 1996, Section 6, Table 6-1.) Note, howver, that at least one edition of Jefferson's works has a much abridged version of this letter, in which the 19-year computation and the proposal for the term of copyright do not occur.
One of Jefferson's most famous statements on patent law was in his often-quoted letter of August 13, 1813 to Isaac McPherson, in which he wrote that, since there is no natural right to property in land, how much less is there a natural right to a property in ideas. I think Jefferson's words apply equally well to copyrights as to patents; to "expression" as well as to "ideas": "he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
why our founding fathers had such a dim view of IP rights.
I like to get a patch, test it, THEN install it.
As do I. For the buisness world, what I would like to see is the ability to redirect the auto updates feature (of both the OS update, and other software updates) to access a server of the sysadmins choice. This (and the related server side software to do this) could allow sysadmins to test the new patches from MS, agree or disagree with the liceancing, and then role out the patches across the network with relitive ease. This type of a system could also do things like make tracking the software liceancing for a large network easy or make it simple to do things like account for whats on a given system.
Oh, wait, we are talking about M$. They won't ever make it that easy for companies they plan on screw^H^H^H^H selling software assurance to.
Major Airlines across the nation are striving for profitability in these tough times. This drive towards profitability is giving rise to some unique new business models. TWA (Trans World Airlines) is leading this new wave of innovation with a new joint venture called TMA or Trans Mouse Airlines. TMA is a joint venture of TWA and the Mice as Equals in our Social Society (MESS). TWA joined MESS because it sees a unique opportunity to raise revenue on its flight business without adding any extra cost. MESS will begin charging the mouse population of our country to fly on domestic and international flights.
I was recently able to ask Mighty Mouse, president of the whole MESS a series of questions about how this will work.
Rodent News Network: Thank you for granting me this interview Mighty Mouse, let me start by asking you why you think the Mouse Population will use this new service?
Mighty Mouse: Well, mice have always been world travelers. I guess that started with the Roman Empire. We traveled to Roam from South East Asia, the to England and the rest of Europe. We came to the US with the Pilgrims, and have established our selves on virtually every landmass on earth. However, travel for us has always been difficult. Up until now we have been unwanted companions. This is the first airline that will cater to the mice and rats that want to travel the world, and we believe that the mouse population will embrace this new service. While very few of us mice have super powers and are able to fly on our own, this new service will let us get to places we have always had difficulty getting to before.
RNN: Just one more question for you, thus far the airlines have been serving the rodent population a tasty greed pellet for lunch they call n-o-c-e-d, will this remain the food of choice, or will we see an improvement in the quality of the food?
MM: While I do not like n-o-c-e-d product myself, as TWA/TMA points out, its about the same quality of food as the humans get, so I guess its equal, and that meets our mandate.
I posted this the other day, but it seems like I should post it again. I have placed my listing of all of the ebook projects I know about online at http://www.stevensantos.com/misc/ebook.txt
This listing includes some 40 ebook projects.
Enjoy!
There are some very good reasons to use Novell, and there are some very good reasons not to use it, but the availability of MySQL as a reason either way just seems odd.
There is (and has been for a while now) a MySQL NLM for Netware that is under the GPL (sorry, I can't find the URL at the moment) and I recall seeing a PostgreSQL NLM on a 4.11 server a while back as well. While I applaud Novell for adding MySQL as a part of there base package, as it adds some additional out-of-the-box functionality, I don't see this making a dent in there slow decline.
Now, Novell does have some VERY interesting tech, but they don't sell it well, they never have. Lets take GroupWise as an example. It could be an Outlook Killer. It has just about all of the features of Outlook (and Exchange), and in many a better product. However, they don't push it, and they don't encourage people to try new things with it. I would LOVE to see them take a really bold step and release a version of that in the same way Sun did Star Office (OK, like Sun but without all the associated problems...). OOo plus Groupwise plus an easy to use SQL database front end would be a real alternitive to M$. It would also shine a bright light on Novell for a long time, one that could then be used to help them grow again if they played their cards right.
IANAL, but WestLaw does exactly that, and there have been court cases supporting them.
IANAL either, but I have done a fair amount of time in a law library or two. Westlaw has a patent on their keysite index system and copyright on the analyses they include with the record (I know, these analyses are quoted so often in court briefs that the copyright is questionable, but thats for another rant). The keysite index system makes it a lot easier to do legal research. Any one can take the text of the rulings themselves and use them any way they choose to. They are public domain. The keysite index system and analyses are not public domain.
The real value of Westlaw is in the keysite index system and analyses provided. Nexus-Lexus also provides similarly useful tools in its numbered index system, analyses and Shepard service.
Oh, and a quick online Lexus search of all Federal District Court cases for all available dates did not list a single copyright or patent case listing either West Group or NexusLexis as a plaintiff or defendant. I am curious, exactly what case are you referring to?
This is the my current listing of extext and related projects. Some have photographic studies of old text, photos and maps, others are standard text or marked up text.
I appoligize in advance for the format, but I format this correctly it gets rejected as having too few charictors per line.
The Humanities Text Initiative: www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/p/pd-modeng/pd-modeng-idx, The Internet Sacred Text Archive: www.sacred-texts.com/index.htm,
The Bralyn E-text Archive: www.bralyn.net/etext/, The Early Canadiana Online Archive: www.canadiana.org/cgi-bin/ECO/mtq, The Canada
Digital Collection: collections.ic.gc.ca/, The Online Book Page at the U. of Penn.: onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/,
A Celibration of Women Writers project at the U. of Penn.: digital.library.upenn.edu/women/, The Litrix Reading Room archive: www.litrix.com/,
National Library of Canada Online Etexts: collection.nlc-bnc.ca/e-coll-e/inet-loc-e.htm, The Oxford Text Archive United Kingdom Archive: ota.ahds.ac.uk/index.html,
Jennifer L. Armstrong's Free Online Novels archive: www.free-online-novels.com/, The U. of Calgary Online Children's Stories: www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html,
The Best Children's Literature On The Net project: www.geocities.com/Paris/Jardin/1630/index.html, The Christian Classics Ethereal Library: www.ccel.org/,
The Free Online Inspirational Books Archive: www.inspirationalmedia.com/eBooks.htm, The Internet Christian Library Project: www.iclnet.org/,
The Online Library of Literature: www.literature.org/, Arthur's Classic Novels Archive: members.fortunecity.com/wendover/index.html,
The Bibliomania Archive: www.bibliomania.com/, The Bygosh.com etext archive: bygosh.com/index.html,
The Electronic Literature Foundation: elf.chaoscafe.com/elf_by_Author.htm, The Internet Classics Archive at MIT: classics.mit.edu/,
Project Gutenberg: www.promo.net/pg, The Online Book Initiative: ftp.std.com/OBI,
The Internet Wiretap Project (used to be wiretap.spies.com): wiretap.area.com, The U. of Virginia etext project and sub projects: etext.lib.virginia.edu,
The Chinese Philosophical Etext Archives: angle.web.wesleyan.edu/etext/, The NetLibrary Etext Archive: netlibrary.net,
The johannesen.com collection: www.johannesen.com/OnlineGMD.htm, The Internet Public Library (indexes many other repositories as well): www.ipl.org,
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts (American & English lit as well as Western philosophy): www.infomotions.com/alex/, The University of Texas at Austin online collection: www.lib.utexas.edu/books/booksut.html,
The English Server (and its various subprojects): eserver.org/fiction/, The Making of America project at the U. of Mich.: moa.umdl.umich.edu/index.html,
The University of Chicago Library (3 collections): www.lib.uchicago.edu/eos/html/ www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/ets/efts/ and www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/newhome/texts/,
The SunSite (UC berkley) collection: sunsite.berkeley.edu/Collections/, The Library Of Congress's various projects: www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html,
The Bartleby collection: www.bartleby.com/, The Bielefeld University Library (Germany): www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/english/,
The Camelot Project: www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cphome.stm, The Blake Digital Text Project: virtual.park.uga.edu/wblake/home1.html,
The Schoenberg Project: www.library.upenn.edu/etext/, The Clevland Digital Library: web.ulib.csuohio.edu/SpecColl/cdl/,
The Everglades Digital Library: everglades.fiu.edu/library/index.html, The Historical Text Archive: historicaltextarchive.com/,
The Humanities Text Intitiative (University of Michigan): www.hti.umich.edu/, The University of Virginia etext project and subprojects: etext.virginia.edu/,
The NY Public Library etext project (comming soon): digital.nypl.org/, The Perseus project: www.perseus.tufts.edu/,
The CDC reading library: www.cdc.gov/publications.htm,
The US Army's online libraries: www.adtdl.army.mil/atdls.htm www.dtic.mil/doctrine/ www.libraries.army.mil/ www.tricare.osd.mil/afml/ www.hqda.army.mil/library/ carlisle-www.army.mil/library/,
Marine Corps Publications: www.usmc.mil/marinelink/ind.nsf/publications, The US Air Force e-publishing page: www.e-publishing.af.mil/orgs.asp?type=pubs,
The Thoreau project: www.niulib.niu.edu/thoreau/, The Free Fiction Library: www.free-fiction.com/library/,
The Ancent Greek Literature Project: www.hol.gr/greece/ancwords.htm, The Free Novels Online project at cjb.net: freenovelsonline.cjb.net/,
Could this be that a country has recognized that a PS2 or an Xbox or other high-tech toy is really not any different from a toaster? Sunbeam has no say over what we do with a toaster after we buy it. If we choose to turn a toaster into a robot, or modify it into a rotisserie oven, that's our right. We can modify it in any way we choose to. If I were to offer a modkit to turn a toaster into a rotisserie oven, that is my right, but more importantly, that is the right the consumer has under common law. Current IP laws are in direct conflict with this, how it ends is any ones guess, but it is an interesting fight.