rjstanford writes:Now let's say that someone comes out with a pBook printer
They have: a colleague and I have been following them
for some years. And yes, there may be a step function
in the practicality of this at some time in the future, when
I have one in the basement.
Right now, however, the folks who offer custom printing
and binding ask to see the contract that allows you
to print the book in question. So the existing legal
regieme is sufficient.
Interestingly, the contract that Baen Books uses as
well as one of the O'Reilly contracts does allow me
to have a copy custom-printed, so those two publishers
are non worried about custom printing/binding.
tepples wrote:
If you bill a U.S. address, you have to follow U.S. patents, right?
Yes, but only if you make it part of the contract.
If I'm in Uzbekistan, charging a U.S. customer
does not mean I'm operating on a different
continent. It means the U.S. customer has
come to me, and my dealings with him are
subject to Uzbek law unless I sign a
contract that specificaly says it is
executed in and interpreted in a U.S.
jurisdiction.
The latter is actually rather common, by
the way. My Canadian company uses California
law in some of its contracts, because that's
where our parent is located.
Of course, they'd also have to agree to
be bound by U.S. patent law in their contract
for U.S. patent law to apply, and Uzbekistan
has to not have a law which prohibits
such contract clauses.
[Copy of my submission to the U.K. All Party Parliamentary Internet Group,
re Digital Rights Management]
I was the coauthor of a technical book, "Using Samba", published in the United
States and Canada by O'Reilly and associates. Despite being made available
electronically for no cost, the book was the outstanding seller in its class,
and made me substantial royalties.
The History of "Using Samba" This book was published without any form of explicit DRM, in a format suitable
for printing from personal computers, with no limitations on distribution of
personal printing, and with a license reserving only commercial printing
rights to the publisher.
There was an implicit form of rights management, in that only commercial
printers have equipment capable of printing and binding on sufficiently thin
paper to make a manageable book: if printed on conventional photocopier paper,
the book is over three inches thick. Printing small sections for reference
on photocopier paper is perfectly practical, but large-scale printing is not.
This effectively reinforced the reservations in the license: printing for
profit is both illegal and impractical, but personal printing, excerpting and
copying is unrestricted.
The net result is that the book was widely used as a reference, and the
on-line readers bought the physical book for its more convenient form in great
numbers. O'Reilly has since published a non-trivial number of other books in
this manner.
How copyright deposit libraries should deal with DRM issues
Copyright and other deposit libraries, such as the National Libraries of the
U.K., Canada and the United States should seek and retain unrestricted copies,
offering suitable statutory protection to the authors or publishers.
Upon the expiry of the copyright, the deposit libraries should make the
originals available for a nominal fee.
Upon the failure or discontinuance of a DRM scheme, the publishers should
retain the option of republishing under a different scheme under ordinary
copyright law.
On cessation of publication, the copyright should by statute continue for no
less than seven years.
After this time, upon request by a member of the public, the copyright deposit
library should advertise that copyright is deemed to have lapsed, and that it
will offer the unrestricted copy within no more than one year. A copyright
owner may then give notice that they have in fact recommenced publication, and
if so the copyright deposit library shall advertise that fact and not release
the unrestricted copy.
For each application to be run, create a zone or virtual machine to run only that application, give it a directory tree from a shared NFS or cluster server, and give the aplication admin the ability to su to root in that zone.
She can then grant sudo rights to developers when a reinstallation or bug-fix is needed, but not affect anyone else.
In addition, in a beowulf-like array, one can put clones of the zone on all the machines where you want to provision the app, and use the master copy for acceptance testings before rolling it out to one node after another.
A roll-out tool that can do change reports is a good extra to throw in here.
You can do a surprising amount with nothing but the
response times of each kind of transaction.
Make some simple test scripts using something like
wget, and capture the response time with PasTmon or
ethereal-and-a-script, one test for each transaction type, while
at the same time measuring cpu, memory and disk IO/s.
At loads that wget or a human user will generate,
1/response time equals the load at 100% utilization
of the application (not 100% cpu!), so if the
average RT is 0.10 seconds, 100% utilization will
happen at 10 requests per second (TPS).
For each transaction type, compute the CPU,
Memory, Disk I/Os and network I/Os for 100%
application utilization. That becomes the
data for your sizing spreadsheet.
If you stay below 100% load when doing your
planning, you'll not get into ranges where
your performance will dive into the toilet (:-))
--dave
This is from a longer talk for TLUG next spring
I have found with books that releasing electronic
copies drives the sales of print copies, because
a book printed on thin paper and bound professionally
is way better than three to four inches of
photocopy paper with bent staples in the corner.
Therefor readers become purchasers.
I wonder how much the form factor affects
newspapers.
I have elderly relatives, all of whom have
gotten good, rapid care, and I've been able
to walk in the door and get non-emergency
care at my local clinic in an hour.
When
I needed emergency care it was apparently
as quick: I don't know
as I was unconscious at the time (:-))
Last week a 99-year old friend got a hip
replaceemnt within 24 hours of breaking
it. She's in rehab right now,
and we're in the city where the waiting
lists are the worst.
So don't believe everything you hear. Some
folks have a vested interest in overstating
the real problems and making others up out
of whole cloth.
Hint: germs (and broken bones) are not price-elastic, so
insurance against them is always sustainable.
Drug and cat-scan costs are price-elastic,
so costs and/or waits do grow with demand.
I used to be on the ABI team at Sun that did this,
and it's really pretty trivial.
A minimally necessary step is to label interfaces
with what revision of what standard they use. The
distributor then adds interfaces labeled
"POSIX 20.3.6" (an imaginary standard) when
the 3.6 release comes out. They don't remove the
20.2 stuff until no-one uses it any more (e.g., when
they switch from 32 to 64-bit), and ELF apps link to
the version they need.
If an application needs a newer version than
20.2, the user can download the newest version from
the distributor and have all the versions up to and
including 20.3.6.
If, on the other hand, the app needs 20.2.19, it's
already there.
And, by the way, the number of down-rev functions needed
in libc or the other system libraries
is diminishingly small, as standards don;t change very
much. Variability is usually seen in application
libraries.
The next, optional, steps can be found at MIT, in the documents about CTSS, ITS and Multics: this problem was solved
long before Unix saw the light of day.
Our values are quite different: Canada and
the U.S. used to have similar ones, back in the
years just after the Second Wold War. We
worked together, helped each other out, and
had just finished smashing
the Third Reich and everything it
stood for.
These days, Canadians aren't too
interested in wars, but they still tend
to cooperate and help each other out. The
army mostly does peacekeeping these days.
Americans, alas, have distinctly moved
towards regarding the world as a dog-eat-dog
one, with wars and militias as standard features.
I, for one, think this
is a bad thing, and harmful to my American cousins.
And that's the root cause of DLL hell (:-)).
Shipping down-rev libraries with applications
and adding them to a the general LD_LIBRARY_PATH
is something of bad thing.
Now, I'm sure you meant one should put
them in a different place ad set the application's
LD_LIBRARY_PATH or load path, but many Windows
and some Unix folks do it the wrong way.
I admit I'm being grumpy, but it burns my ass when
folks repeat the same mistake over and over again,
expecting a different result.
The library problem was solved in the era of CTSS
and Multics, but VMS, Windows and most Unixes
failed to notice.
I owe the community a transcription o Paul.Stachour@HI-Multics.ARPA's
talks on continuous maintenance, which is an accessible
discussion of t problem an the solution set.
What I don't have is a talk on the larger problem, that
of putting yourself out o business by letting marketing
differentiate you so much that customers can't write
portable software for your distribution.
If you can't run the same binaries on all the
distributions, then you're on the way to
suffering from the same thing that made Windows
so much more popular than Unix.
Distributors who want to make it
hard for you to run your binaries
are every bit as wise as the Unix vendors
who tried to avoid standardization
and the risk of mutual success...
Most PC drives allow one to download
new contents for the on-drive eeprom.
A colleague once suggested downloading
all zeroes would be a data-preserving
simulation of erasing the disk.
Back in V7, before Bell, Berkely and eventually
every tin-pot company created their own flavor,
programs on Unix merely needed recompilation when
you moved them to a new machine architecture.
This used to be a major selling point, as all the
mainframes and minis were wildly different, and
IBM minis need porting even when moving from
system 3 to 34 to 38 to AS400. You could write your
code once for Unix, instead of porting it every eight
months as the vendors messed around with you.
shmlco writes:Do I wish there was no DRM? Certainly. I also wish there was no NEED for DRM. Unfortunately, those two viewpoints are not easily reconciled.
Let's look at this as a logic problem:
p1) copying copyrighted material costs copyright holders sales p2) massive copying causes massive costs c1) mass copying is bad
p3) radio makes many copies p4) radio copying encourages sales c2) radio copying is not bad
p5) commercial mass copiers make many copies p6) they do not encourage sales c3) commercial mass copiers are bad
p7) masses of people make a few copies each p8) some of these encourage sales c4) some personal copying is good c5) some personal copying is bad
p9) DRM prevents personal copying c6) some DRM is good c7) some DRM is bad (for the vendor, remember)
p10) DRM does not prevent mass copying c8) DRM is bad (again, for the vendor)
from c6-9, vendors should improve DRM to prevent non-personal copying
Of course,in this case, DRM is being
used in the broadest possible sense, and
includes police raiding the pressing
plants in Shanghai...
Slashdot Mirror
They have: a colleague and I have been following them for some years. And yes, there may be a step function in the practicality of this at some time in the future, when I have one in the basement.
Right now, however, the folks who offer custom printing and binding ask to see the contract that allows you to print the book in question. So the existing legal regieme is sufficient.
Interestingly, the contract that Baen Books uses as well as one of the O'Reilly contracts does allow me to have a copy custom-printed, so those two publishers are non worried about custom printing/binding.
--dave
Yes, but only if you make it part of the contract.
If I'm in Uzbekistan, charging a U.S. customer does not mean I'm operating on a different continent. It means the U.S. customer has come to me, and my dealings with him are subject to Uzbek law unless I sign a contract that specificaly says it is executed in and interpreted in a U.S. jurisdiction.
The latter is actually rather common, by the way. My Canadian company uses California law in some of its contracts, because that's where our parent is located.
Of course, they'd also have to agree to be bound by U.S. patent law in their contract for U.S. patent law to apply, and Uzbekistan has to not have a law which prohibits such contract clauses.
--dave
I was the coauthor of a technical book, "Using Samba", published in the United States and Canada by O'Reilly and associates. Despite being made available electronically for no cost, the book was the outstanding seller in its class, and made me substantial royalties.
The History of "Using Samba"
This book was published without any form of explicit DRM, in a format suitable for printing from personal computers, with no limitations on distribution of personal printing, and with a license reserving only commercial printing rights to the publisher.
There was an implicit form of rights management, in that only commercial printers have equipment capable of printing and binding on sufficiently thin paper to make a manageable book: if printed on conventional photocopier paper, the book is over three inches thick. Printing small sections for reference on photocopier paper is perfectly practical, but large-scale printing is not.
This effectively reinforced the reservations in the license: printing for profit is both illegal and impractical, but personal printing, excerpting and copying is unrestricted.
The net result is that the book was widely used as a reference, and the on-line readers bought the physical book for its more convenient form in great numbers. O'Reilly has since published a non-trivial number of other books in this manner.
How copyright deposit libraries should deal with DRM issues
Copyright and other deposit libraries, such as the National Libraries of the U.K., Canada and the United States should seek and retain unrestricted copies, offering suitable statutory protection to the authors or publishers.
Upon the expiry of the copyright, the deposit libraries should make the originals available for a nominal fee.
Upon the failure or discontinuance of a DRM scheme, the publishers should retain the option of republishing under a different scheme under ordinary copyright law.
On cessation of publication, the copyright should by statute continue for no less than seven years. After this time, upon request by a member of the public, the copyright deposit library should advertise that copyright is deemed to have lapsed, and that it will offer the unrestricted copy within no more than one year. A copyright owner may then give notice that they have in fact recommenced publication, and if so the copyright deposit library shall advertise that fact and not release the unrestricted copy.
The interesting question is whether by connecting to a sever in Canada, a U.S. customer makes the Canadian server subject to U.S. patents.
This is somewhat similar to the arguement that by serving a web page in Canada you're subjct to the laws of every country where it is viewed.
--dave
Mind you, both of them would like to segment their customer base, and will make promises about doing so, but the reality is that they don't.
--dave
Now consider this a hint to Google about avoiding evil...
--dave
They already are: Peter Hiscocks, a professor at Ryerson, recently presented his oscilloscope to the Toronto Linux User group.
--dave
Absolutely!
--dave (who used to run TS 7 until the
machine suffered a lightening strike) c-b
If we were running the kind of Trusted Systems
that the military uses, the attack code would
probably fail for lack of permissions.
Trusted is not the same thing as Trusted, you see (;-))
--dave
For each application to be run, create a zone
or virtual machine to run only that application,
give it a directory tree from a shared NFS or
cluster server, and give the aplication admin
the ability to su to root in that zone.
She can then grant sudo rights to developers
when a reinstallation or bug-fix is needed,
but not affect anyone else.
In addition, in a beowulf-like array, one
can put clones of the zone on all the machines
where you want to provision the app, and use
the master copy for acceptance testings before
rolling it out to one node after another.
A roll-out tool that can do change reports
is a good extra to throw in here.
--dave
This is from Raj Jain's, "The Art of Computer Science Peformance Analysis", Chapter 33 (Opertional Laws).
--dave
Make some simple test scripts using something like wget, and capture the response time with PasTmon or ethereal-and-a-script, one test for each transaction type, while at the same time measuring cpu, memory and disk IO/s.
At loads that wget or a human user will generate, 1/response time equals the load at 100% utilization of the application (not 100% cpu!), so if the average RT is 0.10 seconds, 100% utilization will happen at 10 requests per second (TPS).
For each transaction type, compute the CPU, Memory, Disk I/Os and network I/Os for 100% application utilization. That becomes the data for your sizing spreadsheet.
If you stay below 100% load when doing your planning, you'll not get into ranges where your performance will dive into the toilet (:-))
--dave
This is from a longer talk for TLUG next spring
This eventualy led to the law being struck down, but multiple juries did it first!
--dave
I wonder how much the form factor affects newspapers.
--dave
I have elderly relatives, all of whom have gotten good, rapid care, and I've been able to walk in the door and get non-emergency care at my local clinic in an hour.
When I needed emergency care it was apparently as quick: I don't know as I was unconscious at the time (:-)) Last week a 99-year old friend got a hip replaceemnt within 24 hours of breaking it. She's in rehab right now, and we're in the city where the waiting lists are the worst.
So don't believe everything you hear. Some folks have a vested interest in overstating the real problems and making others up out of whole cloth.
Hint: germs (and broken bones) are not price-elastic, so insurance against them is always sustainable. Drug and cat-scan costs are price-elastic, so costs and/or waits do grow with demand.
--dave
A minimally necessary step is to label interfaces with what revision of what standard they use. The distributor then adds interfaces labeled "POSIX 20.3.6" (an imaginary standard) when the 3.6 release comes out. They don't remove the 20.2 stuff until no-one uses it any more (e.g., when they switch from 32 to 64-bit), and ELF apps link to the version they need.
If an application needs a newer version than 20.2, the user can download the newest version from the distributor and have all the versions up to and including 20.3.6.
If, on the other hand, the app needs 20.2.19, it's already there.
And, by the way, the number of down-rev functions needed in libc or the other system libraries is diminishingly small, as standards don;t change very much. Variability is usually seen in application libraries.
The next, optional, steps can be found at MIT, in the documents about CTSS, ITS and Multics: this problem was solved long before Unix saw the light of day.
--dave
These days, Canadians aren't too interested in wars, but they still tend to cooperate and help each other out. The army mostly does peacekeeping these days.
Americans, alas, have distinctly moved towards regarding the world as a dog-eat-dog one, with wars and militias as standard features.
I, for one, think this is a bad thing, and harmful to my American cousins.
--dave
--dave (who will avoid it) c-b
And that's the root cause of DLL hell (:-)). Shipping down-rev libraries with applications and adding them to a the general LD_LIBRARY_PATH is something of bad thing.
Now, I'm sure you meant one should put them in a different place ad set the application's LD_LIBRARY_PATH or load path, but many Windows and some Unix folks do it the wrong way.
I admit I'm being grumpy, but it burns my ass when folks repeat the same mistake over and over again, expecting a different result. The library problem was solved in the era of CTSS and Multics, but VMS, Windows and most Unixes failed to notice.
I owe the community a transcription o Paul.Stachour@HI-Multics.ARPA's talks on continuous maintenance, which is an accessible discussion of t problem an the solution set.
What I don't have is a talk on the larger problem, that of putting yourself out o business by letting marketing differentiate you so much that customers can't write portable software for your distribution.
--dave (DRBrown.TSDC@HI-Multics.ARPA) c-b
I don't see it mentioned at nslu2-linux.org, is it based on the same hardware and firmware?
--dave
Distributors who want to make it hard for you to run your binaries are every bit as wise as the Unix vendors who tried to avoid standardization and the risk of mutual success...
--dave
Most PC drives allow one to download new contents for the on-drive eeprom. A colleague once suggested downloading all zeroes would be a data-preserving simulation of erasing the disk.
This used to be a major selling point, as all the mainframes and minis were wildly different, and IBM minis need porting even when moving from system 3 to 34 to 38 to AS400. You could write your code once for Unix, instead of porting it every eight months as the vendors messed around with you.
--dave
Independantly, Oracle bought the company the provides the innobase substructure for MySQL.
--dave
Let's look at this as a logic problem:
Of course,in this case, DRM is being used in the broadest possible sense, and includes police raiding the pressing plants in Shanghai...--dave