... in many countries already. And soon (I hope) it may be in the US. We're working with a few congressmen who asked us to help with a bill that's been drawn up.
A mobile phone company is arguing that companies that unlock their handsets violate the DMCA
So I gues that makes thos of us who hackmobilephones terrorists or something?
I would think that if you follow this logic, Verizon crippling their handsets so that customers can't access their own copyrighted works (pictures they've taken and messages they've received) without paying $0.25 is also a terrorist. I can live with that.
It depends on the slice really, and if the sales generated would offset lost sales. Depending on the publisher, you may be talking about anywhere from five to fifteen percent royalties. So a nickel per chapter isn't exactly very balanced, especially if you only received a fraction of that. At the same time, I would not be opposed to something fair that did benefit the author, which is what the Safari Bookshelf is designed to do. Now libraries are different from downloads. For one, libraries have either purchased copies of the book or someone else did and donated them. So the copies are paid for. Secondly, there are a finite number of copies available, which may be checked in or out. So if you don't feel like waiting for a book to be returned, you're probably going to go out and buy a copy for yourself. Of course this isn't the case when you can simply download parts of it for free. If Google had offered to collaborate with authors to come up with something like iTunes for books, I certainly would have more respect for them. If they pulled this with music, every label in the country would be suing the heck out of them.
I end up filling my shelf with 2 - 4 year old books remaindered at our local version of Walmart, at 15 - 25% of US cover price. O'Reilly is still in business, the tech bookshops, and Walmart are still in business
Close-outs like this actually help the book business. Do you think the publisher sells the books to Wal-Mart at the cover price? Wal-Mart's taking the hit to flush as many books out the door and empty their channels. The publisher isn't losing any money - in fact, that's a good hint that the publisher sold more than was necessary. I fail to see how this equates to being able to zero in on only the part of the book you're interested in and reading it for free. If you want to equate that to anything, consider how good a music album would do if you could download your three favorite tracks for free. Do you really think sales for that album would increase ? Note I said give away, not sell. With iTunes, at least they're paying for those three songs, so some revenue is being generated. The Safari Bookshelf works much the same way - a teacher gets on, picks out the pieces of the book they want, then their subscription pays for that slice of it. Do you really think teachers (with shoestring budgets) are going to pay for Safari when they can get the piece of the book they want for free now?
Depends on the book and the reader. There are plenty of books people buy for a reference, rather than as a study. You've got all of this information searchable to any tech who needs quick answers, researchers who just want some numbers or a paragraph to throw in their paper, and anyone else who's just interested in finding some information, and you lose the sales. Depending on how much information they're willing to allow you to download, of course, plays a role in just how good/bad this can get. Imagine if "Why do men have nipples" was searchable by medical question - there'd be no real reason to buy the book, especially when you can index and read it for free. If you want to write free books, go right ahead, and you've got my respect... I write plenty of free software because I want to benefit the community. But the writing, editing, and publishing process authors go through today is anything but altruistic. Authors earn livings off of royalties. If google wants to do this, let them limit themselves to books specifically licensed publicly.
My copies of Free as in Freedom, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Art of Unix Programming, and Practical Common Lisp beg to differ strongly on this point.
Tim O'Reilly arguing that the Google Library Project is a good thing for authors in general
Horse Crap. As an author, I can assure you that most technical publishers are interested in just filling the pipeline, then being done with the book. A majority of the revenue that comes in to a publisher is from the initial sales to Barnes and Noble, Amazon, etcetera. After the first quarter, it's just nail-biting maintenance to have to go after PR leads, re-orders, and reprints - all the meantime paying your staff to sit around and wait for this stuff to happen. Sure, there will occasionally be a very successful book that will pay off to do this, but for most technical books it's in the publisher's best interest to just sell the first ten or fifteen thousand and then be done with it. My own publisher wanted to put out an unencrypted PDF of my book for sale just two moths after it was released. What a stupid idea. There's no better way to kill a book than to make it available for anyone to read for free. Sure, perhaps 6 or 8 months down the road - but publishers these days haven't got a care in the world for the continuity of their books, so long as all the maintenance is involved. Google's not acting in authors' best interests, and neither is Tim O'Reilly.
And that's what it's really about. The switch to Intel has been done so hastily that they're running into all kinds of issues now that third party developers are hacking on it. Change the binary format? Probably to fix some severe deficiencies... but marketed well under the anti-piracy guise.
Offtopic? You pansy. I'm being serious. Once this becomes commonplace, the old sci-fi troll we all thought was stupid and not technically feasable act of hacking into computer systems and messing with people on an entirely spooky level seems pretty doable once this becomes commonplace. How will we know that certain appliances aren't really network conscious? E.g. an override to turn a garbage disposal on remotely while someone's hand happens to be in it, or for the stove to fire up to enormous levels of heat as part of a now network-based assassination attempt. It all seems a bit too spooky to me. Yesterday, I could wake up and be confident that my stove wasn't going to blow up the house because it simply didn't have an ethernet cable. Some time in the future, smart stoves might be susceptible to hacking.
Dear Slashdot crowd.. As the mantainer of the cinelerra manual wiki, which runs out of my home cable connection on a P400mhz 64 meg machine... Please, please, please be gentle..
You've made two tragic mistakes in your assumptions: 1. That Slashdotters actually RTFA, and 2. That Slashdotters read documentation of any kind.
I can't see it because the site is now down, but if it's like the Mac version of Office, it will have a style window with dynamic transparency which I find extremely useful. If you're using a source document behind your window, the style window (and other windows) will gradually become transparent so you can see through them - and when you move to use it (for changing a style), it goes opaque again. OSX has had very useful/functional features like this for years.
Unfortunately, the license the content is released under requires that you are a UK resident to use it.
From the license agreement:
Furthermore, and hence all licensees must have no greater than three complete teeth in the mouth of the primary licensor and shall use the term "get your knickers in a twist" no less than thrice a day. Finally, all licensees shall hereinforth have a full understanding of the term cockup.
Slashdot Mirror
... in many countries already. And soon (I hope) it may be in the US. We're working with a few congressmen who asked us to help with a bill that's been drawn up.
A mobile phone company is arguing that companies that unlock their handsets violate the DMCA
So I gues that makes thos of us who hack mobile phones terrorists or something?
I would think that if you follow this logic, Verizon crippling their handsets so that customers can't access their own copyrighted works (pictures they've taken and messages they've received) without paying $0.25 is also a terrorist. I can live with that.
My point being that I *purchased* these books, all of which are freely available online.
My point was that they were not very good books to begin with... but anyways, not everyone is as altruistic as yourself.
And if my aunt had wheels, she'd be a teacart, but that is neither here nor there.
So RTFP next time, and if you think it's offtopic, just say so instead of making a horrible idiot of yourself by backpeddling as you are.
can we go for 3 dupes in a row?
If we did, that'd be 26.1 million in funding. w00t!
It depends on the slice really, and if the sales generated would offset lost sales. Depending on the publisher, you may be talking about anywhere from five to fifteen percent royalties. So a nickel per chapter isn't exactly very balanced, especially if you only received a fraction of that. At the same time, I would not be opposed to something fair that did benefit the author, which is what the Safari Bookshelf is designed to do. Now libraries are different from downloads. For one, libraries have either purchased copies of the book or someone else did and donated them. So the copies are paid for. Secondly, there are a finite number of copies available, which may be checked in or out. So if you don't feel like waiting for a book to be returned, you're probably going to go out and buy a copy for yourself. Of course this isn't the case when you can simply download parts of it for free. If Google had offered to collaborate with authors to come up with something like iTunes for books, I certainly would have more respect for them. If they pulled this with music, every label in the country would be suing the heck out of them.
I end up filling my shelf with 2 - 4 year old books remaindered at our local version of Walmart, at 15 - 25% of US cover price. O'Reilly is still in business, the tech bookshops, and Walmart are still in business
Close-outs like this actually help the book business. Do you think the publisher sells the books to Wal-Mart at the cover price? Wal-Mart's taking the hit to flush as many books out the door and empty their channels. The publisher isn't losing any money - in fact, that's a good hint that the publisher sold more than was necessary. I fail to see how this equates to being able to zero in on only the part of the book you're interested in and reading it for free. If you want to equate that to anything, consider how good a music album would do if you could download your three favorite tracks for free. Do you really think sales for that album would increase ? Note I said give away, not sell. With iTunes, at least they're paying for those three songs, so some revenue is being generated. The Safari Bookshelf works much the same way - a teacher gets on, picks out the pieces of the book they want, then their subscription pays for that slice of it. Do you really think teachers (with shoestring budgets) are going to pay for Safari when they can get the piece of the book they want for free now?
Depends on the book and the reader. There are plenty of books people buy for a reference, rather than as a study. You've got all of this information searchable to any tech who needs quick answers, researchers who just want some numbers or a paragraph to throw in their paper, and anyone else who's just interested in finding some information, and you lose the sales. Depending on how much information they're willing to allow you to download, of course, plays a role in just how good/bad this can get. Imagine if "Why do men have nipples" was searchable by medical question - there'd be no real reason to buy the book, especially when you can index and read it for free. If you want to write free books, go right ahead, and you've got my respect... I write plenty of free software because I want to benefit the community. But the writing, editing, and publishing process authors go through today is anything but altruistic. Authors earn livings off of royalties. If google wants to do this, let them limit themselves to books specifically licensed publicly.
What good is a writter that can't RTFA?!
Did you RTFP? I was referring to releasing an unencrypted PDF. It'd get one sale, then that'd be it.
My copies of Free as in Freedom, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Art of Unix Programming, and Practical Common Lisp beg to differ strongly on this point.
Thanks for proving my point
Tim O'Reilly arguing that the Google Library Project is a good thing for authors in general
Horse Crap. As an author, I can assure you that most technical publishers are interested in just filling the pipeline, then being done with the book. A majority of the revenue that comes in to a publisher is from the initial sales to Barnes and Noble, Amazon, etcetera. After the first quarter, it's just nail-biting maintenance to have to go after PR leads, re-orders, and reprints - all the meantime paying your staff to sit around and wait for this stuff to happen. Sure, there will occasionally be a very successful book that will pay off to do this, but for most technical books it's in the publisher's best interest to just sell the first ten or fifteen thousand and then be done with it. My own publisher wanted to put out an unencrypted PDF of my book for sale just two moths after it was released. What a stupid idea. There's no better way to kill a book than to make it available for anyone to read for free. Sure, perhaps 6 or 8 months down the road - but publishers these days haven't got a care in the world for the continuity of their books, so long as all the maintenance is involved. Google's not acting in authors' best interests, and neither is Tim O'Reilly.
From TFA:
his powerful burst was detected September 4
From TFS:
The burst was observed on the 6th of September
I guess it took two light days for the submitter to read it.
I plucked this quote out of someone's sig, but it seems appropriate:
"Who's your daddy?"
- Pedro Martinez
I first heard of California's AB1179 late Friday night
Is that a tiger patch? I want it! I want it!
And that's what it's really about. The switch to Intel has been done so hastily that they're running into all kinds of issues now that third party developers are hacking on it. Change the binary format? Probably to fix some severe deficiencies... but marketed well under the anti-piracy guise.
Offtopic? You pansy. I'm being serious. Once this becomes commonplace, the old sci-fi troll we all thought was stupid and not technically feasable act of hacking into computer systems and messing with people on an entirely spooky level seems pretty doable once this becomes commonplace. How will we know that certain appliances aren't really network conscious? E.g. an override to turn a garbage disposal on remotely while someone's hand happens to be in it, or for the stove to fire up to enormous levels of heat as part of a now network-based assassination attempt. It all seems a bit too spooky to me. Yesterday, I could wake up and be confident that my stove wasn't going to blow up the house because it simply didn't have an ethernet cable. Some time in the future, smart stoves might be susceptible to hacking.
...that our once thought unfounded fears of someone programming our toaster to eat our dog are not not-so-radical?
... that my voice is my passport.
Dear Slashdot crowd.. As the mantainer of the cinelerra manual wiki, which runs out of my home cable connection on a P400mhz 64 meg machine ... Please, please, please be gentle..
You've made two tragic mistakes in your assumptions: 1. That Slashdotters actually RTFA, and 2. That Slashdotters read documentation of any kind.
Now Slashdotters can bastardize their favorite movies in even less time!
I can't see it because the site is now down, but if it's like the Mac version of Office, it will have a style window with dynamic transparency which I find extremely useful. If you're using a source document behind your window, the style window (and other windows) will gradually become transparent so you can see through them - and when you move to use it (for changing a style), it goes opaque again. OSX has had very useful/functional features like this for years.
I wonder if they're going to codename it Office Vista, in keeping with common versioning practices.
The sound of a door slamming shut at Microsloth?
I was expecting the article to say, "this effort is being driven by [head of something] at Microsoft".
Unfortunately, the license the content is released under requires that you are a UK resident to use it.
From the license agreement:
Furthermore, and hence all licensees must have no greater than three complete teeth in the mouth of the primary licensor and shall use the term "get your knickers in a twist" no less than thrice a day. Finally, all licensees shall hereinforth have a full understanding of the term cockup.
I guess Pat Robertson is diversifying his revenue sources...
Pat's taken the Microsoft approach now and is more into assassinations than evangelism.