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Comment Re:Um, waaah? (Score 1) 100

by NovaSupreme (#29468031) Attached to: Amazon Delaying Public Domain Submissions On Kindle

that is a bad logic.
amazon owns the platform so they can do what they want and i cannot complain.
but to think that this is good for customers is hopeless.

different people would have different needs. where do you draw the boundary?
* can we have different publishers offering same book with identical content?
* can we have different publishers offering same book with different formatting?
* can we have different publishers offering same book with different spellings (color vs colour)?
* can we have different publishers offering same book but one offering annotation by Shakespearean expert MrSupreme?
* can we have different publishers offering same book in different language?

at one extreme answer is yes, at another you will think no. the boundary is always subjective. only solution is "freedom as in speech". let customers decide what the heck they want.

today same physical book is offered in 100 different formats (by same publisher) - leather bound, paperback, hardcover, asian edition, EEE cheap edition, school edition, new edition with spelling fixes, new edition with commentery. how does that work?

what amazon needs is to make user feedback system. how hard is to sort by number of copies bought and buy the top selling edition?
The Courts

RIAA Wants Its $222,000 Verdict Back 203

Posted by samzenpus from the be-careful-what-you-wish-for dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA, unhappy with the Court's decision setting aside its $222,000 jury verdict over $23.76 worth of song files, and throwing out the legal theory on which it was based, has made a motion for permission to file an appeal from the Judge's order, in Capitol v. Thomas. Normally, only final judgments are appealable, and appeals are not permissible in federal court from 'interlocutory' orders of that nature."

Comment Re:MTBF For Unused Drive? (Score 1) 283

by NovaSupreme (#22974694) Attached to: Disk Failure Rates More Myth Than Metric
MTBF has *nothing* to do with life expectancy. It's failure rate of good drives, that are not expected to fail. More precisely it's failure rate of the drives in the conditions when their failure rate is constant (that precludes high rate failure in the beginning and in the end). I can make hard drives that are guaranteed to work for 1 day, tell that to my customers and their MTBF will be infinity, since there will never be unexpected failures! Another example MTBF of a healthy adult in USA may be 10000 years (chances of road accidents are small) but life expectancy is only 80 years!
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - IBM Demands U.S. Patents for Offshoring U.S. Jobs 1

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "IBM and other corporations are seeking patents for inventions covering the offshoring of U.S. jobs. The USPTO is considering IBM's patent application for Outsourcing of Services, a 'method for identifying human-resource work content to outsource offshore of an organization' to 'countries where cheaper labor prices and/or cheaper materials are available.' Then there's Big Blue's Electronic Marketplace for Identifying, Assessing, Reserving and Engaging Knowledge-Workers for an Assignment Using Trade-Off Analysis, which provides a handy-dandy IBM calculator that drives home the point that you'll pay less for IGS India workers, whether onshore or offshore. And with its System and Method of Using Speech Recognition at Call Centers to Improve Their Efficiency and Customer Satisfaction, IBM describes how to operate in 'low cost foreign countries' with 'support people not having good English language skills, or having an accent that makes it difficult to understand them' by exploiting technology developed for students who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as other accent reduction techniques."
Mozilla

Firefox Working to Fix Memory Leaks 555

Posted by CmdrTaco from the important-but-boring-work dept.
Christopher Blanc writes "Many Mozilla community members, including both volunteers and Mozilla Corporation employees, have been helping to reduce Firefox's memory usage and fix memory leak bugs lately. Hopefully, the result of this effort will be that Firefox 3 uses less memory than Firefox 2 did, especially after it has been used for several hours." Here's hoping. Frequent restarts of things on my computer make me furious. I can't imagine why anyone would tolerate such things.
Power

Wind, Solar & Biofuels to Power Remote Cell Towers 119

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the go-juice dept.
tcd004 writes "How do you set up a cell network when there's no power grid? Namibia, India and Nigeria are building towers using localized power sources to provide critical cell phone access to the most remote parts of their countries. Wind/solar hybrids, and biofuel power plants will power the radio towers, peripheral communications, and even the protective fencing around the installations."
Privacy

Sweden Admits Tapping Citizens' Phones for Decades 273

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the oh-well-if-you-have-already-been-doing-it dept.
paulraps writes "Sweden is close to implementing new surveillance legislation that will include the monitoring of emails, telephone calls and keyword searches using advanced pattern analysis. The objective is to detect 'threats such as terrorism, IT attacks or the spread of weapons of mass destruction' but the proposals have divided the country. In a misguided attempt to put people at ease, the government admitted that Sweden has been tapping its citizens' phones for decades anyway."
Privacy

Submission + - FBI Admits Abuse of Patriot Act to Obtain Info

Submitted by SydShamino
SydShamino writes: CNN, the Associated Press and others are reporting that an independent audit of the FBI revealed "serious misuse" of power to acquire private information granted in the Patriot Act. FBI Director Robert Mueller has accepted responsibility for problems and says they are being corrected, but Congress has already called for hearings. There's no word yet on criminal charges against anyone in the FBI who might have broken the law.
Linux Business

Samba Success in the Enterprise? 149

Posted by Cliff from the asking-for-your-experiences dept.
gunnk asks: "We've deployed a Samba server here to replace some aging Novell Netware boxes. It works great: fast, secure, stable. However, we have one VIP that feels that Samba is 'amateur' software and that we should be buying Windows servers. I've been searching with little success for large Samba deployments in Enterprise environments. Anyone out there care to share stories of places that are happily running large Samba installations for their file servers? Or not so happy, for that matter — better to be informed!"
Windows

Open-Source ID Project Awaits Microsoft's Blessing 45

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the vacation-to-purgatory dept.
An anonymous reader writes to mention that an open-source alternative to Microsoft's CardSpace tool has been on hold for months while they await patent blessing from the Redmond software giant. "While CardSpace is available on Windows, one goal of the Higgins project is to cover other operating systems. Higgins wants to offer an open-source alternative that works on Windows and on alternatives such as Linux and Mac OS X. The application would work similarly to CardSpace."
XBox (Games)

A Morning With Microsoft Games 42

Posted by Zonk from the no-one-threw-rocks-at-me dept.
For the most part, Tuesday offered insights into independent games, and their growing influence in the games industry. Tuesday was also, for at least part of the day, a chance to get caught up on upcoming offerings from Microsoft Game Studios. Though MGS doesn't have a keynote at this year's Game Developer's Conference, representatives from several of the company's first and third party studios were on hand to demonstrate the future of Microsoft gaming. I had the chance to sit in on demos for Mass Effect and Shadowrun. Additionally, Peter Molyneux was there to offer up a very unusual slice of gameplay from Fable 2: an adventurer and his dog. Read on for my impressions of these anticipated titles.

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