xploraiswakco - Slashdot User

Submission + - Amazon Cries 'Uncle' to End IBM Patent Feud

Submitted by

theodp

on Thursday May 10, 2007 @02:21AM

theodp writes: "Amazon will pay an undisclosed amount to IBM to settle a long-running patent feud, and the two companies have agreed to a long-term patent cross-licensing agreement. Information Week wonders if an insurance dispute prompted Amazon's settlement, noting that Atlantic Mutual sued Amazon back in March to escape any obligation to reimburse the e-tailer should it lose the case brought by IBM. Amazon had relied on Atlantic Mutual's backing in an earlier legal battle it waged against tiny InTouch."

Submission + - SPAM: Online music; What the Music Industry Doesn't Want

Submitted by

Brian Beshore

on Thursday May 10, 2007 @01:59AM

Brian Beshore writes: "Online music. It's a revolution. Everyone knows about it. What you mainly hear about, however, is what the big record companies have to say about online music. They talk about piracy, and what do they say about that? They say 'it's not fair to the artist!' 'You're ripping the artist off!' they say. 'The artist is not getting their royalties!' The big record companies are really concerned about the artists in their stables. Right. Let's take a look at how record companies 'take care' of their stars. "According to Ronald Zalkind, in Getting Ahead in the Music Business (Schirmer Books), the expenses an artist incurs for record production often outweigh record royalties: 'Let us now hypothesize an artists with initial record royalties, on the sale of 100,000 units, of $40,600. The artist has a personal manager who gets 20 percent off the top, which reduces the $40,600 figure to $32,480. The average cost of producing an album today (which is what our hypothetical artist ran up at session costs) is $75,000. This means that the artist owes the record company $34,400. Also, the artist receives a $10,000 advance against royalties as bare subsistence income on which federal, state. and local taxes were paid. This raises the artist's outstanding debt, on his first release, to $44,400. Now, let us suppose that the artist's second album with the record company sells gold: The initial payout, less container charges, is $203,000. The personal manager gets 20 percent, which brings the artist's take down to $162,400. The artist owes $44,400 from the first album, which further reduces the artist's gold record income to $118,000. Finally, the artist spent $100,000 on the second go-round in the studio and took a $15,000 advance. With a gold record on the wall, the artist after two successful album releases, has only earned $3,000.' " The above quote is from Making Money Making Music (No Matter Where You Live) by James W. Dearing. (Writer's Digest Books) Is it any wonder that we saw Don Henley appealing to congress about his and other artists recording contracts, saying he felt like an indentured servant. Is it any wonder that more and more artists are turning to the internet to promote their music. Even though mostly what we've heard about online music is about the piracy that goes on, and truly this is not right, what we will see more and more of is that online music is where to look for new music. [spam URL stripped]"

Submission + - Science resources and study methods?

Submitted by

the_kanzure

on Wednesday May 09, 2007 @08:23PM

the_kanzure writes: "For those of us in professional environments, or in university, etc., what databases do you see as essential? PubMed Central, EBSCOHost, ScienceDirect, arXiv, CiteSeeR, STINET, archive.org, Google Scholar/Cache, ezProxy terminals, Merck indexes, these only scratch the surface of Internet databases for useful scientific information — especially chemistry (of all sorts), physics, aerospace, engineering, and so on. So, what databases and what sort of study sessions do you implement? Those of you who drink from the Internet as though a fountain of information, this means you too."

Big Red Button Disasters? 508

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday May 09, 2007 @07:45PM from the shiny-candy-like-button dept.

FredDC asks: "The Daily WTF has a story about a Big Red Button disaster. What Big Red Button disasters have you experienced? Which ones have you caused? Are there any that you've heard about, or do you know of any that can happen any day now?"

Submission + - .com speed internet to your house?

Submitted by

BostonMACOSX

on Wednesday May 09, 2007 @07:23PM

BostonMACOSX writes: "As I ponder opening up a niche .com site I've been toying with running it from my house and not from an ISP or provider. The problem I'm running into is that although there are many cheap providers they have pretty low bandwidth for what I'll need per month.
I'm thinking that I'm going to run it out of my house. I'm going to start with an Xserve and Xserve RAID. I know enough about LAMP and email servers to get up and going and be dangerous at the same time.

What I need to ask is what are my best options for good business grade internet to the home? I'm just outside of boston so providers should be plentiful. I'm just not sure where to begin.....so where do I begin?"

Submission + - Work is work, right?

Submitted by

livnah

on Wednesday May 09, 2007 @05:47PM

livnah writes: "In a recent AskSlashdot posting (http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/09/1 728252), Pikoro asked what to do or where to go when he hits the top of the IT food-chain and finds that his work is "more work than play". Is it possible that in today's world we're overlooking that work is ... work? Granted, work should be as enjoyable as possible — when you enjoy your work your productivity increases — but are we expecting too much these days? Do we need to re-evaluate our requirement for a high joy-factor while in the workplace?"

Submission + - Books for introducing comp sci?

Submitted by thewiseman on Wednesday May 09, 2007 @03:29PM

thewiseman writes: I'm about to graduate from college with a degree in economics and join the working world full-time, but I'm already thinking about picking up something new. I've been incredibly impressed by and interested in the work being done by an information management specialist at my current firm. Does any slashdotter have some good books they'd recommend for introducing a newb to computer science (specifically topics underlying relational databases)?

Where to Go After a Lifetime in IT? 902

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday May 09, 2007 @02:30PM from the starting-the-next-chapter dept.

Pikoro asks: "I have been working in the IT field for the past 20 years or so, and after getting hired by the largest financial company in the world, I thought I might have finally found a place to retire from. However, after working here for almost a year, I find myself, not exactly burnt out, but longing for a complete career field change. It's not that doing IT related tasks aren't fun anymore, but they have become more 'work' than 'play' over the last few years. Since all of my experience has been IT related, I'm not sure where I could go from here. What would you consider doing for a living, after being in a single field for so long?"

Submission + - Recent activity on DIGG, is DIGG really useful?

Submitted by xploraiswakco on Tuesday May 08, 2007 @02:25AM

xploraiswakco writes: With the recent activity over Digg.com vs AACS, how valid do you think Digg.com is? Add to that there are many that think Digg.com is easy to hack and therefore falsify it's listings (this is I believe what really happened, hackers didn't want the AACS "stuff" to be removed, it isn't that hard for hackers to get there virus "bots" to register and vote. (This is my opinion).

So what do you think?

Hacked
Not Valid
Valid
Very Valid
Can't live without it.
I don't care, where is my fish, the answer was 42

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