I think this is awesome.. people already use netbooks/laptops/e-ink books, they already use computers and internet extensively, so this is just a great extension, and as others have pointed out, in a pinch, you can print out what you need more cheaply. - add into the mix open source educational information, which must be on the horizon soon, and you get the best of everything at a much cheaper price.
I'm always surprised at how Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to actually be a decent governator who really is trying to do the right thing for as many people as possible. He's the only republican who I can point to and say "that guy is actually doing the right thing". Kudos to him.
Ths quote gets me, from the guy who made lotus notes.. the most complex shit-filled system around: "If you have something, that by its very nature is very complex, with many goals... then you need open source to have many instances of it because nobody will be able to do an independent implementation of it,"
- Have they open-sourced Lotus notes yet? No? can someone tell this guy to shut the hell up as he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about?
It's all about different platforms, and how the lowest platform kinda works on all other higher ones.
Creating (office) tools for a browser engine to be able to display means that you can use those tools on all platforms which have access to that engine. You're no longer talking about PCs here, you're talking about phones, home entertainment systems, other OSes, and probably standalone TVs, basically any platform which has a screen and an ability for user interaction.
If you create a tool which works in a browser, you open up your tool to all of these platforms, and if you create the tool to work well on the lowest platform, the user experience will always be good on any higher platform.
the tool might not be optimized for a x86 processor, but if it's optimized for an even lower platform, it should run well in a browser on a PC.
- I'm not surprised that someone at microsoft doesn't get that.
If you have low wages you don't end with the people who love to teach, you end with people who aren't qualified to teach your kids.
You end with people who looked at the curriculum available, and picked the easy ride, knowing he'll get low pay, and is fine with it as long as he can't get fired.
You end with people who just barely do what is necessary to get by and nothing else.
Firecracker people who are really interested in helping other people, who are ambitious, who are intelligent and can lead do not become teachers.
That's why you should never leave it just to schools to educate your children. You need to go over and help your children with what they're confronting everyday, school just might be screwing them over otherwise. So if you spend 2-3 hours with your children everyday, then great, if you don't... think of the children.
Yea, can't really disagree with you, although a lot of people do.
Plus, if it's nice out, and nothing bad came out of it, you at least got out of your cubicle for a while.
I don't like it when the fire alarm is tested, or accidentally goes off in my building, but there are certain procedures you do when it does go off, 2 fighter planes around a jumbo jet? sounds fishy, better be safe than sorry.
Just hope for your sake that the evacuation went well and no one panicked or got hurt.
"Imagine having access to PSN with a sub-$200 console. They would dominate by this point, if they just had their priorities straight."
- It's called Playstation 2. and you're right, it's still in a dominant position. From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2 : "The PS2 is the best-selling console to date, having reached over 136 million units sell-in as of the end of December 2008.[2]"
If it's right that the original intent of the officers was to create awareness of hazardous driving in the first place, then these people are retards who in my opinion deserve the ruin they'll put themselves into by trying to sue anything and anyone.
The officers got reprimanded, and were showing care for their own families and communities by advertising a real-life situation of middle-upper class kids doing stupid things and basically getting what they deserved.
It's tragic, but what this family is doing is even more tragic in its selfishness and stupidity.
What you're doing when you're learning is developing connections between braincells. If you are having concentration problems, that is basically your brain giving up trying to connect cells together. Switching between tasks especially when you're learning, before you've mastered what you're focusing on means you never really develop the connections you need.
As a simple test, take a 10 songs you would like to learn, 5 of them, learn by concentrating on it until you've learned it completely then go on to the next, the other 5, go from one to the other when you feel like switching.
I believe that you will grasp the first 5 a lot quicker and be better able to remember them after a week then the latter 5. It's more of a pain to learn them though, but I've recognized that "pain" as just a condition I'm in when learning something new, Just accept it as a part of how you mildly react to a situation which you enjoy doing. A side-effect of doing something worthwhile and enjoyable.
If copyright was used as originally intended, to disallow other businesses/underground operators to copy and sell an item for profit, then fine.
It's now being used to attack normal people doing normal things. Can we limit copyright so that a normal person cannot get sued for copyright violations?
The problem with "pirating" is one of business having to adapt to the times, not get a license, in the form of "copyright", from the government to attack its citizens.
Today, everyone is a potential criminal, from Prince Charles and his sons (don't u think they have Ipods?), the CEOs of the **AA and their children, and YOUR family and friends.
It's a stupid system if it is allowed to go beyond attacking the wholesale pirating of wares.
- I would like to moderate it so that no citizen can be attacked, I would also like to moderate it so that if items are unavailable from the owner of copyright, then it is entered into public domain. gladly Google is paving the way forward with the latter. No government official has seen in himself the victim of attacks yet to do the former.
"Having everything web-based is just the new way of making money from software."
- My god.. you hit the proverbial Google nail right on the head. They live and breathe on ads via a browser through internet websites.. and putting ads into other programs is looked in a negative light, so they've decided to extend what the browser is and does to maximise eyeballs.
I always thought that Google was doing this stuff For The Good, but they aren't really, they're just making sure that anything a user does will be in a browser, thus have the potential of having an adsense frame right infront of him/her.
They already have the infrastructure to let any idiot with a webpage get a bit of cash from using adsense, now they're just adding and enhancing what you can do in a browser to make sure that when you use a computer, you're seeing an adsense ad somewhere on the page.
I never really understood what drove Google toward this Browser utopia, but now I finally understand. The really great thing about this is that they're using pretty awesome philosophies as the base of this profit machine, and everything so far has been open, useful and encourage more people to join in and develop further.
The only thing I've seen where they've gone against what people want is an adblock plugin for the chrome browser. Thankfully we have Firefox for that.
- When people claim that string theory has no supporting evidence.. I'm wondering whether some classic tests which perhaps quantum scientists used to prove quantum theory lend themselves to test string theory as well?
Or is that the wrong way to think about string theory?
Why is this news? Shoes are like condoms, there for protection.. not efficiency. Experienced people who know the risks might do better without them, but that doesn't mean you won't have an accident which could have been prevented if you had had them on.
So be safe when you race, don't let it hurt when you spurt.
Yea.. the ad doesn't make much sense unless you already know that Linux is an operating system.. and it's really just hammering on the "Freedom!" meme.
It's nice, but in no way is it novel or interesting.. but then again, so is Linux.
Science is the process of taking an idea and testing whether it's verifiable. You can disapprove of the idea, but it hasn't really anything to do with science itself.
Superstring theory is an interesting idea.. and if it's correct, will probably give us a greater understanding of the universe, once we actually know how to play with it, and understand how it works.
Exactly.. and I don't understand why "having to be an admin to install" is all of a sudden a problem, it also exists for flash, if the computer is locked down so you can't install a program without admin rights, then you can't install flash without admin rights.
It's fine by me if silverlight goes down the crapper, I haven't really seen it do anything which I like, plus it has the taint of "flash is something we don't control, we have to only use software we control" which microsoft often thinks.
- but in this case, the reasons given aren't really sufficient to say why they gave up on it. I'm mostly guessing that some CEO didn't get it to work properly, and the IT tech couldn't solve it asap.
Just an afterthought, this kind of system would help people who are getting into programming and want some experience, they can look at a single part of a layered system and see if they can make it better, or develop it further. Maybe one of these days this'll happen.
Best intentions, definitely. Best skills, highly doubtful.
Thing is, no one has taken the idea of open source gaming to it's real potential, as in reducing a game engine down to its fragments so that individual people can pick at its individual pieces.
This project is still one big project, it isn't a layered combination of a multitude of programming functions/projects which in the end create a gaming engine. If it was, perhaps more people could invest time in individual parts of the engine, and also a more robust engine could be created, one which could be configured between being a simulator, RTS, FPS depending on what is needed.
A good game-engine project would also be a reserve for best-practices solutions, similar to what linux does today.
When this happens, we might see a real contender to create our own open-source games with. Until then, developers will want that paycheck.
Your ideas regarding ownership is the old way of thinking about copyright.
The new one isn't too far away really, it just makes sure that derivative works are allowed as well.
It's a strange world which is developing right now.
Before, you'd need a physical copy of an item to derive something new from it. If I wanted to create a picture of me, Stephen Colbert and Calvin, I'd have to buy the picture of stephen, buy the picture of calvin, take a picture of me, and then cut and paste the images physically together.
This derived work I could technically sell to anyone interested in buying it without worries, because I've already payed for the previous images.
With technology as it's going, there is no cost to get your videos, images, soundbites to an audience, and with technology going as it's going, there is no cost to derive work from that original work. I can go to calvinandhobbes.com, get the image there for free, go to colbertnation.com get the image for free there, take a digital image of myself, and then use paint.net or other free software to edit this and post it on flickr, and anyone checking out my flickr account can see the image there for free.
Somehow money just didn't enter into the equation at all. Isn't that strange? What kind of a world is this? Should this be allowed? (a question which I find amusing because it inherently has the response "no" even though the proper answer might be yes) should this be banned? (another amusing question, because inherently it has the response "yes" even though the proper answer might be no)
So what is this phenomenon? I've created derivative work from another work which I didn't pay for, because it's free, and I've given my derivative work away as well for free for people to enjoy.
Let's look at what is the main thing: Will the original authors lose anything? The answer to that is a: No, the images are freely available from their source, they're not losing anything.
There's a couple of what-ifs regarding this situation regarding the derivative author actually making a profit from the derivative work, but normal copyright stands up fine when that happens.
The thing is, you can either control the source where people come to find your stuff, or you can lose that control and have no idea what's going on, how the material is being used, or what its quality is. your content online is also your best advertisement to get people to buy into your profit model, whatever it may be. See: http://nrkbeta.no/norwegian-broadcasting-nrk-makes-popular-series-available-drm-free-via-bittorrent/
Yep, it's as stupid as plumbers adding a debit/credit card swipers on every toilet they set up and make you pay every time you go to the bathroom.
MP3s and youtube videos is the same as advertisements for your crap. As in it should be free, and the best advertisement in and of itself for your stuff.
"or years we (the FOSS community) have been bemoaning Windows' poor, totally broken security model. Now, when MS attempts to fix that and inevitably breaks applications that rely on the previous totally broken security model, we want to whine and moan about backwards compatibility?"
- From that comment you'd think that the linux community was a single homogenous mass all with the same ideas and perceptions of things.. which it isn't.
Some people react negatively to anything Microsoft does because they enjoy hating microsoft, doesn't really matter what MS does, they will still react negatively. Some (most?) of those people are Linux fans.
So it's not the FOSS community which is bashing MS because of this, it's either lazy windows programmers or MS bashers.
I don't think you're seeing things properly then, if that really is your recommendation.
Look at the cost over time.
It might Cost X amount of dollars to switch documents to work with OpenOffice, but after that initial cost, there's no extra licensing cost in using OO, as any documents created in OO should work properly in OO.
However, you will be paying Y per year for the next decades for using MS office.
To really see whether it's cost-efficient in changing, you have to look at these values, and not some arbitrary "Some documents aren't working, and we'd have to do work to convert them, so let's not look at it further"
There are 2 things you have to consider, cost is one of them, usability is another. Regarding usability, I'd get one of these guys who uses excel everyday with what he does, and see whether he can use OO for a week, from scratch though, don't import the older excel files, give him a week to see if he can use it from scratch, if he can, then there's no usability problems.
So you haven't done your job well, hope you still can remedy that.
Yeah, they should realize that trying to tie up the kindle specifically to the ebooks they sell is the wrong idea.
What they should do is: 1) They should strive to make the best e-book reader possible and sell it on its own merits and not expect to tie it into the ebook profits.
2) They should strive to offer the best value/volume of e-books available and make their e-book marketplace the go-to place when you want to find and buy a book.
3) They should strive to offer the best "library" of free books available to be the go-to place for free books and make that stand on its own feet (as in not tie it to the profit/losses of the other 2).
- This would mean that people who buy Kindle even though they can get their books elsewhere the mere fact that amazon delivered the kindle, they will check out amazon for book purchases.
- This would also mean that because people can go to the same place to download free books, people would be exposed to 2) I can easily imagine links from one free e-book to other books both free and buyable of similar value (or links to the dvds or hardcover books as presents, or whatever else).
It's easy to do this so that amazon gains immensely and doesn't suffer from the "I'm doing evil for profit", but that means that they have to un-bundle the package, and make the individual elements stand on their own and succeed on their own.
They have to view the kindle similar to what electric companies do, they provide a basic service from which new opportunities can be built upon.
they have to view the e-book as a container for free stuff as well as purchasable stuff, be the best place to go for both free and buyable and you get more people interested in and buying books because you're exposing the people who are only interested in the free stuff to new buyable stuff, and vice versa, making sure that you're a relevant place to do business whether the e-book is free or buyable.
That's why it's important that all 3 targets can support themselves, because if they can't, you get a bundle-idealogy, and that just pisses off too many people to be worth it.
"To be honest, I'm suprised that you're suprised that people who study chimps are suprised by this."(sic)
- How surprising. Does that mean I'm surprised at people being surprised that people are surprised at people who are surprised that experts are surprised by monkeys behavior?
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is awesome.. people already use netbooks/laptops/e-ink books, they already use computers and internet extensively, so this is just a great extension, and as others have pointed out, in a pinch, you can print out what you need more cheaply.
- add into the mix open source educational information, which must be on the horizon soon, and you get the best of everything at a much cheaper price.
I'm always surprised at how Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to actually be a decent governator who really is trying to do the right thing for as many people as possible. He's the only republican who I can point to and say "that guy is actually doing the right thing". Kudos to him.
Ths quote gets me, from the guy who made lotus notes.. the most complex shit-filled system around: "If you have something, that by its very nature is very complex, with many goals... then you need open source to have many instances of it because nobody will be able to do an independent implementation of it,"
- Have they open-sourced Lotus notes yet? No? can someone tell this guy to shut the hell up as he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about?
It's all about different platforms, and how the lowest platform kinda works on all other higher ones.
Creating (office) tools for a browser engine to be able to display means that you can use those tools on all platforms which have access to that engine. You're no longer talking about PCs here, you're talking about phones, home entertainment systems, other OSes, and probably standalone TVs, basically any platform which has a screen and an ability for user interaction.
If you create a tool which works in a browser, you open up your tool to all of these platforms, and if you create the tool to work well on the lowest platform, the user experience will always be good on any higher platform.
the tool might not be optimized for a x86 processor, but if it's optimized for an even lower platform, it should run well in a browser on a PC.
- I'm not surprised that someone at microsoft doesn't get that.
If you have low wages you don't end with the people who love to teach, you end with people who aren't qualified to teach your kids.
You end with people who looked at the curriculum available, and picked the easy ride, knowing he'll get low pay, and is fine with it as long as he can't get fired.
You end with people who just barely do what is necessary to get by and nothing else.
Firecracker people who are really interested in helping other people, who are ambitious, who are intelligent and can lead do not become teachers.
That's why you should never leave it just to schools to educate your children. You need to go over and help your children with what they're confronting everyday, school just might be screwing them over otherwise. So if you spend 2-3 hours with your children everyday, then great, if you don't... think of the children.
Yea, can't really disagree with you, although a lot of people do.
Plus, if it's nice out, and nothing bad came out of it, you at least got out of your cubicle for a while.
I don't like it when the fire alarm is tested, or accidentally goes off in my building, but there are certain procedures you do when it does go off, 2 fighter planes around a jumbo jet? sounds fishy, better be safe than sorry.
Just hope for your sake that the evacuation went well and no one panicked or got hurt.
..Are of muhc les quality..
If you dnot pay anyhting you won get any quality assrance..
Serisly, teh typos in that link are bad.. vrey bad!
"Imagine having access to PSN with a sub-$200 console. They would dominate by this point, if they just had their priorities straight."
- It's called Playstation 2. and you're right, it's still in a dominant position. From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2 : "The PS2 is the best-selling console to date, having reached over 136 million units sell-in as of the end of December 2008.[2]"
If it's right that the original intent of the officers was to create awareness of hazardous driving in the first place, then these people are retards who in my opinion deserve the ruin they'll put themselves into by trying to sue anything and anyone.
The officers got reprimanded, and were showing care for their own families and communities by advertising a real-life situation of middle-upper class kids doing stupid things and basically getting what they deserved.
It's tragic, but what this family is doing is even more tragic in its selfishness and stupidity.
Probably about the same as a normal person.
What you're doing when you're learning is developing connections between braincells. If you are having concentration problems, that is basically your brain giving up trying to connect cells together. Switching between tasks especially when you're learning, before you've mastered what you're focusing on means you never really develop the connections you need.
As a simple test, take a 10 songs you would like to learn, 5 of them, learn by concentrating on it until you've learned it completely then go on to the next, the other 5, go from one to the other when you feel like switching.
I believe that you will grasp the first 5 a lot quicker and be better able to remember them after a week then the latter 5. It's more of a pain to learn them though, but I've recognized that "pain" as just a condition I'm in when learning something new, Just accept it as a part of how you mildly react to a situation which you enjoy doing. A side-effect of doing something worthwhile and enjoyable.
50+ years? Really?
If copyright was used as originally intended, to disallow other businesses/underground operators to copy and sell an item for profit, then fine.
It's now being used to attack normal people doing normal things. Can we limit copyright so that a normal person cannot get sued for copyright violations?
The problem with "pirating" is one of business having to adapt to the times, not get a license, in the form of "copyright", from the government to attack its citizens.
Today, everyone is a potential criminal, from Prince Charles and his sons (don't u think they have Ipods?), the CEOs of the **AA and their children, and YOUR family and friends.
It's a stupid system if it is allowed to go beyond attacking the wholesale pirating of wares.
- I would like to moderate it so that no citizen can be attacked, I would also like to moderate it so that if items are unavailable from the owner of copyright, then it is entered into public domain. gladly Google is paving the way forward with the latter. No government official has seen in himself the victim of attacks yet to do the former.
"Having everything web-based is just the new way of making money from software."
- My god.. you hit the proverbial Google nail right on the head. They live and breathe on ads via a browser through internet websites.. and putting ads into other programs is looked in a negative light, so they've decided to extend what the browser is and does to maximise eyeballs.
I always thought that Google was doing this stuff For The Good, but they aren't really, they're just making sure that anything a user does will be in a browser, thus have the potential of having an adsense frame right infront of him/her.
They already have the infrastructure to let any idiot with a webpage get a bit of cash from using adsense, now they're just adding and enhancing what you can do in a browser to make sure that when you use a computer, you're seeing an adsense ad somewhere on the page.
I never really understood what drove Google toward this Browser utopia, but now I finally understand. The really great thing about this is that they're using pretty awesome philosophies as the base of this profit machine, and everything so far has been open, useful and encourage more people to join in and develop further.
The only thing I've seen where they've gone against what people want is an adblock plugin for the chrome browser. Thankfully we have Firefox for that.
That's something I've been wondering about.
- When people claim that string theory has no supporting evidence.. I'm wondering whether some classic tests which perhaps quantum scientists used to prove quantum theory lend themselves to test string theory as well?
Or is that the wrong way to think about string theory?
Why is this news? Shoes are like condoms, there for protection.. not efficiency. Experienced people who know the risks might do better without them, but that doesn't mean you won't have an accident which could have been prevented if you had had them on.
So be safe when you race, don't let it hurt when you spurt.
Yea.. the ad doesn't make much sense unless you already know that Linux is an operating system.. and it's really just hammering on the "Freedom!" meme.
It's nice, but in no way is it novel or interesting.. but then again, so is Linux.
Well, you're not quite doing it right then.
Science is the process of taking an idea and testing whether it's verifiable. You can disapprove of the idea, but it hasn't really anything to do with science itself.
Superstring theory is an interesting idea.. and if it's correct, will probably give us a greater understanding of the universe, once we actually know how to play with it, and understand how it works.
Exactly.. and I don't understand why "having to be an admin to install" is all of a sudden a problem, it also exists for flash, if the computer is locked down so you can't install a program without admin rights, then you can't install flash without admin rights.
It's fine by me if silverlight goes down the crapper, I haven't really seen it do anything which I like, plus it has the taint of "flash is something we don't control, we have to only use software we control" which microsoft often thinks.
- but in this case, the reasons given aren't really sufficient to say why they gave up on it. I'm mostly guessing that some CEO didn't get it to work properly, and the IT tech couldn't solve it asap.
Hi there, I'm from Iceland. Itunes doesn't work over here. Yarr!
Just an afterthought, this kind of system would help people who are getting into programming and want some experience, they can look at a single part of a layered system and see if they can make it better, or develop it further. Maybe one of these days this'll happen.
Well, no.
Best intentions, definitely. Best skills, highly doubtful.
Thing is, no one has taken the idea of open source gaming to it's real potential, as in reducing a game engine down to its fragments so that individual people can pick at its individual pieces.
This project is still one big project, it isn't a layered combination of a multitude of programming functions/projects which in the end create a gaming engine. If it was, perhaps more people could invest time in individual parts of the engine, and also a more robust engine could be created, one which could be configured between being a simulator, RTS, FPS depending on what is needed.
A good game-engine project would also be a reserve for best-practices solutions, similar to what linux does today.
When this happens, we might see a real contender to create our own open-source games with. Until then, developers will want that paycheck.
Your ideas regarding ownership is the old way of thinking about copyright.
The new one isn't too far away really, it just makes sure that derivative works are allowed as well.
It's a strange world which is developing right now.
Before, you'd need a physical copy of an item to derive something new from it. If I wanted to create a picture of me, Stephen Colbert and Calvin, I'd have to buy the picture of stephen, buy the picture of calvin, take a picture of me, and then cut and paste the images physically together.
This derived work I could technically sell to anyone interested in buying it without worries, because I've already payed for the previous images.
With technology as it's going, there is no cost to get your videos, images, soundbites to an audience, and with technology going as it's going, there is no cost to derive work from that original work. I can go to calvinandhobbes.com, get the image there for free, go to colbertnation.com get the image for free there, take a digital image of myself, and then use paint.net or other free software to edit this and post it on flickr, and anyone checking out my flickr account can see the image there for free.
Somehow money just didn't enter into the equation at all. Isn't that strange? What kind of a world is this? Should this be allowed? (a question which I find amusing because it inherently has the response "no" even though the proper answer might be yes) should this be banned? (another amusing question, because inherently it has the response "yes" even though the proper answer might be no)
So what is this phenomenon? I've created derivative work from another work which I didn't pay for, because it's free, and I've given my derivative work away as well for free for people to enjoy.
Let's look at what is the main thing: Will the original authors lose anything? The answer to that is a: No, the images are freely available from their source, they're not losing anything.
There's a couple of what-ifs regarding this situation regarding the derivative author actually making a profit from the derivative work, but normal copyright stands up fine when that happens.
The thing is, you can either control the source where people come to find your stuff, or you can lose that control and have no idea what's going on, how the material is being used, or what its quality is. your content online is also your best advertisement to get people to buy into your profit model, whatever it may be. See: http://nrkbeta.no/norwegian-broadcasting-nrk-makes-popular-series-available-drm-free-via-bittorrent/
Yep, it's as stupid as plumbers adding a debit/credit card swipers on every toilet they set up and make you pay every time you go to the bathroom.
MP3s and youtube videos is the same as advertisements for your crap. As in it should be free, and the best advertisement in and of itself for your stuff.
It's a shame things are as they are.
"or years we (the FOSS community) have been bemoaning Windows' poor, totally broken security model. Now, when MS attempts to fix that and inevitably breaks applications that rely on the previous totally broken security model, we want to whine and moan about backwards compatibility?"
- From that comment you'd think that the linux community was a single homogenous mass all with the same ideas and perceptions of things.. which it isn't.
Some people react negatively to anything Microsoft does because they enjoy hating microsoft, doesn't really matter what MS does, they will still react negatively. Some (most?) of those people are Linux fans.
So it's not the FOSS community which is bashing MS because of this, it's either lazy windows programmers or MS bashers.
I don't think you're seeing things properly then, if that really is your recommendation.
Look at the cost over time.
It might Cost X amount of dollars to switch documents to work with OpenOffice, but after that initial cost, there's no extra licensing cost in using OO, as any documents created in OO should work properly in OO.
However, you will be paying Y per year for the next decades for using MS office.
To really see whether it's cost-efficient in changing, you have to look at these values, and not some arbitrary "Some documents aren't working, and we'd have to do work to convert them, so let's not look at it further"
There are 2 things you have to consider, cost is one of them, usability is another. Regarding usability, I'd get one of these guys who uses excel everyday with what he does, and see whether he can use OO for a week, from scratch though, don't import the older excel files, give him a week to see if he can use it from scratch, if he can, then there's no usability problems.
So you haven't done your job well, hope you still can remedy that.
Yeah, they should realize that trying to tie up the kindle specifically to the ebooks they sell is the wrong idea.
What they should do is:
1) They should strive to make the best e-book reader possible and sell it on its own merits and not expect to tie it into the ebook profits.
2) They should strive to offer the best value/volume of e-books available and make their e-book marketplace the go-to place when you want to find and buy a book.
3) They should strive to offer the best "library" of free books available to be the go-to place for free books and make that stand on its own feet (as in not tie it to the profit/losses of the other 2).
- This would mean that people who buy Kindle even though they can get their books elsewhere the mere fact that amazon delivered the kindle, they will check out amazon for book purchases.
- This would also mean that because people can go to the same place to download free books, people would be exposed to 2) I can easily imagine links from one free e-book to other books both free and buyable of similar value (or links to the dvds or hardcover books as presents, or whatever else).
It's easy to do this so that amazon gains immensely and doesn't suffer from the "I'm doing evil for profit", but that means that they have to un-bundle the package, and make the individual elements stand on their own and succeed on their own.
They have to view the kindle similar to what electric companies do, they provide a basic service from which new opportunities can be built upon.
they have to view the e-book as a container for free stuff as well as purchasable stuff, be the best place to go for both free and buyable and you get more people interested in and buying books because you're exposing the people who are only interested in the free stuff to new buyable stuff, and vice versa, making sure that you're a relevant place to do business whether the e-book is free or buyable.
That's why it's important that all 3 targets can support themselves, because if they can't, you get a bundle-idealogy, and that just pisses off too many people to be worth it.
"To be honest, I'm suprised that you're suprised that people who study chimps are suprised by this."(sic)
- How surprising. Does that mean I'm surprised at people being surprised that people are surprised at people who are surprised that experts are surprised by monkeys behavior?
I surprise myself sometimes.