Colbert is one of the very few people in the news business who have made a point of promoting NASA and space in general. Given how few friends NASA has outside the geek community, I say NASA should give Colbert what he wants and reap the rewards of the kind of good publicity one simply cannot buy.
Google should simply not link to Guardian content in any way, shape, or form. Any attempt to access Guardian content on purpose via Google (e.g. site:guardian.co.uk any-search-term) should be diverted to a copy of the Guardian's legal complaint.
While this would effectively make the Guardian publications disappear from the Internet, that seems to be what the Guardian is asking for. So let them have it.
with whatever drivers are needed to support the specific hardware.
Install fbreader via repository to read conventional non-DRM-broken ebooks in things like mobi format. I read the non-DRM stuff I buy from Baen Books from it and it works very, very well.
A pdf reader should be installed by default, install Acroread if you really like it. You can read text content with a text editor like gedit or kwrite depending on your window manager.
To read DRM-broken content, get Mobipocket for Windows or break the DRM and read it on fbreader. The bad news for those who get the Mobipocket Reader software is that it works on Crossover Office... but not terribly well. (IIRC, it crashes and freezes a lot). If you actually get Virtualbox and run XP on it, this should work... but you'll have one really busy CPU, I chose not to try installing it on a 900 MHz netbook.
Do this and you have a convenient sized lightweight Linux PC that also can do anything else you can do with Linux and download/install any of tens of thousands of Open Source programs automatically. AND play multimedia video and music files.
Downside... you have to be within reach of an access point or have a broadband USB dongle and an account on somebody's data network for most-of-the-time access to get more books. So get enough books and tech literature and music and video loaded so you are generally in no particular rush to get any specific book.
Buy a Kindle and you've got something that makes profit for Amazon... and does nothing but read books in.azw format. (the conversion to azw takes place as an Amazon service they can dump any time)
Did you think boing-boing appeared from nowhere? Or slashdot? The reasons why either site can be used as a commercial promotion tool is because handfuls of people built each site, and people came. In boing-boing's case, Cory was one of the handful.
You think slashdot useless? Why are you here?
Perhaps if you had anything worthwhile to say, you might be able to build a site around your own content with enough traffic to build a marketable community around. I expect hell to freeze over first.
The only real fail in that article is that Doctorow didn't project the impact of low-cost high-quality e-book readers on what he personally does for a living. I expect to see print books as a mass medium a decade from now just as much as I expect the horse and buggy to replace the auto for long-distance commuting.
against a brick wall and predicting it'll splatter after it leaves your hand.
Doctorow is hardly the first person to notice that the traditional content business models are breaking down. The difference between him and a newspaper CFO who's finding this out from the numbers in an Excel spreadsheet showing P&L is that Doctorow believes he's come up with a business model that works for him as a content provider and that CFO has a sinking feeling.
The difference between you and either Doctorow or a newspaper CFO? You haven't the remotest clue about how content providers make or lose money.
. Before that, the inks were just a plastic box with a sponge, they had a separate tank for each color, and the inks and print heads were separately removable.
That's a pretty good description of what I like about my PIXMA IP3000. I think what you're talking about started the model year after the x000 seriies.
is probably Canon corporate policy, not a fake blog.
My experience with Canon printers has been good. They are very well constructed, using actual metal parts where it makes sense, they aren't the typical plastic shells surrounding mostly air one sees in the great majority of consumer printers.
I will not buy a new Canon printer.
Canon's PIXMA IP3000/4000/5000/6000 printers had the easiest to refill cartridges around. I've got an IP3000, which I bought for $60 with a $20 rebate when new. (and yes, Canon did actually send me the rebate money) Well, it's aging and developing enough signs of wear that I'm thinking of replacing it.
There are a few IP3000s left that were never sold in sealed retail boxes. The price at Amazon starts at $209. The cheapest used IP3000 available at Amazon starts at $110. People in the know would rather chance a used printer than buy a new Canon printer.
How often do you see computer peripherals go up in price years after they are manufactured to the point where they are far more expensive than comparable new ones? The demand for the old ones comes down to drastically reduced cost of ownership. I've been printing for the last year on $30 worth of high-quality fourmilabs bulk ink, and my printed photos have never looked better.
If Canon were to make a new line of printers with chipless cartridges, I'd be happy to pay $100+ for one. If they made one that could be used directly with bulk ink, I'd be delighted to pay $150.
This person older than 50 is waiting for informit to publish my article on installing and customizing Ubuntu for the Eee PC to replace the dumbed down POS "easy to use" netbook UI based on Xandros. I'm also checking my e-mail client on my desktop using nx remote control software. I make my living these days selling Linux how-to articles, and I'm hardly the only one in my age bracket writing this sort of thing.
Just because your grandparents aren't good with computers doesn't mean that everyone in that demographic is also clueless with computers.
You're a kubuntu user? You should be able to find an unofficial Ubuntu repository with KDE3.5.10 in it that'll keep your machine usable until KDE4.x is fixed. (hopefully, by 4.3) I think last time around, I set up a ubuntu machine and simply replaced gnome with KDE 3.5.10 .
(4.1, I think) I'll just say that smoke was coming from my ears afterwards. I'll look at 4.2 or later on something installed in virtualbox.
I didn't know Fedora had done that, too. Fedora, OpenSuse, and Ubuntu are the ones that I know of. For Debian, v4.1 is still in experimental (where it can stay forever, I'd like to see them start working on 4.2 instead... or maybe wait for 4.3) testing and unstable still use 3.5.10. There are times when a slower release cycle is an advantage. I'd rather watch a trainwreck as a spectator. I guess Linus feels the same way, though I'm surprised he didn't simply stay with KDE3.5.10. If one's regular repository no longer supports it, look for a non-official repository that's got it for your current distro version and add it to sources.list by whatever method amuses you, and lock out KDE upgrades from the regular repositories.
Though Gnome is improving, I've got it on Ubuntu in my netbook and a lot of the irritations I remember from the past just don't exist anymore and there are very nice new apps. But a netbook is used for a sufficiently different purpose than a desktop that what's cool and fun on the netbook would be a gigantic PITA for one's main machine.
I was always hoping GEOS would become a competitive mass-market OS for larger machines. Seeing a full Mac-style GUI on a C-64 that actually worked (in lower res) was one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen on a computer. Not that this did me a lot of good, since I already had a Mac by then and I was having to run ECAD apps on it, something I doubt anyone ever tried with a Commie64.
Do please tell them what you just told us. Yes, MS should stand up to the Federal Government in favor of the free market. Let them threaten to take their ball and move it to India! Let the Feds know who's boss!
DISCLAIMER: I write Linux how-to material for publication.
especially after MS suddenly finds itself hit with tariffs and a bunch of MS-specific measures designed specifically to make life miserable for the company. MS is expected to buy Senators, not get into pissing contests with them as their sudden decision to not build a data center which would provide jobs for some of Senator Grassley's constituents because they don't like the questions the Senator is asking indicates they're behaving with their usual arrogance. Which is costing them serious money in the EU and has cost them significant money with respect to their attempt to foist Vista on a world that plainly does not want it.
is having a functioning system with good uptime worth? The bigger the site, the more downtime per-minute costs. The savings on labor costs based on somebody doing a TCO number based on admin salaries + license costs can be wiped out very, very quickly when a Windows glitch or an upgrade takes the system down for a few days. Of course, if the downtime is long enough, the business itself gets wiped out.
one trusts the distro developers to have come up with an OS bundle that's ready for prime-time. If one does not have that level of trust with those developers, one should be running some other distro. Ubuntu's and OpenSUSE dev teams has proven themselves to be extremely competent in the past. Their mistake this time was to assume that KDE's people knew what they were doing and that dot-zero means "release" . . . unfortunately, in the case, dot-zero meant "it escaped". So KDE users used the 'download with KDE' option as one would expect them to based on trust of the Ubuntu/OpenSUSE developers and the KDE development team. Oops. ..
When I downloaded Ubuntu for my netbook, luckily, I knew better than to try KDE4.1. And it (after some hacking) works just fine. With Gnome, despite my current good experiences with KDE 3.5.10
never got told that the 4-dot-zero release was an alpha. Clearly communicated to "the world"? Uh, just who ordinarily reads the KDE website regularly other than professional KDE developers? An announcement on the KDE website =! telling "world + dog".
Given that everyone knows that dot-zero generally means that somebody thinks (often incorrectly) that it's a release version, I'm not surprised nobody checked. A mistake I doubt anyone will ever make again with KDE where somebody primary to the project isn't quite up to the point of understanding modern software version numbering. Perhaps Bill Gates could be persuaded to explain this to whoever screwed this up, using short words and simple sentences.
So users got a big, ugly surprise when the OS many of ours depend on for the software we make a living with turned out to be a badly broken alpha.
The best I can say about 4.1 is that it works somewhat better than 4.0 did. My main desktop machine runs on Debian/KDE3.5.10, my Asus Eee PC 900 runs on Ubuntu Intrepid + Gnome... at this point. I'd love to see a 4.2 with functionality equivalent to 3.5.10. But I won't be installing it on my primary computers to test it, testing OSs-window manager combinations whose stability and reliability and functionality one does not trust is what Virtualbox is for. I suspect I'll be happy with KDE4.5... but I'm not holding my breath.
That said, the KDE 4.x desktop is IMO, a beautiful thing. I'd settle for not so pretty IF THE DAMNED THING WORKED!
on the Net in the early 90s. Moderated tech forums are generally civilized whether they're Usenet *.moderated groups in 1992 or webforums now. While I was on some of those, I spent most of my time on alt.tasteless... not exactly a civilized sort of place. Fun, though.
I care most about "just works". I write for money these days, and if my computer doesn't work, neither do I.
My main computer runs Debian, my netbook runs Ubuntu.
Perhaps because we can't get a driver that works either via distro or via binary from the nvidia website? I've been using VESA for the last year because after 169.* or so, they simply failed.
From what I saw at the company website, it looks like they're building the orbital equivalent of the first commercial airliner, the DC-3.
If they can get the cost to orbit even remotely close to the $200/kg number the Space Power Satellite program proposed by NASA was based on, we could either build a full system or a large proof of concept orbital power array. We're a bit more desperate for power than we were when Bush defunded the SPS project. The launch capability is the hard part of SPS, the rest is just engineering we know how to do.
That could take up enough launches to provide the company a reasonable chance at profit.
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Like fiberglass and xerox, the word is in common usage and I expect the trademark to be invalidated the first time Psion runs into a company or individual ready to fight.
A trademark has to be defended when it is first "misused", not years after the fact after it has been found to be worth megabucks. That trademark was registered in 1996, and that is when they should have started defending it. And that's what I expect a court to tell Psion.
Slashdot Mirror
Colbert is one of the very few people in the news business who have made a point of promoting NASA and space in general. Given how few friends NASA has outside the geek community, I say NASA should give Colbert what he wants and reap the rewards of the kind of good publicity one simply cannot buy.
Google should simply not link to Guardian content in any way, shape, or form. Any attempt to access Guardian content on purpose via Google (e.g. site:guardian.co.uk any-search-term) should be diverted to a copy of the Guardian's legal complaint.
While this would effectively make the Guardian publications disappear from the Internet, that seems to be what the Guardian is asking for. So let them have it.
with whatever drivers are needed to support the specific hardware.
... but not terribly well. (IIRC, it crashes and freezes a lot). If you actually get Virtualbox and run XP on it, this should work... but you'll have one really busy CPU, I chose not to try installing it on a 900 MHz netbook.
.azw format. (the conversion to azw takes place as an Amazon service they can dump any time)
Install fbreader via repository to read conventional non-DRM-broken ebooks in things like mobi format. I read the non-DRM stuff I buy from Baen Books from it and it works very, very well.
A pdf reader should be installed by default, install Acroread if you really like it. You can read text content with a text editor like gedit or kwrite depending on your window manager.
To read DRM-broken content, get Mobipocket for Windows or break the DRM and read it on fbreader. The bad news for those who get the Mobipocket Reader software is that it works on Crossover Office
Do this and you have a convenient sized lightweight Linux PC that also can do anything else you can do with Linux and download/install any of tens of thousands of Open Source programs automatically. AND play multimedia video and music files.
Downside... you have to be within reach of an access point or have a broadband USB dongle and an account on somebody's data network for most-of-the-time access to get more books. So get enough books and tech literature and music and video loaded so you are generally in no particular rush to get any specific book.
Buy a Kindle and you've got something that makes profit for Amazon... and does nothing but read books in
Did you think boing-boing appeared from nowhere? Or slashdot? The reasons why either site can be used as a commercial promotion tool is because handfuls of people built each site, and people came. In boing-boing's case, Cory was one of the handful.
You think slashdot useless? Why are you here?
Perhaps if you had anything worthwhile to say, you might be able to build a site around your own content with enough traffic to build a marketable community around. I expect hell to freeze over first.
The only real fail in that article is that Doctorow didn't project the impact of low-cost high-quality e-book readers on what he personally does for a living. I expect to see print books as a mass medium a decade from now just as much as I expect the horse and buggy to replace the auto for long-distance commuting.
against a brick wall and predicting it'll splatter after it leaves your hand.
Doctorow is hardly the first person to notice that the traditional content business models are breaking down. The difference between him and a newspaper CFO who's finding this out from the numbers in an Excel spreadsheet showing P&L is that Doctorow believes he's come up with a business model that works for him as a content provider and that CFO has a sinking feeling.
The difference between you and either Doctorow or a newspaper CFO? You haven't the remotest clue about how content providers make or lose money.
That's a pretty good description of what I like about my PIXMA IP3000. I think what you're talking about started the model year after the x000 seriies.
is probably Canon corporate policy, not a fake blog.
My experience with Canon printers has been good. They are very well constructed, using actual metal parts where it makes sense, they aren't the typical plastic shells surrounding mostly air one sees in the great majority of consumer printers.
I will not buy a new Canon printer.
Canon's PIXMA IP3000/4000/5000/6000 printers had the easiest to refill cartridges around. I've got an IP3000, which I bought for $60 with a $20 rebate when new. (and yes, Canon did actually send me the rebate money) Well, it's aging and developing enough signs of wear that I'm thinking of replacing it.
There are a few IP3000s left that were never sold in sealed retail boxes. The price at Amazon starts at $209. The cheapest used IP3000 available at Amazon starts at $110. People in the know would rather chance a used printer than buy a new Canon printer.
How often do you see computer peripherals go up in price years after they are manufactured to the point where they are far more expensive than comparable new ones? The demand for the old ones comes down to drastically reduced cost of ownership. I've been printing for the last year on $30 worth of high-quality fourmilabs bulk ink, and my printed photos have never looked better.
If Canon were to make a new line of printers with chipless cartridges, I'd be happy to pay $100+ for one. If they made one that could be used directly with bulk ink, I'd be delighted to pay $150.
How nice of you to point that out.
This person older than 50 is waiting for informit to publish my article on installing and customizing Ubuntu for the Eee PC to replace the dumbed down POS "easy to use" netbook UI based on Xandros. I'm also checking my e-mail client on my desktop using nx remote control software. I make my living these days selling Linux how-to articles, and I'm hardly the only one in my age bracket writing this sort of thing.
Just because your grandparents aren't good with computers doesn't mean that everyone in that demographic is also clueless with computers.
remove kde 4.x and install 3.5.10 in its place. But back up your system first.
You're a kubuntu user? You should be able to find an unofficial Ubuntu repository with KDE3.5.10 in it that'll keep your machine usable until KDE4.x is fixed. (hopefully, by 4.3) I think last time around, I set up a ubuntu machine and simply replaced gnome with KDE 3.5.10 .
(4.1, I think) I'll just say that smoke was coming from my ears afterwards. I'll look at 4.2 or later on something installed in virtualbox.
I didn't know Fedora had done that, too. Fedora, OpenSuse, and Ubuntu are the ones that I know of. For Debian, v4.1 is still in experimental (where it can stay forever, I'd like to see them start working on 4.2 instead... or maybe wait for 4.3) testing and unstable still use 3.5.10. There are times when a slower release cycle is an advantage. I'd rather watch a trainwreck as a spectator. I guess Linus feels the same way, though I'm surprised he didn't simply stay with KDE3.5.10. If one's regular repository no longer supports it, look for a non-official repository that's got it for your current distro version and add it to sources.list by whatever method amuses you, and lock out KDE upgrades from the regular repositories.
Though Gnome is improving, I've got it on Ubuntu in my netbook and a lot of the irritations I remember from the past just don't exist anymore and there are very nice new apps. But a netbook is used for a sufficiently different purpose than a desktop that what's cool and fun on the netbook would be a gigantic PITA for one's main machine.
I was always hoping GEOS would become a competitive mass-market OS for larger machines. Seeing a full Mac-style GUI on a C-64 that actually worked (in lower res) was one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen on a computer. Not that this did me a lot of good, since I already had a Mac by then and I was having to run ECAD apps on it, something I doubt anyone ever tried with a Commie64.
Do please tell them what you just told us. Yes, MS should stand up to the Federal Government in favor of the free market. Let them threaten to take their ball and move it to India! Let the Feds know who's boss!
DISCLAIMER: I write Linux how-to material for publication.
especially after MS suddenly finds itself hit with tariffs and a bunch of MS-specific measures designed specifically to make life miserable for the company. MS is expected to buy Senators, not get into pissing contests with them as their sudden decision to not build a data center which would provide jobs for some of Senator Grassley's constituents because they don't like the questions the Senator is asking indicates they're behaving with their usual arrogance. Which is costing them serious money in the EU and has cost them significant money with respect to their attempt to foist Vista on a world that plainly does not want it.
if your distro repositories only support KDE 4.x and you'd rather stay with 3.5.10 for the sake of your sanity.
is having a functioning system with good uptime worth? The bigger the site, the more downtime per-minute costs. The savings on labor costs based on somebody doing a TCO number based on admin salaries + license costs can be wiped out very, very quickly when a Windows glitch or an upgrade takes the system down for a few days. Of course, if the downtime is long enough, the business itself gets wiped out.
one trusts the distro developers to have come up with an OS bundle that's ready for prime-time. If one does not have that level of trust with those developers, one should be running some other distro. Ubuntu's and OpenSUSE dev teams has proven themselves to be extremely competent in the past. Their mistake this time was to assume that KDE's people knew what they were doing and that dot-zero means "release" . . . unfortunately, in the case, dot-zero meant "it escaped". So KDE users used the 'download with KDE' option as one would expect them to based on trust of the Ubuntu/OpenSUSE developers and the KDE development team. Oops. . .
When I downloaded Ubuntu for my netbook, luckily, I knew better than to try KDE4.1. And it (after some hacking) works just fine. With Gnome, despite my current good experiences with KDE 3.5.10
never got told that the 4-dot-zero release was an alpha. Clearly communicated to "the world"? Uh, just who ordinarily reads the KDE website regularly other than professional KDE developers? An announcement on the KDE website =! telling "world + dog".
... but I'm not holding my breath.
Given that everyone knows that dot-zero generally means that somebody thinks (often incorrectly) that it's a release version, I'm not surprised nobody checked. A mistake I doubt anyone will ever make again with KDE where somebody primary to the project isn't quite up to the point of understanding modern software version numbering. Perhaps Bill Gates could be persuaded to explain this to whoever screwed this up, using short words and simple sentences.
So users got a big, ugly surprise when the OS many of ours depend on for the software we make a living with turned out to be a badly broken alpha.
The best I can say about 4.1 is that it works somewhat better than 4.0 did. My main desktop machine runs on Debian/KDE3.5.10, my Asus Eee PC 900 runs on Ubuntu Intrepid + Gnome... at this point. I'd love to see a 4.2 with functionality equivalent to 3.5.10. But I won't be installing it on my primary computers to test it, testing OSs-window manager combinations whose stability and reliability and functionality one does not trust is what Virtualbox is for. I suspect I'll be happy with KDE4.5
That said, the KDE 4.x desktop is IMO, a beautiful thing. I'd settle for not so pretty IF THE DAMNED THING WORKED!
on the Net in the early 90s. Moderated tech forums are generally civilized whether they're Usenet *.moderated groups in 1992 or webforums now. While I was on some of those, I spent most of my time on alt.tasteless ... not exactly a civilized sort of place. Fun, though.
I care most about "just works". I write for money these days, and if my computer doesn't work, neither do I.
My main computer runs Debian, my netbook runs Ubuntu.
I take it you haven't been around long enough to remember Usenet.
Linux netbooks are selling by the millions.
Perhaps because we can't get a driver that works either via distro or via binary from the nvidia website? I've been using VESA for the last year because after 169.* or so, they simply failed.
From what I saw at the company website, it looks like they're building the orbital equivalent of the first commercial airliner, the DC-3.
If they can get the cost to orbit even remotely close to the $200/kg number the Space Power Satellite program proposed by NASA was based on, we could either build a full system or a large proof of concept orbital power array. We're a bit more desperate for power than we were when Bush defunded the SPS project. The launch capability is the hard part of SPS, the rest is just engineering we know how to do.
That could take up enough launches to provide the company a reasonable chance at profit.
Like fiberglass and xerox, the word is in common usage and I expect the trademark to be invalidated the first time Psion runs into a company or individual ready to fight.
A trademark has to be defended when it is first "misused", not years after the fact after it has been found to be worth megabucks. That trademark was registered in 1996, and that is when they should have started defending it. And that's what I expect a court to tell Psion.