Reading on the Sony Reader is faster with greater comprehension possible than for the same text with the same person on an ipod touch / pda screen
Even if the study were showing that, you may notice that the highest comprehension was achieved at the lowest reading speed, so the different conditions simply resulted in different speed/comprehension tradeoffs. By your reasoning, if you want to understand what you're reading, you should actually be using the slower device.
Of course, that presumes that the study itself is actually meaningful and relevant, but the experiments reported in that study are so incompetently done that you, in fact, can't infer anything from them.
Well, Microsoft has hired some open source developers, like the guy who did IronPython. The result? Microsoft actually has been releasing open source software under OSI-approved licenses. IronPython even ships with Debian.
If that's the result of hiring a few open source developers, imagine how much Microsoft would change if they hired hundreds of open source developers, people that would seriously shake up their culture.
I think there is a culture war going on inside Microsoft. There are a whole bunch of complacent, rich, and incompetent old Microsoft hacks. The more open source developers Microsoft hires, the more those people are going to lose power, and the more Microsoft's open source efforts are going to become genuine.
It's not the legality that Comcast takes issue with, it's the use of bandwidth. You're not supposed to actually use the bandwidth you buy, you see.
Yes, indeed, you are not. It says so right in Comcast's terms of service.
Effectively, the "bandwidth you buy" with your home subscription is burst bandwidth. If you want the ability to have high sustained bandwidth, buy one of the business subscriptions.
Yes, the legal rights to the software will remain available to the community thanks to the GPL; but Microsoft is also buying up developer talent.
No, they aren't really. They are giving the developers lots of money and Microsoft simply won't be an interesting place for them to stay. So, they will be leaving Microsoft after the purchase. Non-competes are hard to enforce, both because courts don't like them and because it's difficult to see how an independently wealthy developer working on this own time would be "competing" with Microsoft.
Microsoft could easily buy the two largest open-source companies on the planet without denting their reserves.
So? Do you think that makes any difference? The developers are just going to take the money, say "thank you", and go on founding another open source company.
that's how #1 companies remain #1.
That's how #1 companies remained #1 companies in the 1980's. The rules have changed.
This is great news. Microsoft will give hundreds of millions of dollars to the founders of open source companies, and the software itself will remain open source. This kind of monetary reward can only encourage the development of more open source software. Thank You Microsoft!
* enable desktop sharing on your Gnome desktop, run the desktop on the console, and connect with a VNC viewer
* run a VNC server (tightvncserver) on the machine and connect with a VNC viewer (put your startup information into ~/.vnc/xstartup); you get to choose size and depth of the desktop, and you can even do this on headless machines
* run xmove (tricky to configure)
The first choice is the consumer-friendly one and trivial to do (it's basically the same as desktop sharing on the Mac, including using the same protocol).
You can either connect to the VNC server port directly, or you can use ssh port forwarding to connect.
Note that this also works the other way around, since the Mac also uses VNC for desktop sharing. So, you can use your Mac as a jukebox for playing all those nasty DRM'ed iTunes songs, and use a nice, user-friendly Linux machine as your desktop.
With Vista, Microsoft has succeeded at removing useful drivers, making the system harder to install and use, and increasing incompatibility. And with Windows 7, they will build on that solid foundation to improve Windows even further.
Out of the box, OS X has trouble with many different kinds of media files, including AVI and DivX, and installing them isn't easy. Also, people end up answering a shitload of questions about OS X about upgrading this or that, and users generally end up searching and installing lots of other software by hand.
Ubuntu asks you once whether you want to install MP3 software, and if you agree, it does it. That's all. Overall, it's much simpler and much less work than getting OS X in shape after an install.
Maybe you should just plug it in, like you do on OS X. Rhythmbox will start up and the iPod will show up in it. Just drag and drop onto it. Unlike the Mac, you can even copy from the iPod to the Linux machine.
Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer.
and this is wrong. You just confirmed it yourself.
In any case, the fact that Nokia is off on a signing kick doesn't mean that's a sensible thing to do.
It sounds silly, but at least it has the nucleus of a falsifiable theory (exercise: think about how you would falsify it experimentally if you simply didn't know and why it can't be true). That's better than a lot of the "serious" theories that are floating around.
The latest nokia symbian phones (nokia series 60 3rd edition) like the N95 and alike DO NOT let you install unsigned symbian applications. You have to get a signature.
I own three S60v3 devices, and I can tell you definitively that that is wrong because all of them have unsigned applications running on them.
Of course, the Treos have been running unsigned applications for years and nothing has happened there either.
Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer.
Nokia warns about unsigned applications; they don't keep you from installing them.
We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.
Or maybe we can just forget about iPhone and instead get rewarded by truly open platforms that aren't owned and run by Apple.
My experience is that if the screen is twice as big, one only needs to press the scroll button half as often.
Talk about stating the obvious.
There's nothing more annoying than trying to read a novel while pressing a button each time one has read 5 or 10 lines of text.
I can think of plenty of things more annoying, like not having the book on me in the first place, having to deal with slow refresh, carrying multiple devices, etc.
It's an optimization between portability factor and annoyance.
Given that pushing a button doesn't bother me, there are big gains in portability against essentially no annoyance for me.
There's a reason books come in standardized sizes.
Yes, like paper handling, binding, and paper waste. A 3" diagonal book with 2000 pages is not practical. A 3" diagonal e-book with 2000 pages is.
Well, this is something one can actually evaluate objectively. From observing Gnome and Mac users, my impression is that the result of an objective evaluation would be that it's at best a toss up or that Gnome wins.
That's incorrect. "Better" simply refers to some implicitly assumed criteria. User interface experts know what those are for user interfaces and development environments, and it's factual question how XCode and Linux development environments compare. You may disagree factually, but it's not a matter of opinion. Just FYI.
I read a lot on mobile devices and I find that screen size and screen resolution makes little difference for reading literature; they are only important for diagrams or reference works.
In fact, what matters most for reading is that the device is pocketable, and a small screen device is far superior to imitation books.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading on the Sony Reader is faster with greater comprehension possible than for the same text with the same person on an ipod touch / pda screen
Even if the study were showing that, you may notice that the highest comprehension was achieved at the lowest reading speed, so the different conditions simply resulted in different speed/comprehension tradeoffs. By your reasoning, if you want to understand what you're reading, you should actually be using the slower device.
Of course, that presumes that the study itself is actually meaningful and relevant, but the experiments reported in that study are so incompetently done that you, in fact, can't infer anything from them.
Well, Microsoft has hired some open source developers, like the guy who did IronPython. The result? Microsoft actually has been releasing open source software under OSI-approved licenses. IronPython even ships with Debian.
If that's the result of hiring a few open source developers, imagine how much Microsoft would change if they hired hundreds of open source developers, people that would seriously shake up their culture.
I think there is a culture war going on inside Microsoft. There are a whole bunch of complacent, rich, and incompetent old Microsoft hacks. The more open source developers Microsoft hires, the more those people are going to lose power, and the more Microsoft's open source efforts are going to become genuine.
It's not the legality that Comcast takes issue with, it's the use of bandwidth. You're not supposed to actually use the bandwidth you buy, you see.
Yes, indeed, you are not. It says so right in Comcast's terms of service.
Effectively, the "bandwidth you buy" with your home subscription is burst bandwidth. If you want the ability to have high sustained bandwidth, buy one of the business subscriptions.
Yes, the legal rights to the software will remain available to the community thanks to the GPL; but Microsoft is also buying up developer talent.
No, they aren't really. They are giving the developers lots of money and Microsoft simply won't be an interesting place for them to stay. So, they will be leaving Microsoft after the purchase. Non-competes are hard to enforce, both because courts don't like them and because it's difficult to see how an independently wealthy developer working on this own time would be "competing" with Microsoft.
Microsoft could easily buy the two largest open-source companies on the planet without denting their reserves.
So? Do you think that makes any difference? The developers are just going to take the money, say "thank you", and go on founding another open source company.
that's how #1 companies remain #1.
That's how #1 companies remained #1 companies in the 1980's. The rules have changed.
This is great news. Microsoft will give hundreds of millions of dollars to the founders of open source companies, and the software itself will remain open source. This kind of monetary reward can only encourage the development of more open source software. Thank You Microsoft!
What, therefore, happened to the 1.6 additional good lawyers that we had before we brought the groups together?
Good question. The answer is that they neutralize each other.
without any risk of interference.
That's "no risk of electromagnetic interference". There is a significant risk of pugilistic interference.
Yes. You have several choices
* enable desktop sharing on your Gnome desktop, run the desktop on the console, and connect with a VNC viewer
* run a VNC server (tightvncserver) on the machine and connect with a VNC viewer (put your startup information into ~/.vnc/xstartup); you get to choose size and depth of the desktop, and you can even do this on headless machines
* run xmove (tricky to configure)
The first choice is the consumer-friendly one and trivial to do (it's basically the same as desktop sharing on the Mac, including using the same protocol).
You can either connect to the VNC server port directly, or you can use ssh port forwarding to connect.
Note that this also works the other way around, since the Mac also uses VNC for desktop sharing. So, you can use your Mac as a jukebox for playing all those nasty DRM'ed iTunes songs, and use a nice, user-friendly Linux machine as your desktop.
With Vista, Microsoft has succeeded at removing useful drivers, making the system harder to install and use, and increasing incompatibility. And with Windows 7, they will build on that solid foundation to improve Windows even further.
Nice to hear that Sun caught up with 1970's software technology, after pushing unsafe and flaky C based software for the previous couple of decades.
Out of the box, OS X has trouble with many different kinds of media files, including AVI and DivX, and installing them isn't easy. Also, people end up answering a shitload of questions about OS X about upgrading this or that, and users generally end up searching and installing lots of other software by hand.
Ubuntu asks you once whether you want to install MP3 software, and if you agree, it does it. That's all. Overall, it's much simpler and much less work than getting OS X in shape after an install.
Maybe you should just plug it in, like you do on OS X. Rhythmbox will start up and the iPod will show up in it. Just drag and drop onto it. Unlike the Mac, you can even copy from the iPod to the Linux machine.
Well, no. Jobs claimed:
and this is wrong. You just confirmed it yourself.
In any case, the fact that Nokia is off on a signing kick doesn't mean that's a sensible thing to do.
have transformed fat tissue stem cells into nerve cells ... thereby turning fat people into really smart people.
The gods don't mind being questioned; it's their priests that get homicidal when you do.
It sounds silly, but at least it has the nucleus of a falsifiable theory (exercise: think about how you would falsify it experimentally if you simply didn't know and why it can't be true). That's better than a lot of the "serious" theories that are floating around.
The latest nokia symbian phones (nokia series 60 3rd edition) like the N95 and alike DO NOT let you install unsigned symbian applications. You have to get a signature.
I own three S60v3 devices, and I can tell you definitively that that is wrong because all of them have unsigned applications running on them.
Of course, the Treos have been running unsigned applications for years and nothing has happened there either.
Jobs is a liar.
Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer.
Nokia warns about unsigned applications; they don't keep you from installing them.
We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.
Or maybe we can just forget about iPhone and instead get rewarded by truly open platforms that aren't owned and run by Apple.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3
There was little reason to adopt MP3 back then, and there is no reason to keep using it now, other than that it's "the standard".
My experience is that if the screen is twice as big, one only needs to press the scroll button half as often.
Talk about stating the obvious.
There's nothing more annoying than trying to read a novel while pressing a button each time one has read 5 or 10 lines of text.
I can think of plenty of things more annoying, like not having the book on me in the first place, having to deal with slow refresh, carrying multiple devices, etc.
It's an optimization between portability factor and annoyance.
Given that pushing a button doesn't bother me, there are big gains in portability against essentially no annoyance for me.
There's a reason books come in standardized sizes.
Yes, like paper handling, binding, and paper waste. A 3" diagonal book with 2000 pages is not practical. A 3" diagonal e-book with 2000 pages is.
The BBC seems a bit out of touch if they think that Flash isn't downloadable.
In any case, it is hard to understand why they don't simply make the stuff available as MPEG4. But, hey, maybe their audience will do it for them.
Well, this is something one can actually evaluate objectively. From observing Gnome and Mac users, my impression is that the result of an objective evaluation would be that it's at best a toss up or that Gnome wins.
'More' is factual. 'Better' is opinion.
That's incorrect. "Better" simply refers to some implicitly assumed criteria. User interface experts know what those are for user interfaces and development environments, and it's factual question how XCode and Linux development environments compare. You may disagree factually, but it's not a matter of opinion. Just FYI.
I read a lot on mobile devices and I find that screen size and screen resolution makes little difference for reading literature; they are only important for diagrams or reference works.
In fact, what matters most for reading is that the device is pocketable, and a small screen device is far superior to imitation books.