I would say that this is a really big problem, but at the very least this is also very unavoidable. Although I've always liked the idea of being able to pick up games on the fly and not having to go to the store to buy them, when it comes to pricing, x box live already charges outrageous amounts for games that came out 10+ years ago. Should be interesting, it also would depend greatly on how big the downloads are going to be. With bandwidth seemingly limitless now, downloading a 10gig game doesn't seem as big of a deal as it did even 3 years ago. I guess it all depends on how large the games get, I can only see them getting bigger.
It doesn't have to be unavoidable. A console manufacturer could embed a mechanism (e.g. a browser) that allows users to shop around for their content much as they might for a physical copy. Copies would still be signed of course, but they could be purchased from Amazon, Play.com or anywhere else. The vendor would be responsible for setting prices, providing bandwidth, creating discounts, promotions, bundles etc. Proper competition would mean lower prices and better discounts. A really sophisticated digital system could even allow second hand sales within certain limits.
What's in it for the console maker to do this? Well on the surface nothing, but then think how consoles get sold in the first place - through stores. If Microsoft / Sony shut stores out of the equation then stores will slap big markups on their consoles, or possibly not carry them at all. Sony are going to feel this first - the PSP Go is 249 euros which is considerably higher than older PSPs, most probably because retailers wouldn't sell the thing without bigger margins.
Opening up digital downloads would keep retailers sweet which keeps console prices down. Obviously defining a common delivery platform is always a tough thing to do, but that doesn't mean it's not feasible. Eventually something like is going to have to happen for digital video or the market will implode, and I don't see other forms of media as being especially different.
Now having said all this, who said companies do the right thing. Maybe MS & Sony will keep their stores proprietary and stay competitive for fear of a revolt or mass defection by studios. But technically it should be possible and from a consumer perspective it would be most welcome.
Forcing a company to ship its competitors with its own product is ridiculous and anti-capitalism.
Capitalism should be about products competing on their merits, not about companies abusing monopoly powers to force competitors out of business or inflicting an inferior product onto people. The EU recognizes this and so does the US.
Of course the EU is trailing reality. Investigating the complaints takes time. Just because it takes some years to complete an investigation and make a ruling doesn't mean Microsoft should have a free pass to keep on doing it.
Anyway, you say people are free to install other browsers. Of course they are, but Microsoft know that the power of the default gives them an instant monopoly. They've done it with mail readers, browsers, media players, network stacks, compression drivers and more besides. When they can't monopolize something (e.g. an open format or platform), they attempt to poison it instead by partially implementing it or extending it in proprietary ways. They are a serial monopolist and unless someone stamps on their behaviour they'll keep on doing it.
Fortunately the EU has taken a stand where the US chickened out.
By far the largest issue I have playing games in SD is fonts. Lots of games use fonts which are so small that they are barely legible in SD. The worst offender by far is GTA IV where I can't even read the messages that pop up on the phone.
I realise HD is the future but if SD support is mandatory (and it is), the frigging game should be playable in SD.
If it was an optional component, then uncheck it by default. If its already installed, then just uninstall it but preserve all the bookmarks. If necessary warn the user on the packaging and before / during the installation process what is going to happen and how to resolve it. I don't see why upgrades are crippled because of it except for MS trying to spite the EU. It doesn't even make financial sense since now they have to sell the full retail copy of Windows in the EU at a lower cost to catch people who would have bought an upgrade version if one existed. It also pretty much seals the demise of IE in Europe which cannot be a good thing at all for Microsoft.
Netscape made money by charging licence fees for commercial use of its browser. By giving away IE for nothing, bundling it with the OS and even producing a free version for Unix and OS X, they effectively killed all of Netscape's revenues. They drove a competitor out of business not by producing a better product but by handing out an alternative for nothing. You complain of it being crappy (not my experience but we'll run with it), who's to say that wasn't in part due to Netscape running out of money because nobody would pay for it any more?
And that's just one example. Microsoft REPEATEDLY did this from the days of MS DOS onwards for disk compression, memory managers, antivirus, networking, browsers, media players etc. When they weren't trying to drive competitors out of business they were trying to usurp or undermime open protocols and withold details that would allow interoperability. The EU has obviously heard enough complaints and seen enough evidence and has decided enough is enough.
That still doesn't explain why MS chose what they chose with regards to Windows 7. The EU did not impose such a remedy. Indeed it is hard to see why MS couldn't simply have asked the used at the end of installation to pick and choose a browser (or other products) from a list and automatically install them. Or do so when the user first invoked iexplore.exe afterwards. In any event it doesn't forgive their past behaviour or excuse their excesses in the slightest.
It's not insane at all. Microsoft used the ubiquitousness of one product to force people to use another. Internet Explorer is only the dominant browser because they artificially bundled it with Windows. They gave it away in effect to drive Netscape out of business. The EU clearly has more teeth to deal with the issue than the US and the case has been ongoing since 1993. The browser is only one of a catalogue of abuses MS have been found guilty with over networking, proprietary protocols, browsers and media players.
As to how they remedy the browser issue, that's their own problem. They could certainly have chosen a better way than crippling the European product like they did. I expect they believe that by inconveniencing customers there will be a backlash against the EU. This is just a case of cutting off their nose to spite their face and I expect it will worsen IE's browser share far more than if they just offer users the choice of picking which browser to install.
Actually from what you presented in your post, there is no evidence whatsoever that the museum shooting was a hate crime. A white man goes and shoots a black man at the holocaust museum. There is nothing in the act itself that suggests a hate crime (any more than someone knocking over a 7-11 with a sikh cashier is likely to be a hate crime against sikhs).
What was presented in the post was just an overview. The shooter James Von Brunn had a well documented history of racism, antisemitism as well as ties to white supremacy. The prosecution will have no problem at all establishing the link between his rants (many of which are still online) and him turning up in a Holocaust Museum and blasting away.
Here we go again! If the materials were published in the US just how can an English court have jurisdiction? Are they claiming that because English addresses received the materials that English laws are in play? Or is this another treaty driven action in an American court? And England is a hoot compared to France. France really does want to reach out and control the world.
If they were published in the US by people residing in the UK, and who posted them from the UK, then what the hell difference does it make. It would be like a US citizen lamely claiming that when they threatened to kill the president they did so via servers in Russia. So fucking what.
I'd add that the US certainly hasn't exactly made the jurisdictional distinction when dealing with online gambling, encryption / DRM, hackers or piracy sites. There are plenty of examples of people being arrested when entering the US for "crimes" that were perfectly legal in their own country, e.g. Dmitry Sklyarov. So it's not a one way street.
I doubt they're removing it entirely, just rationalizing. Just like any OO tech you can go overboard, wrapping everything in a class or interface even when it doesn't make sense. Hell you could even have an object implementing nsIString to pass around any string but performance would be dire. At one point (and I'm going back a few years here), the view manager internally used a bastardized XPCOM notation even though it didn't define the interfaces in IDL, and didn't even bother refcounting the interface queries. In such cases you may as well rip it out and stop confusing everyone.
Most of Gecko is bound together with interfaces defined in IDL and implemented in C++ / JS. This model is called XPCOM and is based off Microsoft's COM in a large part. In theory (though not always in practice), it didn't matter in COM where the interfaces are implemented - single thread, multi-thread, multi-process or even across a network so long as the caller and callee abide by things such as rules for memory allocation, reference counting, object creation etc. I say in theory because some interfaces can be horribly inefficient when called repeatedly over a network, some interfaces might have broken IDL definitions and some interfaces might deal with things like handles or memory addresses which don't translate properly between processes.
One way to implementing multi-process Firefox is first allow XPCOM to work across process. i.e. allow objects to be via XPCOM that are actually spawned in another process, one explicitly created for the task. In COM it had a thing called a running object table (ROT). When you create a process hosted object it looks to see if one is running already, and if not it uses the registry info to spawn one. Then it waits for it to start and then it tells the process to create the object, sets up all the marshaling etc. XPCOM could do something similar, though it would have to do so in a cross-platform manner. I assume that Firefox would have to determine when creating a browser object first if it was chrome or content, and if it was content to spawn a host process and then set up the interfaces. Once set up and assuming the interfaces were efficient, the effect would be largely transparent.
The biggest performance hit would probably be on anything which tried to call or iterate over the DOM boundary between chrome and content. For example chrome which introspected content would suffer because all the calls would have to be serialized / deserialized.
Personally I think its feasible but it would hit performance. An alternative would be to just host plugins in another process. Windowless plugins might be a pain to implement but at least you could kill the other process if a plugin goes nuts which seems to happen all too frequently for me.
EVE's approach is even more broken, because at least grinding rewards the player for playing the game. In EVE, you are rewarded for queuing skills and logging out. Not to mention that a highly skilled player in a small ship can beat a less skilled player in a large ship. Or the fact that it takes months and months to actually get anywhere in the game, let alone start being fun.
Not true at all. Skills give modest bonuses to your ability to fight, trade etc. and are the foundation of play, but at the end of the day its up to the player to buy a ship that suits their style, and to have financial resources or connections to obtain parts, and to have the skill to know which weapons & kit to fit that makes them a good player.
Besides, if a highly skilled player in a small ship can beat a less skilled player in a large ship, that's a good thing. Too many MMOs have been ruined by twinkers and gold farmers. If you suck as a fighter pilot, go get another profession or use better equipment for the next battle. Some people in EVE even spend their whole lives in the corporate side of things, or mining, or on espionage missions etc. If you suck in head to head battles, run away or don't get into them in the first place.
There are so many mistakes, contradictions and outright hypocritical things in the Bible, that if it's the Word of God, God sure has a few personal issues to deal with.
In EVE there are no levels in the conventional MMO sense. Instead you learn skills, of which there are hundreds in a skill tree. Want to mine? Then you need to learn the mining skill? Want to fly a frigate? Then you need piloting skills and then frigate skills for the class of ship you want to fly. Want to trade on the stock market? Learn trading, day trading etc. Some skills obviously have pre-requisites on others.
Training all the skills to their maximum level is impossible so most people get a core and then begin to specialise. One nice thing about them is they train up in the background, even offline. Most skills are easy enough to get to level 3 or 4 but level 5 can take days. So if a skill took 10 days to learn you could plan it to coincide with a real life holiday, or just have it going while you do something else.
So there is no levelling. There is no class system either although there are factions and you can put points into attributes that make a character for certain roles over others.
I'm using the one in Thunderbird. The problem these days is you CAN'T use Bayesian rules since many spams use:
Morphed words (e.g. C1alis, \/1agr() + millions of variations)
The message is embedded in an image, i.e. there are no words
Phishing attempts which therefore use the same language and terms as legitimate emails
Random strings. Nonsensical headings which do not match anything.
Foreign garble. Chinese, Korean, Russian, Japanese and Hebrew words which I'm not even sure the filter would parse properly as words
I've given up trying to train the filter any more. Instead I have some bayesian filtering for the most egregious messages and then specific rules for other common spams. It still leaves a lot of crap to clean up which Google manages automatically.
I assume Google succeeds because it has the collective advantage of analysing all its user's posts, where they originated from, their delivery times as well as bayesian filters and other tricks. What I don't understand is why Yahoo which has the same advantages fails so hard at the same task. Not a day goes by where my Yahoo account doesn't have 20-30 new spams in it.
2 or 3 legit emails per 100 * 200-300 messages = 4-9 legit emails a day. Anyway I don't use my POP3 account for much personal correspondence any more since its too easy for it to be deleted by accident.
How is it crippled? It can view PDF's natively (the most common format). Sure it has it's own format, as I'm sure every other ebook reader does too.
The DX can view PDFs but other models can't. And none of them can view HTML, RTF, EPUB, LIT or DOC files. So yeah Amazon is trying its best to force people to use its own service. Even its own MOBI format is seriously broken not supporting things like tables and fixed fonts that render the format worse than useless for technical books.
BTW I don't give a shit if Amazon offers online converters for some of these or not. I don't want to have to pay Amazon to convert books to a format it should support natively. Some of my books may be purchased from other sites, or even proprietary / confidential and are therefore none of Amazon's business.
BTW the Sony Reader isn't perfect but its trying a hell of a lot harder than Kindle and costs less to boot. Why are people raving about the Kindle again?
DRM is a restriction but sadly its a reality that most publishers and authors would want it.
The best that can be hoped is that any common eBook format offered a few simple levels of DRM - none, passive (watermarking), full where full would allow 5 active devices or similar. Let the publishers decide. If the no-DRM camp gained traction they might win some converts along the way.
Personally I don't have an issue with DRM so long as the format is portable (i.e. not tied to a vendor or service), its relatively painless and the price of eBooks reflects the inability to loan or sell titles.
No way on Earth I would work hard writing or creating something to have it passed around the Internet for free. I create for my own profit, not your entertainment. Once the Internet community stops (I know it isn't everyone but it is enough to be a major problem) stealing content created by artists for profit, we will finally be able to embrace the open standards we all truly want. Until then DRM will live one in some for or other.
Open doesn't necessarily mean unencrypted. It's quite feasible that O'Reilly or any other publisher could specify a platform based on open standards that still uses encryption and DRM to prevent users from distributing books around easily.
The problem at the moment is there are all these competing fiefdoms (such as Amazon's) with their own proprietary formats, their own proprietary readers, tied to their own proprietary storefronts. And the net result is a wasteland of warring factions. It's been this way for years and nobody seems to have a frigging clue of the harm they're doing to their collective interests. Hell, it's easier to grab a book from IRC than risk the lock-in that all these vendors impose.
People are not interested in eBooks because there is no standard and each reader is tied to its own format with token support for others (if at all). If you are an author then you should be screaming for blood over this. All these stupid proprietary formats are killing your sales. If there were a single format that all publishers, all stores and all readers implemented then sales of eBooks would skyrocket.
Spam is now so bad for me on my home account that I reckon for every 100 messages, only two or three are legitimate contact. I literally get 200-300 spams a day. Bayesian filters will get rid of about 20%, and rules I've added such as deleting any email with cyrillics or other foreign characters still leave me with 100 or so to delete manually.
I've set up GMail to filter my email and by comparison I'd say one or two spams get through. So I'm very happy with GMail's level of coverage. It's not perfect but it makes things tolerable. I'm not at all happy with Yahoo's level of coverage. Yahoo allegedly also has spam filters, but I've yet to see they actually work. It's not uncommon to find my email box filled with Nigerian and other scams.
I wouldn't say its exactly cheap but it is a very desirable looking car. I think in its price range that it may well sell to the same crowds as BMW & Mercedes because its very sexy looking.
Personally I think Tesla are couldn't pull off a true "people's car" because they don't have the manufacturing capacity. No country has the infrastructure. And besides it would be a huge financial risk. Maybe someone like Tata should come in as a partner. Modify their Nano with an electric drive train and its entirely possible they could mass produce something which is not only affordable but cheap by comparison to other vehicles.
The final Compuserve clients were basically reskinned AOL client built with the largely the same code base. An interesting piece of trivia is that the final versions of the client used the Mozilla Gecko browser engine. I think it was equivalent to Mozilla 0.8 / Netscape 6 or so at the time but it was pretty stable and actually logged less crash incidents than embedded IE.
The idea was the Compuserve client would serve as a guinea pig for embedding Mozilla and when the company was confident enough the AOL client itself would transition. Unfortunately they were terrified that their support calls would jump if the Mozilla engine didn't support every shitty web site infected with ActiveX controls or VBScript. Then MS came along a waved a huge wad of money under their noses to settle the browser suit. So they chickened out, took the money and faded into obscurity.
So Compuserve represents the one and only release client from AOL that contained their own browser. It's sad really. Ironically for Microsoft I think they should have paid AOL to keep Mozilla and use it since Firefox might not have existed otherwise.
This learning curve may explain why EVE is so intimidating / boring.
Anyway, once you get into it its actually a great game. Perhaps you have to have liked playing Elite back in the day to appreciate it. It's a massively online version Elite. Aside from all fighting you also get the politicking, scams, crimes and so forth that make the game world hugely dynamic.
If I'm paying full whack for an e-reader I expect it to support all of the common book formats without prejudice. If the firmware integrates a store or a proprietary format as an extra then fine. This after all is how the iPod sold so well. Apple wisely ensured it played unencrypted MP3s and AACs first and foremost, complete with ripping software. The result was iPods sold through the roof and Apple coined it from integrated iTMS support.
I just don't understand who is stupid enough to buy a Kindle at full price considering how crippled it is. The device should be subsidized to reflect its proprietary nature or the software should be opened up to make it more useful. FFS even Sony (a company not exactly known for embracing standards) has a more open reader that costs less.
Even less fathomable is why publishers are letting the ebook market degenerate into competing formats, proprietary readers and possible market dominance by Amazon. One would think it is in their interest to come up with and dictate a single book format, one which all readers can implement, one which all stores can sell books with. It sounds obvious but a single format would level the playing field and catapult ebooks into the mainstream.
I'm surprised BD+ is not used more than it is
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BD+ Resealed Once Again
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· Score: 2, Informative
BD+ is not uncrackable but it makes it very difficult to extract the disk's volume key because a machine is required to run a program to obtain it. BD+ programs can be model specific and involve memory or timing tests making it difficult to emulate. Slysoft has just been able to cope so far because relatively few disks used BD+ and did so in relatively unsophisticated form.
But if more studios come on board Slysoft is going to have severe trouble keeping up. This is ultimately what BD+ is meant to do - to delay and impede piracy (and fair use). The more disks that use it, the more cracks appear in the supported disk list. It's not inconceivable the big studios are planning a "big bang" where suddenly and in a coordinated fashion they all go BD+. Then it's lights out for AnyDVD. It will never recover from that.
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It doesn't have to be unavoidable. A console manufacturer could embed a mechanism (e.g. a browser) that allows users to shop around for their content much as they might for a physical copy. Copies would still be signed of course, but they could be purchased from Amazon, Play.com or anywhere else. The vendor would be responsible for setting prices, providing bandwidth, creating discounts, promotions, bundles etc. Proper competition would mean lower prices and better discounts. A really sophisticated digital system could even allow second hand sales within certain limits.
What's in it for the console maker to do this? Well on the surface nothing, but then think how consoles get sold in the first place - through stores. If Microsoft / Sony shut stores out of the equation then stores will slap big markups on their consoles, or possibly not carry them at all. Sony are going to feel this first - the PSP Go is 249 euros which is considerably higher than older PSPs, most probably because retailers wouldn't sell the thing without bigger margins.
Opening up digital downloads would keep retailers sweet which keeps console prices down. Obviously defining a common delivery platform is always a tough thing to do, but that doesn't mean it's not feasible. Eventually something like is going to have to happen for digital video or the market will implode, and I don't see other forms of media as being especially different.
Now having said all this, who said companies do the right thing. Maybe MS & Sony will keep their stores proprietary and stay competitive for fear of a revolt or mass defection by studios. But technically it should be possible and from a consumer perspective it would be most welcome.
Capitalism should be about products competing on their merits, not about companies abusing monopoly powers to force competitors out of business or inflicting an inferior product onto people. The EU recognizes this and so does the US.
Anyway, you say people are free to install other browsers. Of course they are, but Microsoft know that the power of the default gives them an instant monopoly. They've done it with mail readers, browsers, media players, network stacks, compression drivers and more besides. When they can't monopolize something (e.g. an open format or platform), they attempt to poison it instead by partially implementing it or extending it in proprietary ways. They are a serial monopolist and unless someone stamps on their behaviour they'll keep on doing it.
Fortunately the EU has taken a stand where the US chickened out.
I realise HD is the future but if SD support is mandatory (and it is), the frigging game should be playable in SD.
If it was an optional component, then uncheck it by default. If its already installed, then just uninstall it but preserve all the bookmarks. If necessary warn the user on the packaging and before / during the installation process what is going to happen and how to resolve it. I don't see why upgrades are crippled because of it except for MS trying to spite the EU. It doesn't even make financial sense since now they have to sell the full retail copy of Windows in the EU at a lower cost to catch people who would have bought an upgrade version if one existed. It also pretty much seals the demise of IE in Europe which cannot be a good thing at all for Microsoft.
And that's just one example. Microsoft REPEATEDLY did this from the days of MS DOS onwards for disk compression, memory managers, antivirus, networking, browsers, media players etc. When they weren't trying to drive competitors out of business they were trying to usurp or undermime open protocols and withold details that would allow interoperability. The EU has obviously heard enough complaints and seen enough evidence and has decided enough is enough.
That still doesn't explain why MS chose what they chose with regards to Windows 7. The EU did not impose such a remedy. Indeed it is hard to see why MS couldn't simply have asked the used at the end of installation to pick and choose a browser (or other products) from a list and automatically install them. Or do so when the user first invoked iexplore.exe afterwards. In any event it doesn't forgive their past behaviour or excuse their excesses in the slightest.
As to how they remedy the browser issue, that's their own problem. They could certainly have chosen a better way than crippling the European product like they did. I expect they believe that by inconveniencing customers there will be a backlash against the EU. This is just a case of cutting off their nose to spite their face and I expect it will worsen IE's browser share far more than if they just offer users the choice of picking which browser to install.
What was presented in the post was just an overview. The shooter James Von Brunn had a well documented history of racism, antisemitism as well as ties to white supremacy. The prosecution will have no problem at all establishing the link between his rants (many of which are still online) and him turning up in a Holocaust Museum and blasting away.
If they were published in the US by people residing in the UK, and who posted them from the UK, then what the hell difference does it make. It would be like a US citizen lamely claiming that when they threatened to kill the president they did so via servers in Russia. So fucking what.
I'd add that the US certainly hasn't exactly made the jurisdictional distinction when dealing with online gambling, encryption / DRM, hackers or piracy sites. There are plenty of examples of people being arrested when entering the US for "crimes" that were perfectly legal in their own country, e.g. Dmitry Sklyarov. So it's not a one way street.
I doubt they're removing it entirely, just rationalizing. Just like any OO tech you can go overboard, wrapping everything in a class or interface even when it doesn't make sense. Hell you could even have an object implementing nsIString to pass around any string but performance would be dire. At one point (and I'm going back a few years here), the view manager internally used a bastardized XPCOM notation even though it didn't define the interfaces in IDL, and didn't even bother refcounting the interface queries. In such cases you may as well rip it out and stop confusing everyone.
One way to implementing multi-process Firefox is first allow XPCOM to work across process. i.e. allow objects to be via XPCOM that are actually spawned in another process, one explicitly created for the task. In COM it had a thing called a running object table (ROT). When you create a process hosted object it looks to see if one is running already, and if not it uses the registry info to spawn one. Then it waits for it to start and then it tells the process to create the object, sets up all the marshaling etc. XPCOM could do something similar, though it would have to do so in a cross-platform manner. I assume that Firefox would have to determine when creating a browser object first if it was chrome or content, and if it was content to spawn a host process and then set up the interfaces. Once set up and assuming the interfaces were efficient, the effect would be largely transparent.
The biggest performance hit would probably be on anything which tried to call or iterate over the DOM boundary between chrome and content. For example chrome which introspected content would suffer because all the calls would have to be serialized / deserialized.
Personally I think its feasible but it would hit performance. An alternative would be to just host plugins in another process. Windowless plugins might be a pain to implement but at least you could kill the other process if a plugin goes nuts which seems to happen all too frequently for me.
Not true at all. Skills give modest bonuses to your ability to fight, trade etc. and are the foundation of play, but at the end of the day its up to the player to buy a ship that suits their style, and to have financial resources or connections to obtain parts, and to have the skill to know which weapons & kit to fit that makes them a good player.
Besides, if a highly skilled player in a small ship can beat a less skilled player in a large ship, that's a good thing. Too many MMOs have been ruined by twinkers and gold farmers. If you suck as a fighter pilot, go get another profession or use better equipment for the next battle. Some people in EVE even spend their whole lives in the corporate side of things, or mining, or on espionage missions etc. If you suck in head to head battles, run away or don't get into them in the first place.
There are so many mistakes, contradictions and outright hypocritical things in the Bible, that if it's the Word of God, God sure has a few personal issues to deal with.
Training all the skills to their maximum level is impossible so most people get a core and then begin to specialise. One nice thing about them is they train up in the background, even offline. Most skills are easy enough to get to level 3 or 4 but level 5 can take days. So if a skill took 10 days to learn you could plan it to coincide with a real life holiday, or just have it going while you do something else.
So there is no levelling. There is no class system either although there are factions and you can put points into attributes that make a character for certain roles over others.
I've given up trying to train the filter any more. Instead I have some bayesian filtering for the most egregious messages and then specific rules for other common spams. It still leaves a lot of crap to clean up which Google manages automatically.
I assume Google succeeds because it has the collective advantage of analysing all its user's posts, where they originated from, their delivery times as well as bayesian filters and other tricks. What I don't understand is why Yahoo which has the same advantages fails so hard at the same task. Not a day goes by where my Yahoo account doesn't have 20-30 new spams in it.
2 or 3 legit emails per 100 * 200-300 messages = 4-9 legit emails a day. Anyway I don't use my POP3 account for much personal correspondence any more since its too easy for it to be deleted by accident.
The DX can view PDFs but other models can't. And none of them can view HTML, RTF, EPUB, LIT or DOC files. So yeah Amazon is trying its best to force people to use its own service. Even its own MOBI format is seriously broken not supporting things like tables and fixed fonts that render the format worse than useless for technical books.
BTW I don't give a shit if Amazon offers online converters for some of these or not. I don't want to have to pay Amazon to convert books to a format it should support natively. Some of my books may be purchased from other sites, or even proprietary / confidential and are therefore none of Amazon's business.
BTW the Sony Reader isn't perfect but its trying a hell of a lot harder than Kindle and costs less to boot. Why are people raving about the Kindle again?
The best that can be hoped is that any common eBook format offered a few simple levels of DRM - none, passive (watermarking), full where full would allow 5 active devices or similar. Let the publishers decide. If the no-DRM camp gained traction they might win some converts along the way.
Personally I don't have an issue with DRM so long as the format is portable (i.e. not tied to a vendor or service), its relatively painless and the price of eBooks reflects the inability to loan or sell titles.
Open doesn't necessarily mean unencrypted. It's quite feasible that O'Reilly or any other publisher could specify a platform based on open standards that still uses encryption and DRM to prevent users from distributing books around easily.
The problem at the moment is there are all these competing fiefdoms (such as Amazon's) with their own proprietary formats, their own proprietary readers, tied to their own proprietary storefronts. And the net result is a wasteland of warring factions. It's been this way for years and nobody seems to have a frigging clue of the harm they're doing to their collective interests. Hell, it's easier to grab a book from IRC than risk the lock-in that all these vendors impose.
People are not interested in eBooks because there is no standard and each reader is tied to its own format with token support for others (if at all). If you are an author then you should be screaming for blood over this. All these stupid proprietary formats are killing your sales. If there were a single format that all publishers, all stores and all readers implemented then sales of eBooks would skyrocket.
I've set up GMail to filter my email and by comparison I'd say one or two spams get through. So I'm very happy with GMail's level of coverage. It's not perfect but it makes things tolerable. I'm not at all happy with Yahoo's level of coverage. Yahoo allegedly also has spam filters, but I've yet to see they actually work. It's not uncommon to find my email box filled with Nigerian and other scams.
Personally I think Tesla are couldn't pull off a true "people's car" because they don't have the manufacturing capacity. No country has the infrastructure. And besides it would be a huge financial risk. Maybe someone like Tata should come in as a partner. Modify their Nano with an electric drive train and its entirely possible they could mass produce something which is not only affordable but cheap by comparison to other vehicles.
The idea was the Compuserve client would serve as a guinea pig for embedding Mozilla and when the company was confident enough the AOL client itself would transition. Unfortunately they were terrified that their support calls would jump if the Mozilla engine didn't support every shitty web site infected with ActiveX controls or VBScript. Then MS came along a waved a huge wad of money under their noses to settle the browser suit. So they chickened out, took the money and faded into obscurity.
So Compuserve represents the one and only release client from AOL that contained their own browser. It's sad really. Ironically for Microsoft I think they should have paid AOL to keep Mozilla and use it since Firefox might not have existed otherwise.
Anyway, once you get into it its actually a great game. Perhaps you have to have liked playing Elite back in the day to appreciate it. It's a massively online version Elite. Aside from all fighting you also get the politicking, scams, crimes and so forth that make the game world hugely dynamic.
I just don't understand who is stupid enough to buy a Kindle at full price considering how crippled it is. The device should be subsidized to reflect its proprietary nature or the software should be opened up to make it more useful. FFS even Sony (a company not exactly known for embracing standards) has a more open reader that costs less.
Even less fathomable is why publishers are letting the ebook market degenerate into competing formats, proprietary readers and possible market dominance by Amazon. One would think it is in their interest to come up with and dictate a single book format, one which all readers can implement, one which all stores can sell books with. It sounds obvious but a single format would level the playing field and catapult ebooks into the mainstream.
BD+ is not uncrackable but it makes it very difficult to extract the disk's volume key because a machine is required to run a program to obtain it. BD+ programs can be model specific and involve memory or timing tests making it difficult to emulate. Slysoft has just been able to cope so far because relatively few disks used BD+ and did so in relatively unsophisticated form. But if more studios come on board Slysoft is going to have severe trouble keeping up. This is ultimately what BD+ is meant to do - to delay and impede piracy (and fair use). The more disks that use it, the more cracks appear in the supported disk list. It's not inconceivable the big studios are planning a "big bang" where suddenly and in a coordinated fashion they all go BD+. Then it's lights out for AnyDVD. It will never recover from that.