The question of free software on closed OS's has come up twice for me recently. I'd like to know your thoughts on these issues.
I write free software (GPL) for PalmOS in my spare time. There is a small, but growing, community of free software authors for PalmOS, and I feel it is important to make an effort to replace some of the (ridiculously-priced, even ignoring the closedness) shareware which is prevalant on this platform. Do you think it's a good idea to work on this kind of thing, when it is unlikely that the PalmOS will ever be freed or (properly) replaced with a free OS? Is it worth working on free software for a non-free platform, when there is a need for the software and a need for it to be free, as opposed to working on free software for a free platform?
Another, similar, issue has recently come up in the PalmOS developer community. About 3 years ago, a free PalmOS development kit based on GCC was released, and it is very popular in the PalmOS developer community - estimates of up to 50% of the developers are using it. This toolkit (version 0.5.0) has now fallen somewhat behind the times, and needed some work, and someone stood up and took over 'ownership' of the toolkit, with the stated intention of producing a newer toolkit based on GCC 2.9x (and feeding the changes back to the GCC maintainers, hopefully for eventual inclusion in the main tree). This work took longer than expected, and before it was completed, Palm Inc. hired the developer to work on it full-time under their auspices. He released it (as version 2.0) earlier on this year and while it (apparently - I haven't actually used it yet) fixes some of the problems, it causes others, and apparently breaks some backwards compatibility. At around the time of this release, someone else (who had never said anything about working on this toolkit before in public, as far as I can tell) announced that he was also working on a modernisation of the toolkit. He released a beta version of his toolkit (version 0.6.0) and has been rather over-enthusiastic in his defence of his version versus the 'official' Palm-sponsored release. The discussion got quite rude at times, with the second developer (the 'owner' of the 0.6.0 release) being quite rude about the design of the 2.0 release, and stating that he felt it was wrong for a Palm employee to work on the GPLed toolkit - that it should be done by a third party so as to keep it independent of the Palm 'party line'. Anyway, the point of the story is that a large number (probably a majority) of the users of this toolkit are using it on Windows, with the Cygnus Cygwin environment to provide enough of a GNU-ish environment to run the GCC-based toolkit. The 0.6.0 author has stated that he doesn't care about making his toolkit work on Windows, whereas the Palm-employed 2.0 author has treated Windows as something of a priority. My personal feeling is that it is better for Windows users to be using a GCC-based toolkit in a GNU-ish environment (if they cannot be persuaded to move from Windows) than that they use a proprietary toolkit. What are your thoughts?
If this makes no sense, tell me and I'll try to clarify. I haven't bothered naming names above, mainly because they're not important - it's the issue I'm interested in, but the full story is available in various mailing list archives, so it isn't a secret.
I was travelling into London on the Tube yesterday, and an ad for silicon.com caught my eye. It was a picture of a man's head, with a finger held up to his lips, and the slogan "Don't reveal your source!" underneath it. I assumed at the time that it meant "silicon.com is a source of industry knowledge - don't tell people where you get your information", but I'm not so sure that the second (anti-free software/open source) meaning is an accident, now.
I noticed this morning and switched my client back onto RC5. I fully understand how this kind of thing happens - there is no way the people at the center of a project like Distributed.net can test all possible combinations of hardware and software.
This may be a silly question, but I'm going to ask it anyway: Did (some) of the OGR blocks take a huge amount of time for others, or was it just me? I'm running the client on a Celeron 300A (not a power machine, but a lot faster than the 386 I started running RC5 on) and some of the OGR blocks took over 14 hours. I didn't know we'd done anything like 25% of the 'keyspace', but it looked to me like this project was going to go on for ever, given the speed of my computer.
I hate to be picky, and I really am not aiming this at this particular author, but wouldn't it be better to wait for the full article? A full comparison of all available word processors would indeed be a useful and interesting thing, but a head-to-head between two, with others merely listed, gives a very unbalanced view.
If the article has to be broken down, surely one comparison of the commercial WPs (StarOffice, Applix and WordPerfect) and one of the free WPs (Abiword, Kword, Klyx) would make more sense, rather than comparing the upcoming fifth release of a commercial WP with the upcoming first release of a free WP. Oh yeah, and neither Abiword nor WordPerfect should really be classed as a stand-alone app - Abiword will be part of Gnome Office, and WordPerfect will be part of WordPerfect Office.
Interesting, but lacking:-(
Supporting 'greater community' charities
on
Giving Back
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· Score: 3
I have written a couple of small pieces of free software (GPL) for the Palm (one is TRGPro specific, but anyway...). The majority of Palm software is shareware or payware, so people tend to expect to pay for software, unlike the Linux community (statement of fact, not trying to make an argument). I therefore have the following comment in my README file:
This software is free. If you feel a particular need to pay for it, give something to your favourite charity instead, since they need the money far more than I do.
By far the most rewarding e-mail I have received regarding this software was a scan of a receipt. A German user downloaded the software, thought it was worth paying for, and gave 10 Euros (about $10) to charity in payment for my software. And that made me feel good. Seriously, if a tiny proportion of the money saved by companies and individuals by using free (beer) software was given to non-software charities, it could do a lot of good for the world. It wasn't mentioned above, but the $2000 award given to vim by Slashdot/Andover/VA has gone straight to helping a childrens charity in Uganda. Much as free, high-quality software makes the world a better place, funding medical treatment for children who need it and can't afford it is immeasurably more benificial to the world.
Check this download from Netscape's developer site. It's example code and documentation for you to plug-in third-party mail and/or news systems. I have Netscape launching Pine with the To: line filled in on my machine, and I don't see why you couldn't get it to launch mutt.
So, this is a negative post about VA & Andover. And it's posted with a very obvious piece of editorialising which tells a very obvious story. VA get to add positive comment to their stories before they get posted. Do Redhat get the right to reply to stories in the headline? Do Penguin get that right? I doubt it.
Alternatively, this is a slightly more subtle attempt to avoid discussion on this subject. By making the headline a mini-feature in itself, a large portion of the discussion will be about Roblimo's comments, rather than about the original story. They're trying to manipulate us!. </ADVOCATE>
My actual opinion on this? I think the quality of Slashdot has declined somewhat since I first started reading it, which was quite a long time before anyone had heard of Andover. I miss things like the war against using www.slashdot.org instead of slashdot.org aka TDwww(TMS). On the other hand, I have also changed a lot in the time since I started reading here, so it is just as possible that the 'problem' is with me, not Slashdot. I'm glad to see the guys who put this thing together get their just rewards. I think that the code is finally open, VA are a well-known and well-respected company in the community, and there is certainly no more need to worry now than there was about Andover, and they don't seem to have (directly at least) caused any problems.
This is my normal sig - it just happens to fit this posting well:
vim has always been 'Charityware' - if you use it, you are encouraged to make a donation towards a charity working with orphans in Uganda. On Friday, Bram Moolenaar announced on the vim mailing list that vim had won the award, and that the money would go to that charity. Which I think is pretty cool.
Designed to route around problems, up to and including a nuclear blast and/or censorship.
Now the up-to-date slash code is (finally:-) available, there is no way anything can stop/. from existing. Yeah, the site at slashdot.org could die, and Rob/Hemos/JonKatz/whoever might stop writing for it, but that wouldn't matter too much. Rob et al. put a lot of work into it, but I think/. was mainly the result of a web site being in the right place at the right time. If someone (VA/Microsoft/whoever) took this site down, another one would spring up very quickly, particularly since it is obvious that you can actually make money doing this, as well as having fun and serving the community.
This is entirely legal. If you write some code, you can release it under whatever license(s) you want. You are free to release it under the GPL and sell it under a more traditional license at the same time, on the basis that people who don't (or can't) accept the terms of the GPL can buy their way out of it. The problem with this comes when there is more than one author for a program - i.e. any program which has user-submitted patches or enhancements. In that case, you would either need permission from every contributor, or you would need to get them to assign their copyright on their code to you when they submit it, so you can later sell it.
As it happens, there is an article at Byte on exactly this issue at the moment. I don't agree with everything in the article, but it is worth a read.
For a couple of months now. It hasn't been out for much longer than that, and when I asked the author why he hadn't announced it, he told me he wanted it to be out 'in the wild' for a while to iron out any bugs before a full-scale announcement. Apart from a problem at the start of January when calculating the trands resulted in a Palm lock-up (no, not a Y2K problem, it would have happened in any January), it's great. And I've lost some serious weight while trying out a new cool program for my Palm. How great is that???
Check Open Handheld for an attempt at a PalmOS free software development group. As you can see, this page is pretty much dead (the pages don't seem to have been updated in over a year) and there hasn't been any activity on the mailing list for a long time.
To be honest, I don't see much need for a free (speech) replacement for PalmOS. The OS (at least until quite recently) is very closely coupled with the hardware, and Palm are very good to their developers. You can (after filling in the relevent forms) get the source to most of the OS, and the source to all the built-in apps is available under a very free license. One thing in particular would make a free replacement hard - there is no keyboard on the device, so you'd need writing recognition to do most useful things with the device.
One more thing: my GPLed software for the Palm is available at http://www.vmlinuz.org/palmos. There's a barely-written web site downloader (use SiteScooper instead) and LinkDirect (yes, it's a better, GPLed clone of DirectLink), a program for making a quick PPP connection between the Palm serial port and the PC serial port.
The number IV is apparently not used because it clashes (I'm not sure, either the glyph IV or the word/number 4) with a naughty word in some Oriental language. I think it is also something to do with skipping a number to make it obvious that this is a new generation.
The number VI is apparently not used because it clashes with a naughty word in English.
As for others, the company known as Palm Computing has also released devices called the Pilot and the PalmPilot. The word Pilot is no longer used, apparently because the pen company of the same name (and prior usage) took offence and asked Palm (through the courts, IIRC) to please stop using it.
The other devices using the PalmOS are the IBM Workpad (a rebadged Palm, in effect), a variety of devices produced by Symbol, the TRGPro from TRG (duh!), the Visor from Handspring, and the upcoming devices from Sony and Apple.
I've got a TRGPro (which I won at PalmSource London) and I love it:-)
I (being Jewish) enjoy wishing my (also Jewish) friends Merry Christmas, in a purely ironic sense. Don't get me wrong, I also have actively Christian friends to whom I wish Merry Christmas sincerely, but living in a pseudo-Christian country, I find it amusing to wish other non-Christians Merry Christmas. On the other hand, I actually do *not* agree with non-Christians doing the tree thing (and similar). Although it is well-known that these were adopted from Pagan traditions, they were adopted by *Christianity*, not Judaism or agnosticism (or any other -ism, AFAIK), so there is no reason for non-Christians to follow them.
And there's no point wishing someone Happy Chanukah now, since Chanukah finished 10 days ago:-)
This, unfortunately, is one of the larger and more worrying misuses of cookies. There are actually a relatively small number of companies online who 'do' banner ads. The large sites (C|net,/., Yahoo, etc.) do their own banners, and smaller sites usually don't have banners, but most medium-sized sites use one of the small number of banner ad agencies.
The problem is that the agency can track you across multiple sites. If you visit www.site1.com, you can only get a cookie which will be sent back to that server, right? WRONG. While you were at www.site1.com, you viewed a banner from ad.doubleclick.net (for example). The problem is that when you visit www.site2.com, which should not be able to 'see' the cookie from www.site1.com, you took another banner from ad.doubleclick.net. This means that Doubleclick can track you between sites, which is a bad thing. I also saw something (this morning, I think, but I can't remember where) saying that companies are sending HTML mail which downloads an image which sets a cookie. The agency then has your e-mail address associated with a cookie, giving them (potentially at least) a lot more information about you. Not a problem for me, of course, since I use Pine for mail:-)
I have no problem at all with certain sites using cookies. I am currently (since earlier on this week) using Junkbuster, and I have it set to allow cookies from Slashdot, LinuxToday, Amazon, and a couple of stock sites. If anyone else wants to send me a cookie, they can ask me and I'll decide on each individual case. At least I have the choice.
Two replies (to myself and to the other replies to my comment above):
I wasn't trying to suggest anything about anyone. The only reason I copied that chunk from the original text is that the crowd here is strongly Linux-leaning, rather than generic tech-leaning, and I thought that comment would be interesting. Not every cool tech person likes Linux, and it would be a bad thing if they did. I'm sure John Lasseter has more interesting tech at his disposal. The other thing is that someone was going to suggest the penguin was a Linux reference sooner or later, so I thought I'd head that off before it started. Ho hum...
It is frustrating to read this kind of thing on this (Eastern) side of the Atlantic, since this film, like most, will take a ridiculously long time to get over here. And, of course, doubly frustrating, since (AFAICT) the nearest digital cinema is in Florida. Arghhh!
There's an interesting story at Salon.com about this, with some nice background info. Amongst the comments in the article are:
And what about the character Ranft gives voice to -- Wheezy, the asthmatic penguin? Did Pixar honcho Steve Jobs intend that as a subliminal reference to the penguin mascot of Linux software? "Linux? What's that? Really, I have no idea what that is. We had an idea for a broken squeaky penguin who had asthma way back on the old 'Toy Story.'
And, to go offtopic, I read it using Sitescooper, a funky off-line web formatting thingy written in Perl, aimed at PalmPilot users.
Of course, one of the biggest problems with buying things over the internet is the problem with returns. I have no problem ordering stuff for myself over the internet, but if I have even the slightest thought that someone may possibly want to return something, chances are, I'll order through Border Books or Barnes and Noble over Amazon.
I'm in the UK, so if I buy from B&N I'm paying trans-Atlantic shipping, so I'm a bit biased. I have bought quite a few books from Amazon(.co.uk and.com) and I have always been happy with the service. I bought The Moat Around Murcheson's Eye from Amazon.co.uk earlier on this year, and when it arrived it was damaged. I sent it back in the same packaging a few days later and waited to hear from them. After a few days, I called them to ask what the deal was, and the customer service bloke was very apologetic. Although he said the return wasn't yet on the system, he offered me a refund or replacement immediately, and the replacement arrived a couple of days later. A few days later (obviously after they had found the parcel I sent) I also got a refund for the postage on the return (about £1.50), which I hadn't asked for and which I wasn't expecting.
So, would you reccommend B&N because they have bricks-and-mortar shops to which you can take returns? Or is there some other reason? If that's the reason, I don't think it's fair: If you want to shop online and rely on the postal service to deliver your goods, you have to be prepared to return your goods by mail too. Unless your nearest bookstore is very near, you're probably going to be able to find a nearer post office anyway, at least from my experience in the UK.
mount -o loop <imagename> <mountpoint> has always worked for me - I've never needed to use the losetup command. As ever, YMMV.
Had a brief look at it this morning (GMT). It's pretty slick, but I think the install is too simple. It leaves out things which I think should be available.
Slashdot Mirror
People like repetition. It's reassuring.
Yes, I know. I've had a very hard week.
The question of free software on closed OS's has come up twice for me recently. I'd like to know your thoughts on these issues.
I write free software (GPL) for PalmOS in my spare time. There is a small, but growing, community of free software authors for PalmOS, and I feel it is important to make an effort to replace some of the (ridiculously-priced, even ignoring the closedness) shareware which is prevalant on this platform. Do you think it's a good idea to work on this kind of thing, when it is unlikely that the PalmOS will ever be freed or (properly) replaced with a free OS? Is it worth working on free software for a non-free platform, when there is a need for the software and a need for it to be free, as opposed to working on free software for a free platform?
Another, similar, issue has recently come up in the PalmOS developer community. About 3 years ago, a free PalmOS development kit based on GCC was released, and it is very popular in the PalmOS developer community - estimates of up to 50% of the developers are using it. This toolkit (version 0.5.0) has now fallen somewhat behind the times, and needed some work, and someone stood up and took over 'ownership' of the toolkit, with the stated intention of producing a newer toolkit based on GCC 2.9x (and feeding the changes back to the GCC maintainers, hopefully for eventual inclusion in the main tree). This work took longer than expected, and before it was completed, Palm Inc. hired the developer to work on it full-time under their auspices. He released it (as version 2.0) earlier on this year and while it (apparently - I haven't actually used it yet) fixes some of the problems, it causes others, and apparently breaks some backwards compatibility. At around the time of this release, someone else (who had never said anything about working on this toolkit before in public, as far as I can tell) announced that he was also working on a modernisation of the toolkit. He released a beta version of his toolkit (version 0.6.0) and has been rather over-enthusiastic in his defence of his version versus the 'official' Palm-sponsored release. The discussion got quite rude at times, with the second developer (the 'owner' of the 0.6.0 release) being quite rude about the design of the 2.0 release, and stating that he felt it was wrong for a Palm employee to work on the GPLed toolkit - that it should be done by a third party so as to keep it independent of the Palm 'party line'.
Anyway, the point of the story is that a large number (probably a majority) of the users of this toolkit are using it on Windows, with the Cygnus Cygwin environment to provide enough of a GNU-ish environment to run the GCC-based toolkit. The 0.6.0 author has stated that he doesn't care about making his toolkit work on Windows, whereas the Palm-employed 2.0 author has treated Windows as something of a priority. My personal feeling is that it is better for Windows users to be using a GCC-based toolkit in a GNU-ish environment (if they cannot be persuaded to move from Windows) than that they use a proprietary toolkit. What are your thoughts?
If this makes no sense, tell me and I'll try to clarify. I haven't bothered naming names above, mainly because they're not important - it's the issue I'm interested in, but the full story is available in various mailing list archives, so it isn't a secret.
I was travelling into London on the Tube yesterday, and an ad for silicon.com caught my eye. It was a picture of a man's head, with a finger held up to his lips, and the slogan "Don't reveal your source!" underneath it. I assumed at the time that it meant "silicon.com is a source of industry knowledge - don't tell people where you get your information", but I'm not so sure that the second (anti-free software/open source) meaning is an accident, now.
Linux Expo 2000 in London 1st/2nd June. I don't know what it's like (I couldn't make it last year), but it's there.
This may be a silly question, but I'm going to ask it anyway: Did (some) of the OGR blocks take a huge amount of time for others, or was it just me? I'm running the client on a Celeron 300A (not a power machine, but a lot faster than the 386 I started running RC5 on) and some of the OGR blocks took over 14 hours. I didn't know we'd done anything like 25% of the 'keyspace', but it looked to me like this project was going to go on for ever, given the speed of my computer.
If the article has to be broken down, surely one comparison of the commercial WPs (StarOffice, Applix and WordPerfect) and one of the free WPs (Abiword, Kword, Klyx) would make more sense, rather than comparing the upcoming fifth release of a commercial WP with the upcoming first release of a free WP. Oh yeah, and neither Abiword nor WordPerfect should really be classed as a stand-alone app - Abiword will be part of Gnome Office, and WordPerfect will be part of WordPerfect Office.
Interesting, but lacking :-(
Check this download from Netscape's developer site. It's example code and documentation for you to plug-in third-party mail and/or news systems. I have Netscape launching Pine with the To: line filled in on my machine, and I don't see why you couldn't get it to launch mutt.
So, this is a negative post about VA & Andover. And it's posted with a very obvious piece of editorialising which tells a very obvious story. VA get to add positive comment to their stories before they get posted. Do Redhat get the right to reply to stories in the headline? Do Penguin get that right? I doubt it.
Alternatively, this is a slightly more subtle attempt to avoid discussion on this subject. By making the headline a mini-feature in itself, a large portion of the discussion will be about Roblimo's comments, rather than about the original story. They're trying to manipulate us!.
</ADVOCATE>
My actual opinion on this? I think the quality of Slashdot has declined somewhat since I first started reading it, which was quite a long time before anyone had heard of Andover. I miss things like the war against using www.slashdot.org instead of slashdot.org aka TDwww(TMS). On the other hand, I have also changed a lot in the time since I started reading here, so it is just as possible that the 'problem' is with me, not Slashdot.
I'm glad to see the guys who put this thing together get their just rewards. I think that the code is finally open, VA are a well-known and well-respected company in the community, and there is certainly no more need to worry now than there was about Andover, and they don't seem to have (directly at least) caused any problems.
This is my normal sig - it just happens to fit this posting well:
vim has always been 'Charityware' - if you use it, you are encouraged to make a donation towards a charity working with orphans in Uganda. On Friday, Bram Moolenaar announced on the vim mailing list that vim had won the award, and that the money would go to that charity.
Which I think is pretty cool.
Now the up-to-date slash code is (finally :-) available, there is no way anything can stop /. from existing. Yeah, the site at slashdot.org could die, and Rob/Hemos/JonKatz/whoever might stop writing for it, but that wouldn't matter too much. Rob et al. put a lot of work into it, but I think /. was mainly the result of a web site being in the right place at the right time. If someone (VA/Microsoft/whoever) took this site down, another one would spring up very quickly, particularly since it is obvious that you can actually make money doing this, as well as having fun and serving the community.
Yeah, okay - I heard this on the radio this morning and it was an instictive response. I didn't think, I hang my head.
:-)
Happy?
since 02/02/1998. That's numbers as opposed to digits.
BTW, posted using Mozilla M13 - damn I'm impressed with this thing
As it happens, there is an article at Byte on exactly this issue at the moment. I don't agree with everything in the article, but it is worth a read.
For a couple of months now. It hasn't been out for much longer than that, and when I asked the author why he hadn't announced it, he told me he wanted it to be out 'in the wild' for a while to iron out any bugs before a full-scale announcement. Apart from a problem at the start of January when calculating the trands resulted in a Palm lock-up (no, not a Y2K problem, it would have happened in any January), it's great.
And I've lost some serious weight while trying out a new cool program for my Palm. How great is that???
To be honest, I don't see much need for a free (speech) replacement for PalmOS. The OS (at least until quite recently) is very closely coupled with the hardware, and Palm are very good to their developers. You can (after filling in the relevent forms) get the source to most of the OS, and the source to all the built-in apps is available under a very free license. One thing in particular would make a free replacement hard - there is no keyboard on the device, so you'd need writing recognition to do most useful things with the device.
One more thing: my GPLed software for the Palm is available at http://www.vmlinuz.org/palmos. There's a barely-written web site downloader (use SiteScooper instead) and LinkDirect (yes, it's a better, GPLed clone of DirectLink), a program for making a quick PPP connection between the Palm serial port and the PC serial port.
The number IV is apparently not used because it clashes (I'm not sure, either the glyph IV or the word/number 4) with a naughty word in some Oriental language. I think it is also something to do with skipping a number to make it obvious that this is a new generation.
:-)
The number VI is apparently not used because it clashes with a naughty word in English.
As for others, the company known as Palm Computing has also released devices called the Pilot and the PalmPilot. The word Pilot is no longer used, apparently because the pen company of the same name (and prior usage) took offence and asked Palm (through the courts, IIRC) to please stop using it.
The other devices using the PalmOS are the IBM Workpad (a rebadged Palm, in effect), a variety of devices produced by Symbol, the TRGPro from TRG (duh!), the Visor from Handspring, and the upcoming devices from Sony and Apple.
I've got a TRGPro (which I won at PalmSource London) and I love it
I (being Jewish) enjoy wishing my (also Jewish) friends Merry Christmas, in a purely ironic sense. Don't get me wrong, I also have actively Christian friends to whom I wish Merry Christmas sincerely, but living in a pseudo-Christian country, I find it amusing to wish other non-Christians Merry Christmas. On the other hand, I actually do *not* agree with non-Christians doing the tree thing (and similar). Although it is well-known that these were adopted from Pagan traditions, they were adopted by *Christianity*, not Judaism or agnosticism (or any other -ism, AFAIK), so there is no reason for non-Christians to follow them.
:-)
:-)
And there's no point wishing someone Happy Chanukah now, since Chanukah finished 10 days ago
Oh, yeah, Merry Christmas everyone!
The problem is that the agency can track you across multiple sites. If you visit www.site1.com, you can only get a cookie which will be sent back to that server, right? WRONG. While you were at www.site1.com, you viewed a banner from ad.doubleclick.net (for example). The problem is that when you visit www.site2.com, which should not be able to 'see' the cookie from www.site1.com, you took another banner from ad.doubleclick.net. This means that Doubleclick can track you between sites, which is a bad thing. I also saw something (this morning, I think, but I can't remember where) saying that companies are sending HTML mail which downloads an image which sets a cookie. The agency then has your e-mail address associated with a cookie, giving them (potentially at least) a lot more information about you. Not a problem for me, of course, since I use Pine for mail :-)
I have no problem at all with certain sites using cookies. I am currently (since earlier on this week) using Junkbuster, and I have it set to allow cookies from Slashdot, LinuxToday, Amazon, and a couple of stock sites. If anyone else wants to send me a cookie, they can ask me and I'll decide on each individual case. At least I have the choice.
- I wasn't trying to suggest anything about anyone. The only reason I copied that chunk from the original text is that the crowd here is strongly Linux-leaning, rather than generic tech-leaning, and I thought that comment would be interesting. Not every cool tech person likes Linux, and it would be a bad thing if they did. I'm sure John Lasseter has more interesting tech at his disposal.
- It is frustrating to read this kind of thing on this (Eastern) side of the Atlantic, since this film, like most, will take a ridiculously long time to get over here. And, of course, doubly frustrating, since (AFAICT) the nearest digital cinema is in Florida. Arghhh!
BTW, nice-looking site you've got there BruceThe other thing is that someone was going to suggest the penguin was a Linux reference sooner or later, so I thought I'd head that off before it started. Ho hum...
And, to go offtopic, I read it using Sitescooper, a funky off-line web formatting thingy written in Perl, aimed at PalmPilot users.
You'd be meaning The Story of Mel then...
Anyone who doesn't know the story should check the BeDope story, the User Friendly story, the segfault story, or one of the stories at /.
I'm in the UK, so if I buy from B&N I'm paying trans-Atlantic shipping, so I'm a bit biased. I have bought quite a few books from Amazon(.co.uk and .com) and I have always been happy with the service. I bought The Moat Around Murcheson's Eye from Amazon.co.uk earlier on this year, and when it arrived it was damaged. I sent it back in the same packaging a few days later and waited to hear from them. After a few days, I called them to ask what the deal was, and the customer service bloke was very apologetic. Although he said the return wasn't yet on the system, he offered me a refund or replacement immediately, and the replacement arrived a couple of days later. A few days later (obviously after they had found the parcel I sent) I also got a refund for the postage on the return (about £1.50), which I hadn't asked for and which I wasn't expecting.
So, would you reccommend B&N because they have bricks-and-mortar shops to which you can take returns? Or is there some other reason? If that's the reason, I don't think it's fair: If you want to shop online and rely on the postal service to deliver your goods, you have to be prepared to return your goods by mail too. Unless your nearest bookstore is very near, you're probably going to be able to find a nearer post office anyway, at least from my experience in the UK.
Had a brief look at it this morning (GMT). It's pretty slick, but I think the install is too simple. It leaves out things which I think should be available.