I find that the more complicated Linux networking setups involve bonding, which is used in enterprise setups to allow you to both aggregate traffic across multiple ethernet links, and to provide automatic failover/failback in case one or more of those links go down.
Is this covered in the book? A Linux networking book that doesn't cover bonding is pretty much worthless to me as a Linux system administrator.
As a consultant who travels with a laptop, I would say I use wireless at client sites no more than 15% of the time. The chance of me showing up with a wireless-only laptop, and being able to get onto the network on the first day.... 0%.
So you bring a frickin' USB ethernet adapter, or just stick with your Macbook.
You are not the target audience for this laptop. Apple has researched the market extremely well. 99% of these will be purchased by college students that use them to take notes, IM, search wikipedia/google, and browse facebook in class. For these type of operations, an ethernet jack and optical drive is totally unnecessary. A 3 pound form factor, bright screen, and thin case most definitely is.
Apple will sell these faster than they can make them. They will be the "must have" notebook for new college students. And, if you've ever priced out sub-notebooks, you know that these are extremely price-competitive compared to the Sonys and other competitors.
If you're not at least given some hope of a worthwhile upcoming raise (typically at your year review, not sooner) start shopping around - but don't quit or burn bridges. Once you've found a good new employer and they're willing to hire you, go back to your boss and say you'd like to stay, but need to have things adjusted.
Sorry, but this is bad advice. The shopping around part is fine... if you're being underpaid, you should find a job that pays what you are worth. The problem is when you go back to your current employer and try to negotiate a higher salary based on the other offer you've received. Most companies view this tactic as extortion, and even if you are successful in negotiating a higher salary from your current job, your manager will remember that you used that tactic, and when layoffs or cuts happen, guess who will be the first to go? That's right, you will. If you are very critical to the operation, of course they'll keep you around for 6 months or so at the higher salary, but only until you can train your replacement, who will be brought in at a lower salary and will take your job once you're "let go due to downsizing."
There are many horror stories about people that have tried to do this and ended up out of a job 6-12 months later. The proper way to handle it is to submit your letter of resignation. If the company really needs you, they may say "is there anything we can do to make you stay?" and at that time, you might mention the possibility of a salary increase. Even if you are successful, remember, you will always be "tainted" to them from that point on, and if there is ever a time they need to let someone go, you'll be the first one they think of.
I think the writing is on the wall that system administrators are going to go the way of the tv repairman.
I call bullshit. I'm an experienced UNIX system administrator (worked on big Sun kit for over 12 years at large telcos and banks), and I have yet to hear of any UNIX administrator in India that knows how to work on large, enterprise servers like Sun Fire 25Ks. Sure, you can outsource the small help-desk and first-tier support, but try finding someone that knows how to properly architect multi-gigabit I/O on a multi-domain system without creating bottlenecks. Sorry, but you just can't do it.
In 5-10 years, there may be a few people in India that know how to do this, but I can pretty much guarantee you they will be making $100 an hour contract, which is pretty much the same rate for a senior UNIX administrator here.
I've even seen big companies like GE outsource their entire UNIX administration team to India, just to have to waste millions of dollars to bring it back to the US when they found out that the Indian equivelant of a "Senior UNIX sysadmin" knows only a few commands like "ls", "cp", "tar", etc.
Sorry, not going to happen... Even if a UNIX sysadmin in India takes a 2 week class on how to properly work on Sun kit, they're not going to have the 12 years of experience that I do. In short, the idea of an Indian sysadmin taking my job is about as laughable as a Mexican bus-boy taking over as head chef of a 4 star french restaurant.
While we are at it, let's pull health insurance companies grubby hands off of health care. Take profit out of health care. That some should profit on the suffering of the sick and injured, and others even INCREASE their suffering, is detestable, but politicos from BOTH parties are happy with it, as long as they get their campaign "contributions".
Yeah, because all doctors love to work for free, and thousands of medical students can't wait to plunk down $150K or more for school so they can be in debt the rest of their natural lives while working for free...
God forbid some poor doctor should want to make an honest living in our free country!
Hail comrade, welcome to the new medical system, where nobody is paid and everyone works for free. We've completely eradicated all disease and suffering. Now everyone is treated at state run death...err...euthansia facilities. You too can be next in line to get "free" medical care.
For instance, especcially in a dual-turner TIVO, they can be a bastard to set up. Why? First you must make sure that just the primary card is in slot 1. Pair the 2 devices (usually will involve giving the card and host id to the cable provider so they can pair them in the controller). Then you may need to force the TIVO to re-scan the channels so that it can attempt to make sure it's now seeing and can decrypt those video feeds. ONCE everything is working perfectly with the first card, THEN you can put the second card into slot 2 and try and get it working by repeating the previous steps. The problem here is that if you start with both cards in the device, the TIVO doesn't like it.
I have an HD Tivo, and I can tell you've had to deal with them before...;) Anyway, what amazes me the most is the complete and total incompetence of the cable TV installers. When I had mine installed (I'm on Cablevision), I had to setup the appointment in advance. I got rescheduled because they wanted a "senior" tech to assist because of the complexity involved. Tivo has tried to make the process as easy as possible, by including a "cheat sheet" that you're supposed to give to the cable installer when he shows up. Well, genius boy shows up and says "I don't need to read that, I've done 20 of these before." After spending 2 hours and going through 4 cable cards and having no success, I was like: "How about we follow the instructions on the page?" Well, I was able to get it working where he could not. The problem was that he was loading both cards at once (first problem). The second problem was that after the card authenticates with the encryption server, it downloads a firmware update and you have to wait about 5-10 minutes for the card to reboot. He wasn't waiting this long and just thought the card had died because it was in the middle of the firmware update process.
Anyway, it shouldn't surprise me that the cable companies don't want to train their people on how to install CableCard. If they had their way we would be forced to buy shitty SA or Motorola STBs and our superior quality Tivos would be SOL.
Personally, I don't think the Tivos suck that much. I think the installers don't know wtf they're doing.
Oh boy, here we go again... Apple hardware is no more (or less) reliable than any other PC H/W from Dell,HP, et al.... All that the additional cost buys you is a Shiny/Glossy box and a Shiny/Glossy OS.
Well, Apple hardware just tends to be decent, as far as notebooks that actually have "real" graphics adapters, and not this onboard Intel graphics... If you get the Macbook Pro, that is. You get decent battery life and a portable size/weight that makes it actually portable, unlike some of the Wintel behemoths that are 10-12 pounds and run only 30 minutes on battery... Well, that's unfair because some of the core 2 get decent battery life, but I'm just saying Apple has great design, and is price competitive if you equip a Dell/Lenovo with similar quality components.
Why not just buy a Mac notebook, put Linux on it, and have the best of both worlds? You get the reliable Apple hardware, and the OS that matches your development environment?
Learn to use tags, idiot. Blockquote tag is there for a reason. Your use of language, where you say "first they say", "then:" makes it look like the second paragraph is in the article. No, it's not in the article at all. She doesn't say she has a 10 year old daughter and she would play shooters with her.
And, if you really would play rated M shooters with your 10 year old daughter you're a terrible parent as well.
Parent seems to think it might be funny to misquote the article for some kind of troll purposes. Read the original article because the author didn't say anything like that.
imagine if all new movies were either endless strings of sequels, or remakes of other movies you've already seen. imagine if all music was watered-down over-produced generic crap. imagine if the most popular video game system were to offer downloads of all their classic titles at great prices. imagine if the dominant operating system was so buggy, incompatible, and slow, that no one wanted to use it.
These guys (disclaimer: I'm not one of them and in fact haven't owned any stock for over 20 years) always say that you should pick a stock with a dividends to price ratio if ten to one or better.
Microsoft, the last I heard, pays no dividends.
You got it wrong. They recommend not purchasing stocks with a Price to Earnings ratio (P/E) of greater than 10. That means the valuation of the stock (total shares outstanding * share price) should not be more than 10 times what they earn. This is pretty good advice as we saw during the.com days. Some.coms were ridiculously overvalued at 50-60 or more P/E. A company that has no products or services, and somehow has stock worth billions is not a very good investment.
Microsoft, for what it's worth, has a P/E of 23.10 when I just checked. It might be overvalued, but it's hard to say. Perhaps the investors feel it's undervalued and that Vista just hasn't taken off yet (I know, I'm laughing just writing that)... who knows?
While I agree with the sentiment, are artists really leaving in "droves?" Other than indie artists maybe never pursuing a label to start with, how many already-signed artists are leaving the labels? Can you list more than 10? More than 20? Even if you listed 1000, I'm sure it would be something like a tiny single digit percentage (or less) of the total artists on labels, hardly qualifying as droves.
They don't need to leave. All that has to happen is that new bands realize they don't need a record label. A MySpace page and digital distribution through iTunes is now all a good band needs to promote themselves.
The thing is, it has been happening this way for the last few years. In about 3 or 4 more years, the only talent that will be on record labels will be oldies... Music from the 90s and older. That will be a smaller and smaller niche as kids find new and interesting music without the help of the marketing whizzes at the record labels telling them what band they should like.
But, you think medicine is bad now...wait till the US govt is in charge. We'll sink under the $$$ and bureacracy that will engender.
Thank you for spouting the same "we don't want the people that run the DMV to run our healthcare" FUD that you hear on Fox News 24/7.
The plain and simple fact of the matter is that all of the proposed mandatory health insurance plans are just that: mandatory health insurance. The government is in no way going to "take over" healthcare and start running hospitals and put all doctors on government payroll. It is ridiculous to think we would just throw out our entire healthcare industry, as it is one of the biggest parts of our US economy.
What the government would do under some of the proposed plans is make health insurance mandatory. That means that every American will be insured. If they can't afford to pay the premiums, they get government help to pay (your tax dollars at work), but if they're working their premium is usually paid partially by their employer and partially by themselves.
The healthcare system stays the same. You can still pick your doctor, pick your hospital. The coverage is mandatory.
Quit spouting the republican FUD about the government taking over all healthcare. It will never happen. The republicans are trying to sell this image of countries like the UK who actually run their own hospitals and hire doctors. This is pretty inefficient, as we've already proven that capitalism works for things like this.
Most reasonable Americans would agree that everyone should have health insurance. The current system for poor people, which is basically, you wait until you're really sick, almost dead, then go to the emergency room for unscheduled, extremely expensive ($$$) healthcare, which you'll never be able to pay the bill for, doesn't work. What does work and is much less costly ($) is to have everyone insured, so that the poor people have the option of going to a regular doctor who might be able to find and resolve health issues early, before they become major emergency room operations that we all have to pay for indirectly (unpaid emergency room bills increase hospital costs, which increases the rate of all healthcare).
But far be it from the Republican and right-wing controlled media to tell you what the healthcare plans are really about. It sounds much more scary and gets more viewers to show some dingy DMV office with lines out the doors and say "POLITICIAN A WANTS TO TURN YOUR HOSPITALS INTO THIS! STORY AT 11!"
On whose side do you think Rand would be here -- the people who produce the music, or folks like us who believe that we deserve to have it for free?
Actually, Rand would be very much against the tactics of the music industry. Things like "taxes on blank media" pretty much fly in the face of Libertarianism and Objectivism. She was also very against companies that lobbied congress to get laws protecting their outdated business models. She would have been against the theft of music and piracy of music however, but also strongly against a tax on all blank media, which is what we have now.
Boycott Apple now. And boycott Amazon too. Do not accept that when you buy software, you in fact license it. Assert your right to play bought media on whatever you feel like, and to buy it through open interfaces not closed proprietary software. And agitate and publicize.
Might as well boycott Microsoft (Xbox360), Sony (PS3), and Nintendo as well. Oh, and boycott all video game developers since they develop for closed systems as well.
Get over yourself dude. Some companies decide to create a "walled-garden" where only approved 3rd party apps can run. This is for two reasons:
1. They want to protect their revenue streams and get a commission from every software sale on their system. Some like Sony (PS3) depend on that because their console is sold at a loss.
2. They want to make sure that the software that runs on their systems has good quality. Apple certainly fits this category, and I don't blame them for wanting to make sure that 3rd party apps don't totally bork millions of people's iPhones.
Oh, and your example of Amazon is stupid because you can put millions of free and unprotected eBooks on it by simply copying them over USB. Of course the software is locked down, but I imagine some hackers will figure out how to load a different build of Linux on it.
Anyway, you might as well boycott all companies and corporations and we can go back to living in caves and banging rocks together to make fire. Ungrateful pretentious snob.
Here in the 2007s, we get to wait 2 hours, strip nekkid, walk through a metal detector, and have a bomb sniffing dog rammed up our asses whenever we go to the airports.
You got the bomb sniffing dog? All I ever get rammed up my ass is the business end of a night stick, and they don't even use lube!
One time she'd had some sort of run-in with the law; "failure to appear" for a speeding ticket or pot or some such nonsense and didn't even know she was wanted. She got tickets to some shindig some friend of her father's was throwing and showed up. The affair had to do with these "top twenty wanted in Sangamon County" lists.
Sorry, but you don't get to be on the top 20 most wanted in the county lists for a speeding ticket, or failure to appear. Usually it's only for a robbery or a crime committed with violence involved, aka armed robbery, or some other financial crime like fraud or bank robbery.
She showed up for the free food and alcohol (Tami's no beanpole and likes to drink) and of course most of the people there were from law enforcement. There was one of the top-20 wanted posters prominently displayed, and she was on it!
Sounds like she got caught by one of those parties they throw to try and catch criminals on their top 10/20 lists. She's probably not telling you the whole truth if she said she only had a speeding ticket or failure to appear.
I'm all for open access, but I find the law problematic. Instead of requiring the journals to make their content available, it requires the researcher to deposit the article in a database. The result is yet another piece of paperwork we have to keep track of instead of doing research, and if we forget to deposit one of our articles, we are now breaking the law.
The only alternative is to publish in open access journals, which is fine in principle. However, for a cash-strapped lab, it can be hard to pay open access fees for several articles a year, even with NIH funding.
Sorry, but I don't have much sympathy for you there. I do believe there should be more NIH and NSF funding in general, but if yo uwant to accept this funding, you already know there are strings attached. One of those strings is that the information and knowledge you gain needs to be available to the general public. If you don't like dealing with this, maybe you should just get private funding from a corporation? Of course, corporate funding usually requires you to publish your results to at least the company providing the funding, so there you go.
Unfortunately, in the real world (tm), most jobs require us to provide at least weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports to our managers about what we've actually been spending our days doing. This is a responsibility most professionals have.
Text search? I'm still using the Palm IIIxe, which goes everywhere with me, does PIM stuff and has full text search on the books I carry in pdb format. Even with regular use, runs a month on 2 AAA batteries. I can read from the backlight screen in the dark, I've got some nice little aps like a graphing calculator. And the pages flip instantly.
Somebody's gonna hafta do a lot of late nights to design something that will convince me to switch.
Have you ever read it for 4 hours in a row? I think your eyes and hands might get tired from squinting at the smaller screen, or from staring into a flourescent light source, or from holding a device that wasn't meant to be held for 4 hours straight. But if it works for you that's great.
I would recommend the Kindle for only one big reason:
- Text search capability
It's hard to believe that in 2007, the latest Sony reader has no ability to search through the text of a book. This is important for technical reference manuals and textbooks, and was a dealbreaker for me. I don't use the Kindle store (other than to purchase one book when I first got it), so I leave the wireless off to save batteries.
I find the Kindle is dead simple to use. Plug it into your computer with USB, drag some Mobipocket, RTF, or TXT files onto it (convert your.PDFs with free Mobipocket creator), and there you go. No DRM necessary, unless you buy books from the Kindle store.
Also, some people will complain about no native PDF support on the Kindle. This is not a bad thing. Sony reader displays PDFs, but shrinks an entire 8.5x11 page down to the size of the tiny screen, so it's almost unreadable! This is why you must convert your PDFs into Mobipocket format first, so that the Kindle can resize the fonts, etc., and it becomes an actually readable e-book, and not a glorified thumbnail viewer.
Also, you forgot to mention that part of the PlaysforSure specification allows media companies to decide when their media will expire off of your computer. So, while an iTunes song I bought 10 years ago will still be playable forever, a song I bought from media company X using PlaysforSure might expire tomorrow...
This is a big distinction, and a huge part of the reason why PlaysforSure never took off. You really don't know if your media will playforsure at all now do you?
This is also part of a growing trend I've noticed with shady companies and governments naming products and laws the exact opposite of what they really are... Clear skies initiative that allows pollution? Healthy forest initiative that means we can clearcut large sections of the forest? Playsforsure that means it really won't play for sure?
Good comment, I agree with most of what you say, but I have to point out one area where you're dead wrong:
Most of those people will give even less of a damn about you in a pinch, than your guildmates in WoW.
In my experience, and yes, I'm in a raiding guild that is currently raiding Black Temple and Hyjal, so I know a little bit about WoW, your guildmates in WoW don't give a flying fuck about you besides what you can do to help them get loot. Loot is pretty much all that matters in WoW, and this can be observed because as soon as one person fucks up and wipes the raid, everybody makes them feel like shit on vent and bitches at them until their self esteem has been taken down about 10 pegs and they feel like/wrists. Also, the guild drama I've seen has led me to believe that the only reason any of these people even spend as much time together as they do is that they want loot. If our guild ever met in real life, we'd discover that there are so many social differences that we don't even get along.
I'm just stating what I found out to be the truth. Guilds stick together, even highly successful guilds like mine, because of a common goal and interest (raiding and getting loot). Take away that common interest, and we're just 25 strangers on vent talking about shit that doesn't interest the other 24.
I like Newegg, but I don't like paying $5 shipping if all I need is one small cable. Rarely have the things they offer free shipping on been the things I actually need.
Well, you can pay $2.50 for a cable from Newegg, plus $5 shipping, or you can pay $20 at Worst Buy or Circuit Shitty. You choose.
CompUSA is the only real computer store near me (in Rochester, NY). Of course there's Best Buy and Circuit City (etc) but the selection was always a lot better at CompUSA. When I needed a hard drive or something in a hurry that was always where I went.
When is Fry's going to make it to the east coast?
CompUSA is for suckers that have more money than brains. They sell crappy components and charge ridiculously high prices for them. Start shopping at Newegg.com, you won't regret it. They have a distribution center in New Jersey also so stuff arrives on the East Coast with free or low cost shipping, usually within 1-2 days.
Also, they don't treat you like a criminal if you need to return something, and actually have good customer service.
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I find that the more complicated Linux networking setups involve bonding, which is used in enterprise setups to allow you to both aggregate traffic across multiple ethernet links, and to provide automatic failover/failback in case one or more of those links go down.
Is this covered in the book? A Linux networking book that doesn't cover bonding is pretty much worthless to me as a Linux system administrator.
You are not the target audience for this laptop. Apple has researched the market extremely well. 99% of these will be purchased by college students that use them to take notes, IM, search wikipedia/google, and browse facebook in class. For these type of operations, an ethernet jack and optical drive is totally unnecessary. A 3 pound form factor, bright screen, and thin case most definitely is.
Apple will sell these faster than they can make them. They will be the "must have" notebook for new college students. And, if you've ever priced out sub-notebooks, you know that these are extremely price-competitive compared to the Sonys and other competitors.
There are many horror stories about people that have tried to do this and ended up out of a job 6-12 months later. The proper way to handle it is to submit your letter of resignation. If the company really needs you, they may say "is there anything we can do to make you stay?" and at that time, you might mention the possibility of a salary increase. Even if you are successful, remember, you will always be "tainted" to them from that point on, and if there is ever a time they need to let someone go, you'll be the first one they think of.
In 5-10 years, there may be a few people in India that know how to do this, but I can pretty much guarantee you they will be making $100 an hour contract, which is pretty much the same rate for a senior UNIX administrator here.
I've even seen big companies like GE outsource their entire UNIX administration team to India, just to have to waste millions of dollars to bring it back to the US when they found out that the Indian equivelant of a "Senior UNIX sysadmin" knows only a few commands like "ls", "cp", "tar", etc.
Sorry, not going to happen... Even if a UNIX sysadmin in India takes a 2 week class on how to properly work on Sun kit, they're not going to have the 12 years of experience that I do. In short, the idea of an Indian sysadmin taking my job is about as laughable as a Mexican bus-boy taking over as head chef of a 4 star french restaurant.
God forbid some poor doctor should want to make an honest living in our free country!
Hail comrade, welcome to the new medical system, where nobody is paid and everyone works for free. We've completely eradicated all disease and suffering. Now everyone is treated at state run death...err...euthansia facilities. You too can be next in line to get "free" medical care.
Anyway, it shouldn't surprise me that the cable companies don't want to train their people on how to install CableCard. If they had their way we would be forced to buy shitty SA or Motorola STBs and our superior quality Tivos would be SOL.
Personally, I don't think the Tivos suck that much. I think the installers don't know wtf they're doing.
Why not just buy a Mac notebook, put Linux on it, and have the best of both worlds? You get the reliable Apple hardware, and the OS that matches your development environment?
Learn to use tags, idiot. Blockquote tag is there for a reason. Your use of language, where you say "first they say", "then:" makes it look like the second paragraph is in the article. No, it's not in the article at all. She doesn't say she has a 10 year old daughter and she would play shooters with her.
And, if you really would play rated M shooters with your 10 year old daughter you're a terrible parent as well.
Parent seems to think it might be funny to misquote the article for some kind of troll purposes. Read the original article because the author didn't say anything like that.
Microsoft, for what it's worth, has a P/E of 23.10 when I just checked. It might be overvalued, but it's hard to say. Perhaps the investors feel it's undervalued and that Vista just hasn't taken off yet (I know, I'm laughing just writing that)... who knows?
The thing is, it has been happening this way for the last few years. In about 3 or 4 more years, the only talent that will be on record labels will be oldies... Music from the 90s and older. That will be a smaller and smaller niche as kids find new and interesting music without the help of the marketing whizzes at the record labels telling them what band they should like.
The plain and simple fact of the matter is that all of the proposed mandatory health insurance plans are just that: mandatory health insurance. The government is in no way going to "take over" healthcare and start running hospitals and put all doctors on government payroll. It is ridiculous to think we would just throw out our entire healthcare industry, as it is one of the biggest parts of our US economy.
What the government would do under some of the proposed plans is make health insurance mandatory. That means that every American will be insured. If they can't afford to pay the premiums, they get government help to pay (your tax dollars at work), but if they're working their premium is usually paid partially by their employer and partially by themselves.
The healthcare system stays the same. You can still pick your doctor, pick your hospital. The coverage is mandatory.
Quit spouting the republican FUD about the government taking over all healthcare. It will never happen. The republicans are trying to sell this image of countries like the UK who actually run their own hospitals and hire doctors. This is pretty inefficient, as we've already proven that capitalism works for things like this.
Most reasonable Americans would agree that everyone should have health insurance. The current system for poor people, which is basically, you wait until you're really sick, almost dead, then go to the emergency room for unscheduled, extremely expensive ($$$) healthcare, which you'll never be able to pay the bill for, doesn't work. What does work and is much less costly ($) is to have everyone insured, so that the poor people have the option of going to a regular doctor who might be able to find and resolve health issues early, before they become major emergency room operations that we all have to pay for indirectly (unpaid emergency room bills increase hospital costs, which increases the rate of all healthcare).
But far be it from the Republican and right-wing controlled media to tell you what the healthcare plans are really about. It sounds much more scary and gets more viewers to show some dingy DMV office with lines out the doors and say "POLITICIAN A WANTS TO TURN YOUR HOSPITALS INTO THIS! STORY AT 11!"
Get over yourself dude. Some companies decide to create a "walled-garden" where only approved 3rd party apps can run. This is for two reasons:
1. They want to protect their revenue streams and get a commission from every software sale on their system. Some like Sony (PS3) depend on that because their console is sold at a loss.
2. They want to make sure that the software that runs on their systems has good quality. Apple certainly fits this category, and I don't blame them for wanting to make sure that 3rd party apps don't totally bork millions of people's iPhones.
Oh, and your example of Amazon is stupid because you can put millions of free and unprotected eBooks on it by simply copying them over USB. Of course the software is locked down, but I imagine some hackers will figure out how to load a different build of Linux on it.
Anyway, you might as well boycott all companies and corporations and we can go back to living in caves and banging rocks together to make fire. Ungrateful pretentious snob.
Unfortunately, in the real world (tm), most jobs require us to provide at least weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports to our managers about what we've actually been spending our days doing. This is a responsibility most professionals have.
I would recommend the Kindle for only one big reason:
.PDFs with free Mobipocket creator), and there you go. No DRM necessary, unless you buy books from the Kindle store.
- Text search capability
It's hard to believe that in 2007, the latest Sony reader has no ability to search through the text of a book. This is important for technical reference manuals and textbooks, and was a dealbreaker for me. I don't use the Kindle store (other than to purchase one book when I first got it), so I leave the wireless off to save batteries.
I find the Kindle is dead simple to use. Plug it into your computer with USB, drag some Mobipocket, RTF, or TXT files onto it (convert your
Also, some people will complain about no native PDF support on the Kindle. This is not a bad thing. Sony reader displays PDFs, but shrinks an entire 8.5x11 page down to the size of the tiny screen, so it's almost unreadable! This is why you must convert your PDFs into Mobipocket format first, so that the Kindle can resize the fonts, etc., and it becomes an actually readable e-book, and not a glorified thumbnail viewer.
Also, you forgot to mention that part of the PlaysforSure specification allows media companies to decide when their media will expire off of your computer. So, while an iTunes song I bought 10 years ago will still be playable forever, a song I bought from media company X using PlaysforSure might expire tomorrow...
This is a big distinction, and a huge part of the reason why PlaysforSure never took off. You really don't know if your media will playforsure at all now do you?
This is also part of a growing trend I've noticed with shady companies and governments naming products and laws the exact opposite of what they really are... Clear skies initiative that allows pollution? Healthy forest initiative that means we can clearcut large sections of the forest? Playsforsure that means it really won't play for sure?
I'm just stating what I found out to be the truth. Guilds stick together, even highly successful guilds like mine, because of a common goal and interest (raiding and getting loot). Take away that common interest, and we're just 25 strangers on vent talking about shit that doesn't interest the other 24.
Also, they don't treat you like a criminal if you need to return something, and actually have good customer service.