I loved my Clie... it was so small and handy to have around. But that's a niche that's happily filled by my Pre now. For books I'm extraordinarily pleased with my PRS-505 with the e-ink display. It really is a step up.
If your book isn't page-size agnostic, you're going to get crappy results from PDF support on ANY reader. Nobody has a screen size that's 8.5x11 (maybe your PDF is smaller? paperback sized?). Sony does offer a full-page zoomed-out view (I believe), but that's almost impossible to read. As soon as you start to zoom in and reflow text, you worry about things like charts breaking.
Bottom line, you should be writing your books in some sort of open semantic mark-up format like EPUB, which was designed for this purpose.
I'm tempted to agree, but that requires a major change in the way society lays responsibility for actions. Is a person responsible for his actions if he didn't know better, or *couldn't* know better, because of some mental affliction? What if someone is diagnosed as having a gene that gives them merely a predisposition to certain types of untoward behavior? What happens at all the points between "predisposition" and "uncontrollable urge"? What about civil rights, protected classes? Should we ingrain into law equal treatment for people who make choices based on these predispositions and uncontrollable urges? Where would being homosexual fall into that spectrum?
The very basis of the way we treat each other in society is based on the fact that we have a choice, and being deferential in situations in which people don't. If the distinction between having a choice and not having a choice is a much more gray area and in many cases unprovable (as I agree it likely is), we have some very difficult societal problems to address.
I really don't. FNAL has a huge LHC team: they devote 3 floors of Wilson to supporting the US contingent of the experiment. Any LHC setback is a setback for Fermilab as well.
Aside from the electrical connections, the magnets need to be trained to reach the fields necessary to sufficiently bend a 7TeV beam. The last talk I heard on the status of the magnets was that this was a very non-linear effect. We could probably get to 5, 5.5 with not that much difficulty (again, when the electrical connections are repaired)... but even getting to 6 will take *quite* an investment of down-time. The cost/benefit curve has a very clear kink in it.
Oh, I see... so then Bell can decide for me whether I'm about to see the "right" site?
I'm confused. I don't recall even implying such a thing. I likened Bell to phishers... how can that be an endorsement of their results?
In the event that I was unclear, let me say it more explicitly: when you use user input to do a DNS lookup you can't trust the results. There's typos and typosquatters. So whether or not the DNS server returns the proper error message or resolves to a site is *meaningless* for any piece of software to rely on.
Just like a server that inherently trusts the client is broken, so is any software that makes assumptions about a remote site just because it exists.
Just because a domain exists doesn't mean it's the one you wanted. Think of all those properly registered phishing sites out there, just waiting for a user typo. What's the difference between them and a DNS search redirect? If anything, this highlights the broken behavior of using the (non-)existence of a domain name for anything useful. You really care about whether you got the RIGHT site, not just *a* site.
The GPL gives the end user the right to the source if that end user pays for the app/product. It doesn't guarantee the end user any rights wrt re-deployment on specific commercial platforms beyond the right to the source code.
That's only true for the GPL2 (which I think is what we're talking about here). You'll note the GPL3 has provisions explicitly to address this.
Are you sure? I think the Photoelectric Effect works against you there... You have to get a photon to interact with the body, and the energy of any given 2.4 GHz photon is insufficient to ionize atoms because of Planck's Law. It doesn't matter how many photons are emitted.
When I was a senior in high school, a student started physically assaulting one of the teachers. The teacher didn't fight back because he had been instructed, as the entire faculty had been, to not do so as the school would face a lawsuit if a teacher injured a student.
And it never occurred to the teacher to sue the student for assaulting HIM? And he teaches our children. Swell.
So then nothing is enough, since it would be willful copyright infringment at this point, now that they KNOW they don't have the right to distribute the book. I guess in your eyes that's between them and the publisher and they should break the law and suck up whatever punishment they get hit with... but I don't find that a very practical view.
For sure, Amazon should never have deleted these books and never should have given themselves that ability in the first place (if only for plausible deniability in exactly these cases), but now that the damage is done they can't go back.
If they were really serious about making things right, they'd offer more than the damage they've done, say, $20 gift cards for their REAL, PHYSICAL store so we don't have to trust them not to do this again. And of course, still be liable in exceptional cases like this where further damages were done.
Re:Decent text editor still not included right?
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
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· Score: 1
I like this train of thought, but it's not really as straightforward as that. Many of the things you've listed are more concepts or relationships than text, and can be represented just as well (or better) graphically.
I find the improvement is, when they ARE represented as text, you can use your own customized powerful set of keybindings and macros written in a Turing-complete language with a WIDE degree of hooks expressly designed for manipulating text.
Emacs is an amazing hammer, so it's more appealing to start treating things as nails where you can get away with it.
I have that in 22, but you had to start the server listening from the original emacs process. Is that still the case, or does it start acting as a server by default now?
And I'm not even going to go into how SMS is transmitted...
How can you make those two statements in the same breath? If you know how SMS is transmitted, you know that on the cell networks SMS is NOT the same as data, and incurs them different costs because they use up bandwidth on different channels. Their incompetence, surely, since they've failed to adapt text messaging to make use of the highly prevalent data networks, but still, you can't blame them for pricing different resources in different ways.
How about people stop using that ancient holdover that is SMS in the first place?
The reason for this is simple: Greed and collusion.
There's a hell of a jump. Could it also be incompetence? That infrastructure was designed to carry SMS'es over a control channel for which there is limited bandwidth, instead of a more general-purpose data channel?
There are plans that have decreased costs to the consumer ($10/mo unlimited with Sprint) as even those infrastructure costs went down. Or you could just use your data channel (Twitter and Google Chat have fine apps on all the major new phones).
I wish I were joking, since I have a Pre too. I guess we're not popular enough for 3rd party devs to write apps for, even the open source guys (Spaz aside).
I would agree, but for 3 things: (1) Google Maps (not just the streets, but finding businesses), (2) Being able to pull up addresses and numbers from emails you didn't know you'd need, and (3) Being net-reachable without being tethered to a laptop (maybe not a feature if it's work requesting it, but socially it's pretty damn handy).
In the last month alone, those three things saved my ass a half-dozen times, and were merely useful the rest of the time. I agree it's still kinda ridiculously pricey to get a data plan, but maybe with the increasing popularity, scale and competition will drive it down (Sprint has some nice plans for the Pre).
Sean Kovacs, main developer of GV Mobile, says that he had personal approval for his app from Phil Shiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, last April.
If this bit is true and documented, then sue for lost development time. Apple gave assurances they wouldn't do something, Google committed resources, then Apple did it. Whatever Apple's reasoning here for changing their minds, they can't yank the football away any more than a contest promoter could decide not to give awards to a winner.
Ok, I grant that they'll have capabilities, but my file naming schema may not match what they expect, nor is my metadata exactly the same as theirs. Not showstoppers, granted, but makes their lives difficult if they really wanted to do it. And then there's the fact that these aren't Amazon files, these are my OWN files copied from my OWN computer, that would be outrage and liability on quite a large scale.
But even granting the worst case situation, there's no DRM! I can copy it back from my computer, and even if I can't, I still have the book.
If you're that terribly paranoid about it, buy a Sony Reader. They're not net-connected and you interact with them as if they were a mass storage device. No way to phone home.
Slashdot Mirror
I loved my Clie... it was so small and handy to have around. But that's a niche that's happily filled by my Pre now. For books I'm extraordinarily pleased with my PRS-505 with the e-ink display. It really is a step up.
If your book isn't page-size agnostic, you're going to get crappy results from PDF support on ANY reader. Nobody has a screen size that's 8.5x11 (maybe your PDF is smaller? paperback sized?). Sony does offer a full-page zoomed-out view (I believe), but that's almost impossible to read. As soon as you start to zoom in and reflow text, you worry about things like charts breaking.
Bottom line, you should be writing your books in some sort of open semantic mark-up format like EPUB, which was designed for this purpose.
I'm tempted to agree, but that requires a major change in the way society lays responsibility for actions. Is a person responsible for his actions if he didn't know better, or *couldn't* know better, because of some mental affliction? What if someone is diagnosed as having a gene that gives them merely a predisposition to certain types of untoward behavior? What happens at all the points between "predisposition" and "uncontrollable urge"? What about civil rights, protected classes? Should we ingrain into law equal treatment for people who make choices based on these predispositions and uncontrollable urges? Where would being homosexual fall into that spectrum?
The very basis of the way we treat each other in society is based on the fact that we have a choice, and being deferential in situations in which people don't. If the distinction between having a choice and not having a choice is a much more gray area and in many cases unprovable (as I agree it likely is), we have some very difficult societal problems to address.
I really don't. FNAL has a huge LHC team: they devote 3 floors of Wilson to supporting the US contingent of the experiment. Any LHC setback is a setback for Fermilab as well.
Aside from the electrical connections, the magnets need to be trained to reach the fields necessary to sufficiently bend a 7TeV beam. The last talk I heard on the status of the magnets was that this was a very non-linear effect. We could probably get to 5, 5.5 with not that much difficulty (again, when the electrical connections are repaired)... but even getting to 6 will take *quite* an investment of down-time. The cost/benefit curve has a very clear kink in it.
Oh, I see... so then Bell can decide for me whether I'm about to see the "right" site?
I'm confused. I don't recall even implying such a thing. I likened Bell to phishers... how can that be an endorsement of their results?
In the event that I was unclear, let me say it more explicitly: when you use user input to do a DNS lookup you can't trust the results. There's typos and typosquatters. So whether or not the DNS server returns the proper error message or resolves to a site is *meaningless* for any piece of software to rely on.
Just like a server that inherently trusts the client is broken, so is any software that makes assumptions about a remote site just because it exists.
DNS doctoring is bad for many reason.
Just because a domain exists doesn't mean it's the one you wanted. Think of all those properly registered phishing sites out there, just waiting for a user typo. What's the difference between them and a DNS search redirect? If anything, this highlights the broken behavior of using the (non-)existence of a domain name for anything useful. You really care about whether you got the RIGHT site, not just *a* site.
Because it resembles every second one they find.
Radio Shack customers?
You're no fun. You should meet my friend Donald Draper
The GPL gives the end user the right to the source if that end user pays for the app/product. It doesn't guarantee the end user any rights wrt re-deployment on specific commercial platforms beyond the right to the source code.
That's only true for the GPL2 (which I think is what we're talking about here). You'll note the GPL3 has provisions explicitly to address this.
Are you sure? I think the Photoelectric Effect works against you there... You have to get a photon to interact with the body, and the energy of any given 2.4 GHz photon is insufficient to ionize atoms because of Planck's Law. It doesn't matter how many photons are emitted.
Nice try, Mom, but you won't get me off the Internet *that* easy.
When I was a senior in high school, a student started physically assaulting one of the teachers. The teacher didn't fight back because he had been instructed, as the entire faculty had been, to not do so as the school would face a lawsuit if a teacher injured a student.
And it never occurred to the teacher to sue the student for assaulting HIM? And he teaches our children. Swell.
So then nothing is enough, since it would be willful copyright infringment at this point, now that they KNOW they don't have the right to distribute the book. I guess in your eyes that's between them and the publisher and they should break the law and suck up whatever punishment they get hit with... but I don't find that a very practical view.
For sure, Amazon should never have deleted these books and never should have given themselves that ability in the first place (if only for plausible deniability in exactly these cases), but now that the damage is done they can't go back.
If they were really serious about making things right, they'd offer more than the damage they've done, say, $20 gift cards for their REAL, PHYSICAL store so we don't have to trust them not to do this again. And of course, still be liable in exceptional cases like this where further damages were done.
Oooh, scary post you've got there.
I like this train of thought, but it's not really as straightforward as that. Many of the things you've listed are more concepts or relationships than text, and can be represented just as well (or better) graphically.
I find the improvement is, when they ARE represented as text, you can use your own customized powerful set of keybindings and macros written in a Turing-complete language with a WIDE degree of hooks expressly designed for manipulating text.
Emacs is an amazing hammer, so it's more appealing to start treating things as nails where you can get away with it.
I have that in 22, but you had to start the server listening from the original emacs process. Is that still the case, or does it start acting as a server by default now?
TEXT MESSAGES = DATA ?
And I'm not even going to go into how SMS is transmitted...
How can you make those two statements in the same breath? If you know how SMS is transmitted, you know that on the cell networks SMS is NOT the same as data, and incurs them different costs because they use up bandwidth on different channels. Their incompetence, surely, since they've failed to adapt text messaging to make use of the highly prevalent data networks, but still, you can't blame them for pricing different resources in different ways.
How about people stop using that ancient holdover that is SMS in the first place?
The reason for this is simple: Greed and collusion.
There's a hell of a jump. Could it also be incompetence? That infrastructure was designed to carry SMS'es over a control channel for which there is limited bandwidth, instead of a more general-purpose data channel?
There are plans that have decreased costs to the consumer ($10/mo unlimited with Sprint) as even those infrastructure costs went down. Or you could just use your data channel (Twitter and Google Chat have fine apps on all the major new phones).
Nice! Thank you so much for that link.
Yeah, and how are those 30 apps going for you?
I wish I were joking, since I have a Pre too. I guess we're not popular enough for 3rd party devs to write apps for, even the open source guys (Spaz aside).
I would agree, but for 3 things: (1) Google Maps (not just the streets, but finding businesses), (2) Being able to pull up addresses and numbers from emails you didn't know you'd need, and (3) Being net-reachable without being tethered to a laptop (maybe not a feature if it's work requesting it, but socially it's pretty damn handy).
In the last month alone, those three things saved my ass a half-dozen times, and were merely useful the rest of the time. I agree it's still kinda ridiculously pricey to get a data plan, but maybe with the increasing popularity, scale and competition will drive it down (Sprint has some nice plans for the Pre).
Sean Kovacs, main developer of GV Mobile, says that he had personal approval for his app from Phil Shiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, last April.
If this bit is true and documented, then sue for lost development time. Apple gave assurances they wouldn't do something, Google committed resources, then Apple did it. Whatever Apple's reasoning here for changing their minds, they can't yank the football away any more than a contest promoter could decide not to give awards to a winner.
Ok, I grant that they'll have capabilities, but my file naming schema may not match what they expect, nor is my metadata exactly the same as theirs. Not showstoppers, granted, but makes their lives difficult if they really wanted to do it. And then there's the fact that these aren't Amazon files, these are my OWN files copied from my OWN computer, that would be outrage and liability on quite a large scale.
But even granting the worst case situation, there's no DRM! I can copy it back from my computer, and even if I can't, I still have the book.
If you're that terribly paranoid about it, buy a Sony Reader. They're not net-connected and you interact with them as if they were a mass storage device. No way to phone home.