Unfortunately, I can't find very good information online on site licenses for proprietary software. How much does a site-license for Endnote cost? What about a site license for MS Office for 2,000 computers?
It doesn't surprise me that you can't find good information about this. Even if you found valid pricing for a medium-sized business, I doubt that universities have the same pricing. Universities themselves also negotiate directly with Microsoft (at least the larger ones do), leading to differences in pricing and terms. Unis also often negotiate to obtain student pricing on products like Office. For example:
The real question is, if you're "in a position to potentially influence future software purchasing decisions", how do you not have access to the current expenditures on software licensing? What you really need are current expenditures and knowledge about when the current contract expires.
My first thought (after, "it's a dehumidifier") was that combined with a nice array of solar panels this could be a self-sustaining water supply in remote areas.
Then I read the article to find:
The mill ceases to be effective below about 30 per cent relative humidity levels[...]
which rules out use in places where water is most hard to obtain. There's plenty of water in most places where humans live; the trouble is usually that it's undrinkable because of its salt content (ocean/sea water) or because it will make you sick. Desalination is a more efficient solution for the former and water filtration is more efficient for the latter.
That said, there's probably some small market for these things. The claim that the company "hopes will become the first mainstream household appliance to have been invented since the microwave" seems over the top.
When my contract expires (early next year), I'll be in the market for a new phone and plan. This time around, the prepaid plans I've been seeing might actually be a better deal than what I've been paying.
The trouble is, prepaid phones seem pretty crappy on average. I have a Motorola Razr which I'd likely keep, but sadly it's CDMA (Verizon) so I can't stick a prepaid SIM into it. At the same time, I wouldn't mind ditching my separate mp3 player and having a phone capable of using the wifi I have available in many places. That all points to "smartphones", which can be really expensive without a 2 year plan.
Buying an unlocked phone with a decent OS for $200 and buying some cheap flash might be a good solution. Or, if the hardware sucks and the OS is poorly adapted to it, it might be a frustrating experience. Time will tell, but I'm not anxious to become an early adopter here.
For me, this would be more useful if it used https to gmail. The article, of course, is just one step shy of speculation (and why not link to the original blog post with more information?).
T-Mobile is in a decent position with the next gen of smart phones. I've seen their "hotspots" more commonly than other carriers. Combine a wireless plan with their hotspot plan (which appears to be a little pricey at $20/mo with phone service) and you've got cell coverage most places and 802.11 coverage many places.
Still, I'm not likely to get a data plan myself. A nice (open) phone that can use 802.11 and get email for "free" sounds pretty good to me.
Having just purchased a T61 (as it was being discontinued), I suspect they have good reasons for not offering Linux right now.
The new T400/T500 use Intel's newest wireless chipset (Wifi 5100), which wasn't supported under Linux at the time of launch (early August). Intel announced support on August 14th, and as far as I know, it's not supported in any stable release of any major distribution. This will change in the coming months, of course, but it makes sense that there's no Linux option now.
The video card is in a similar situation. The laptops with discrete graphics also have integrated graphics which are switchable via driver (for power savings). As far as I know, this switching isn't implemented at all in X and I don't know if you can disable one or the other card. If you order a version with only integrated graphics, I believe it's supported only by the latest version of the intel driver (which isn't yet packaged for many distributions).
Even though I use my T61 for Linux, I still bought a Vista Home version for three reasons: 1.) Every so often I like to have Windows for something, 2.) The hardware options for the Linux version were crippled - slower processor line, etc. and 3.) OpenSuse isn't my distro of choice anyway. You'd have to buy the dock separately (no big deal), because the support for it under Linux isn't official (and it took some time to get things to work reasonably well for me).
Lenovo also isn't offering the latest version of the Thinkpad T/X series (T400, T500, X200) in Linux, yet. I imagine the primary reason is that Intel hasn't yet written drivers for the Intel 5100 wireless chipset.
As a person who uses annotation heavily (I use xournal), I have never figured out a way to *save* the annotations one makes in okular.
okular saves its annotations based on the filename in your ~/.kde (or ~/.kde4) directory in XML files. This has limitations - you must label your files uniquely, and since the annotations are not embedded in the PDF it's messier to share annotations between people or computers. Still, it's a start. My problems with it have been some rendering glitches and the inability to recognize two-column formats when highlighting more than one line.
I'm a big KDE fan, and I've been looking forward to KDE 4 for some time. The volume of complaints about KDE 4.0 surprised me; it seemed fairly clear that 4.0 was about getting a usable but not feature-complete release out so that application developers could target the new platform. By feature complete, I mean supporting all the options that KDE 3.5 has, which blows away every other desktop environment I've ever used. This is, of course, by design, as Mac OS X and GNOME are designed with sensible defaults and a fairly limited set of options.
I think Fedora may have made a mistake in defaulting to KDE 4.0 in the latest release; the KDE folks could perhaps have made the release more explicitly a "technology preview" release. Kubuntu had the right idea - offer it in the repository, but leave the default at 3.5. This allowed me to try out okular, the new document reader (which rocks, btw - finally a decent non-Adobe PDF reader which supports annotations, though they could still use a little work). But having read the early release info, I knew that KDE 4.0 wasn't for me, so I haven't tried it.
The new release brings the kdepim apps to the new KDE libs. Unfortunately, Amarok is on a separate release schedule, so we still have to wait there. For those that use KOffice, that too will be released later in the year, IIRC.
This article [tomshardware.com] is about a year old, but none of the drives listed give you throughput greater than 100 MB/s. And that list includes 10k RPM drives.
Correction: One drive of about a dozen gives 102 MB/s read performance, a WD Velociraptor which is 10k RPM.
Current drives easily doo 100MB/s and I would be surprised if this drive can do 120-140MB/s.
Got a source for that? I've just installed two Seagate SATA 750G drives with 16 MB of cache each in a mirrored config, and I get sustained read performance in the neighborhood of 60-65 MB/s. And mirroring should speed up read performance relative to a single drive. Write performance is about 25 MB/s (tested using bonnie++). These numbers are a significant improvement over the PATA 200G and 120G drives that they replaced, but not matching the relative increase in capacity (nearly 4x).
This article is about a year old, but none of the drives listed give you throughput greater than 100 MB/s. And that list includes 10k RPM drives.
They allow their customers to enter their CD key on the website and download the entire game (useful if you bought the PC version and now want to play on a Mac),
Does this exist for Starcraft? If so, I can't find a link. The OS X installer takes your CD key and asks for the Brood War CD, but it doesn't like my Windows-only version of Brood War.
Come on, folks! It's News for Nerds, you should know better!
The New York Times has taken to turning acronyms into proper nouns, e.g. Nafta. Drives me nuts, but where the NYT goes, much of journalism follows sooner or later.
Take a cotton ball, soak it in isopropyl rubbing alcohol 70% concentration (commonly available at drugstore), squeeze some of the alcohol out so you aren't just dribbling it all over, and then rub down the keyboard, mousepad, screen, case etc with the cotton ball.
All pharmacies will sell isopropyl prep pads containing with a 70% concentration. They're for people who need to self-administer injections, and they come individually wrapped in large (100 count) boxes quite inexpensively.
Re:Why doesn't Google just produce their own shows
on
TV and Movies On YouTube?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Google has more than enough money to develop their own shows, or just outright purchase an existing major show like House or The Office.
Google does not want to get into the business of "content creation". They make their money being the access portal (one way or another) to other people's content. Whether that's through Google Search/News/etc.
As soon as they enter the content market (whether that be for entertainment television, news of any sort, books, or music), they will make competitors out of other content companies. These companies will fight (or fight harder) Google's push to get all content indexed. The current fight for this is with Google books, scanning the entire book to make it searchable and allowing a reasonable portion of the book to be viewed "free".
As Google pushes the limits of fair use (which, IMHO, I think is a good thing), the last thing they want to do is antagonize the content producers. That means sticking with the script of, "Look, we can help bring more consumers to your products by having them find you through us". Becoming a competitor to these companies weakens that argument substantially; they think Google will give preferential treatment to their own content (which they probably would).
On the one hand, we have a large fraction of the population who are happy with their laptop speakers and 128 kbit mp3s on their ipods with the earbuds that come with them. Let me be the first to say that in many situations that's just fine; I have a cheap pair of earbuds on my mp3/ogg player because I tend to listen to podcasts or music in environments with enough noise that I wouldn't tell the difference.
On the other hand, we have the audiophile crowd. People who spend insane amounts of money on wiring, power source "cleaners", etc. There are plenty of people who can tell and appreciate the difference between a cheap setup and a decent one, but most of us have budgets. As soon as you move beyond the standard offerings at your local Best Buy, you enter the realm of not knowing whether the reviews you're reading are from people with a clue or just "audiophiles" who think they hear a difference.
I know, I know, the best way to judge audio equipment is to listen to it yourself. Of course, you run the risk of falling into the trap of thinking you hear a difference when you couldn't if you were doing a blind test.
What I'd like to see is a reputable, audio-focused location which bases its comparisons on objective criteria. For example, I find that dpreview does a pretty decent job laying out the pros and cons of camera equipment. Cooks Illustrated takes a "test everything" approach to creating recipes and testing equipment. Are either perfect? No, but I trust their results more than reviews I see for audio equipment. Audio is subjective by nature, but so is taste; Cooks Illustrated handles this by having blind tasting panels; it'd be cool to see the same approach for audio equipment. Perhaps something like this already exists, but I haven't come across it.
The name of the mission is Solar Probe+; I can't decide whether a name like Icarus would be more appropriate. Then again, naming your project after something that burns up might not be the best idea.
Of course, when the mission is done I would expect them to send the craft into the sun.
That's true mainly in computer science, mathematics, physics, etc. I see little LaTeX being used in the life and social sciences. Unfortunately, the de facto standard for those really is microsoft word documents.
LaTeX is widely used in economics, probably more than word processors in general. It's easy to spot with working paper versions of papers; authors tend to leave the LaTeX default fonts and heading styles.
I've also noticed a significant trend away from PowerPoint towards Beamer for presentations. From what I understand, in the physics world, PowerPoint still reigns for presentations (and even poster making!).
I'm tempted by one of these, being a Netflix subscriber who doesn't use the streaming service at all (I use Linux and Mac OS X). Since this thing runs Linux, I suspect that Netflix is offering their videos in a different form than the normal desktop version, perhaps even without DRM. It's my understanding that the reason there is no Mac client is because the MS-designed codec/DRM is not available for OS X.
It's also tempting to get one of these for these for what the future might bring. Netflix could up their quality and this device is supposed to theoretically do up to 720p. It doesn't seem unreasonable for them to implement streaming from local sources (especially things like music). Still, I don't want to buy a device and end up disappointed when they don't do anything with the feature set. I've been burned by that before, with an iriver mp3 player a few years back that was supposed to add ID3 database capability to a firmware update. It never came.
The one thing you probably can be guaranteed of is more movies from Netflix. It'd be interesting to know which movies/shows they've tried but have been unable to get the digital rights for. The rate of growth of the movie database will have to slow at some point; let's hope it's not anytime soon.
Before I get this, I need to hook up a Windows computer to my internet connection and see whether I get the "best" video quality from my DSL. The complaints I've seen about Netflix video quality are often due to people not being able to sustain the highest quality download. Since we already seem to be right around the max of DSL/cable modem speeds to get in the realm of DVD 480p quality, any HD movies will likely need some serious caching capability or really nasty compression. I'd rather have low-compression 480p than high-compression 720p, but that's because I don't have an HDTV.
It's too bad the cable and phone companies are competing in the streaming movie segment; it'd be nice to have Netflix mirrors sitting at my ISP, but that doesn't seem too likely. It's also unfortunate that without some sort of net neutrality agreement, my ISP could make Netflix streaming all but useless quite easily.
Still, for $99, it shouldn't be too hard to get your money's worth. They certainly priced it right.
i repeat my reply from above: the main reason gnewsense exists is that gobuntu and debian both have kernels with binary blobs in them.
It's my understanding and experience that all the video blobs are packaged separately in Ubuntu, and not distributed by Debian (last I checked). From reading the other responses, I'm getting the impression that these binary blobs you're referring to extend to some firmware and such.
If that's the case, fine. Why not just offer an alternative set of kernel packages? It would not be hard at all to just offer an alternative repository which replaces the "offending" Ubuntu packages with free ones. Of course, the FSF's reaction is that simply offering non-free software in your repository is unacceptable; this is what I think most of the/. responders find ridiculous.
Also, are these firmware blobs part of the vanilla Linux source tree? If they aren't, then those concerned so much with free software (and the article claims this will mostly be developers and hardware testers) can simply install from source. I used to do it, as did most Linux users back before the default kernel packages worked as well as they do now.
All I'm saying is that if you have time on your hands and your goal is to develop and test free software in a "pure" environment, there are more efficient ways of doing that than replicating an entire distribution. Debian is darned close right now; just offer a set of kernel packages in another repository and don't use non-free. If you want to audit every file of source, great; I bet the Debian people would appreciate it and move the software to non-free or develop a replacement.
gNewSense sounds like Ubuntu made to be Debian without the non-free parameter in sources.list. No binary video blobs, fine. Firefox? gNewSense replaces it with Epiphany, while Debian renames it because of trademark issues (specifically, you can't fork Firefox without calling it something else). Debian's course seems idealogical enough already, gNewSense is just over the top, IMO.
The article claims that one benefit of gNewSense is that it is a distribution the FSF can get fully behind. If I recall, the FSF won't endorse Debian because they offer non-free if you enable it in their repositories. That just seems like hairsplitting to me. I can fully understand the desire to have free software/open source replacements and encouraging development of them, but I fail to see how gNewSense achieves that any better than what we had. In Debian you have to go out of your way to get non-free software. In Ubuntu it's fairly straightforward to avoid it if you want to. Is it really worth a distribution with perhaps the worst name I've ever heard for software?
January 25, 1996: "Whether they stand alone or are acquired, Apple as we know it is cooked. It's so classic. It's so sad."
I suppose Apple as we knew it in 1996 is dead, but how many people really miss that Apple? By January 2001 Apple was on the rebound, 3 years after introducing the iMac and about to release Mac OS X 10.0.
I don't think that's what Forrester had in mind, though. I'll take any such company-specific predictions with a grain of salt.
'Course, being a miser and a logical git, it's all down to TPCs being considerably cheaper than most ebook gadgets, and having a lot more functionality.
Once there's an ebook reader that costs the same as a decent TPC and can do the same things as a TPC, then I'll be happy. So happy in fact that I'll politely refuse to buy it, because TPCs will also have become better by then.
I agree that at this point tablets look like a better bang for the buck, at least for me. These ebooks though blow away tablets in terms of battery life (from maybe a dozen hours with WiFi use to weeks of just reading, according to people here). Also, though I haven't seen one in person, I've heard that the eink screens are really nice on the eyes.
Even though the Iliad is $700, I can't point to a new tablet PC that's cheaper than that. The cheapest I know about is the consumer HP line starting at $900. For my next laptop I'm looking at the Thinkpad line, and the X series tablet starts about $1500 (while the X61 series non-tablet starts about $1100). I think to beat $700 on a (full-featured) tablet you'd have to go used, but I'm definitely interested if you know of something else.
I had a completely opposite reaction to the price when I read about the Nokia N800. Full web browser, WiFi, 4" screen (bigger than ipod touch, significantly smaller than most ebooks) was being sold on Amazon for about $210 last week (they don't appear to sell them directly anymore). The new version adds a keyboard and GPS and goes for about $400. Still, $200 w/ WiFi seems like a much better price point. The full web browser is more useful than the Kindle, and the price is far and away better than the Iliad, provided the screen is big enough. Considering I've used a few Handspring/Palm-based devices as ebook readers before, I'm sure this Nokia thing could work for some people.
Neat stuff. Still, I'd probably only be willing to pay about $300-400 for the Iliad's functionality, not $700 (I'd want WiFi). The cost of the eink screens needs to come down quite a bit so we get low-end readers in the $100-200 range and $300+ occupied by the really hackable ones like the Iliad.
Regarding Wikipedia, the Kindle has a distinct advantage over this: free access to Wikipedia through the cell phone networks rather than WiFi. That almost completely negates the need for an offline (especially if crippled) version. I still think the Kindle is too expensive for what it gives you at this point, but the tie to the cell phone network for no monthly fee was a really good idea. It's hard to imagine any of the smaller ebook players working out a similar agreement.
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It doesn't surprise me that you can't find good information about this. Even if you found valid pricing for a medium-sized business, I doubt that universities have the same pricing. Universities themselves also negotiate directly with Microsoft (at least the larger ones do), leading to differences in pricing and terms. Unis also often negotiate to obtain student pricing on products like Office. For example:
University of Wisconsin Office 2007 Enterprise: $72
University of Michigan Office 2007 Enterprise: $47
The real question is, if you're "in a position to potentially influence future software purchasing decisions", how do you not have access to the current expenditures on software licensing? What you really need are current expenditures and knowledge about when the current contract expires.
Not quite. Inflation from Jan 1999 to Nov 2008 (latest available) was about 29.3% (BLS CPI data). So $1000 in 1999 would be about $1293 today.
I disagree.
My first thought (after, "it's a dehumidifier") was that combined with a nice array of solar panels this could be a self-sustaining water supply in remote areas.
Then I read the article to find:
which rules out use in places where water is most hard to obtain. There's plenty of water in most places where humans live; the trouble is usually that it's undrinkable because of its salt content (ocean/sea water) or because it will make you sick. Desalination is a more efficient solution for the former and water filtration is more efficient for the latter.
That said, there's probably some small market for these things. The claim that the company "hopes will become the first mainstream household appliance to have been invented since the microwave" seems over the top.
When my contract expires (early next year), I'll be in the market for a new phone and plan. This time around, the prepaid plans I've been seeing might actually be a better deal than what I've been paying.
The trouble is, prepaid phones seem pretty crappy on average. I have a Motorola Razr which I'd likely keep, but sadly it's CDMA (Verizon) so I can't stick a prepaid SIM into it. At the same time, I wouldn't mind ditching my separate mp3 player and having a phone capable of using the wifi I have available in many places. That all points to "smartphones", which can be really expensive without a 2 year plan.
Buying an unlocked phone with a decent OS for $200 and buying some cheap flash might be a good solution. Or, if the hardware sucks and the OS is poorly adapted to it, it might be a frustrating experience. Time will tell, but I'm not anxious to become an early adopter here.
For me, this would be more useful if it used https to gmail. The article, of course, is just one step shy of speculation (and why not link to the original blog post with more information?).
T-Mobile is in a decent position with the next gen of smart phones. I've seen their "hotspots" more commonly than other carriers. Combine a wireless plan with their hotspot plan (which appears to be a little pricey at $20/mo with phone service) and you've got cell coverage most places and 802.11 coverage many places.
Still, I'm not likely to get a data plan myself. A nice (open) phone that can use 802.11 and get email for "free" sounds pretty good to me.
Having just purchased a T61 (as it was being discontinued), I suspect they have good reasons for not offering Linux right now.
The new T400/T500 use Intel's newest wireless chipset (Wifi 5100), which wasn't supported under Linux at the time of launch (early August). Intel announced support on August 14th, and as far as I know, it's not supported in any stable release of any major distribution. This will change in the coming months, of course, but it makes sense that there's no Linux option now.
The video card is in a similar situation. The laptops with discrete graphics also have integrated graphics which are switchable via driver (for power savings). As far as I know, this switching isn't implemented at all in X and I don't know if you can disable one or the other card. If you order a version with only integrated graphics, I believe it's supported only by the latest version of the intel driver (which isn't yet packaged for many distributions).
Even though I use my T61 for Linux, I still bought a Vista Home version for three reasons: 1.) Every so often I like to have Windows for something, 2.) The hardware options for the Linux version were crippled - slower processor line, etc. and 3.) OpenSuse isn't my distro of choice anyway. You'd have to buy the dock separately (no big deal), because the support for it under Linux isn't official (and it took some time to get things to work reasonably well for me).
Lenovo also isn't offering the latest version of the Thinkpad T/X series (T400, T500, X200) in Linux, yet. I imagine the primary reason is that Intel hasn't yet written drivers for the Intel 5100 wireless chipset.
okular saves its annotations based on the filename in your ~/.kde (or ~/.kde4) directory in XML files. This has limitations - you must label your files uniquely, and since the annotations are not embedded in the PDF it's messier to share annotations between people or computers. Still, it's a start. My problems with it have been some rendering glitches and the inability to recognize two-column formats when highlighting more than one line.
I'm a big KDE fan, and I've been looking forward to KDE 4 for some time. The volume of complaints about KDE 4.0 surprised me; it seemed fairly clear that 4.0 was about getting a usable but not feature-complete release out so that application developers could target the new platform. By feature complete, I mean supporting all the options that KDE 3.5 has, which blows away every other desktop environment I've ever used. This is, of course, by design, as Mac OS X and GNOME are designed with sensible defaults and a fairly limited set of options.
I think Fedora may have made a mistake in defaulting to KDE 4.0 in the latest release; the KDE folks could perhaps have made the release more explicitly a "technology preview" release. Kubuntu had the right idea - offer it in the repository, but leave the default at 3.5. This allowed me to try out okular, the new document reader (which rocks, btw - finally a decent non-Adobe PDF reader which supports annotations, though they could still use a little work). But having read the early release info, I knew that KDE 4.0 wasn't for me, so I haven't tried it.
The new release brings the kdepim apps to the new KDE libs. Unfortunately, Amarok is on a separate release schedule, so we still have to wait there. For those that use KOffice, that too will be released later in the year, IIRC.
Correction: One drive of about a dozen gives 102 MB/s read performance, a WD Velociraptor which is 10k RPM.
Got a source for that? I've just installed two Seagate SATA 750G drives with 16 MB of cache each in a mirrored config, and I get sustained read performance in the neighborhood of 60-65 MB/s. And mirroring should speed up read performance relative to a single drive. Write performance is about 25 MB/s (tested using bonnie++). These numbers are a significant improvement over the PATA 200G and 120G drives that they replaced, but not matching the relative increase in capacity (nearly 4x).
This article is about a year old, but none of the drives listed give you throughput greater than 100 MB/s. And that list includes 10k RPM drives.
Does this exist for Starcraft? If so, I can't find a link. The OS X installer takes your CD key and asks for the Brood War CD, but it doesn't like my Windows-only version of Brood War.
The New York Times has taken to turning acronyms into proper nouns, e.g. Nafta. Drives me nuts, but where the NYT goes, much of journalism follows sooner or later.
All pharmacies will sell isopropyl prep pads containing with a 70% concentration. They're for people who need to self-administer injections, and they come individually wrapped in large (100 count) boxes quite inexpensively.
Google does not want to get into the business of "content creation". They make their money being the access portal (one way or another) to other people's content. Whether that's through Google Search/News/etc.
As soon as they enter the content market (whether that be for entertainment television, news of any sort, books, or music), they will make competitors out of other content companies. These companies will fight (or fight harder) Google's push to get all content indexed. The current fight for this is with Google books, scanning the entire book to make it searchable and allowing a reasonable portion of the book to be viewed "free".
As Google pushes the limits of fair use (which, IMHO, I think is a good thing), the last thing they want to do is antagonize the content producers. That means sticking with the script of, "Look, we can help bring more consumers to your products by having them find you through us". Becoming a competitor to these companies weakens that argument substantially; they think Google will give preferential treatment to their own content (which they probably would).
On the one hand, we have a large fraction of the population who are happy with their laptop speakers and 128 kbit mp3s on their ipods with the earbuds that come with them. Let me be the first to say that in many situations that's just fine; I have a cheap pair of earbuds on my mp3/ogg player because I tend to listen to podcasts or music in environments with enough noise that I wouldn't tell the difference.
On the other hand, we have the audiophile crowd. People who spend insane amounts of money on wiring, power source "cleaners", etc. There are plenty of people who can tell and appreciate the difference between a cheap setup and a decent one, but most of us have budgets. As soon as you move beyond the standard offerings at your local Best Buy, you enter the realm of not knowing whether the reviews you're reading are from people with a clue or just "audiophiles" who think they hear a difference.
I know, I know, the best way to judge audio equipment is to listen to it yourself. Of course, you run the risk of falling into the trap of thinking you hear a difference when you couldn't if you were doing a blind test.
What I'd like to see is a reputable, audio-focused location which bases its comparisons on objective criteria. For example, I find that dpreview does a pretty decent job laying out the pros and cons of camera equipment. Cooks Illustrated takes a "test everything" approach to creating recipes and testing equipment. Are either perfect? No, but I trust their results more than reviews I see for audio equipment. Audio is subjective by nature, but so is taste; Cooks Illustrated handles this by having blind tasting panels; it'd be cool to see the same approach for audio equipment. Perhaps something like this already exists, but I haven't come across it.
The name of the mission is Solar Probe+; I can't decide whether a name like Icarus would be more appropriate. Then again, naming your project after something that burns up might not be the best idea.
Of course, when the mission is done I would expect them to send the craft into the sun.
LaTeX is widely used in economics, probably more than word processors in general. It's easy to spot with working paper versions of papers; authors tend to leave the LaTeX default fonts and heading styles.
I've also noticed a significant trend away from PowerPoint towards Beamer for presentations. From what I understand, in the physics world, PowerPoint still reigns for presentations (and even poster making!).
I'm tempted by one of these, being a Netflix subscriber who doesn't use the streaming service at all (I use Linux and Mac OS X). Since this thing runs Linux, I suspect that Netflix is offering their videos in a different form than the normal desktop version, perhaps even without DRM. It's my understanding that the reason there is no Mac client is because the MS-designed codec/DRM is not available for OS X.
It's also tempting to get one of these for these for what the future might bring. Netflix could up their quality and this device is supposed to theoretically do up to 720p. It doesn't seem unreasonable for them to implement streaming from local sources (especially things like music). Still, I don't want to buy a device and end up disappointed when they don't do anything with the feature set. I've been burned by that before, with an iriver mp3 player a few years back that was supposed to add ID3 database capability to a firmware update. It never came.
The one thing you probably can be guaranteed of is more movies from Netflix. It'd be interesting to know which movies/shows they've tried but have been unable to get the digital rights for. The rate of growth of the movie database will have to slow at some point; let's hope it's not anytime soon.
Before I get this, I need to hook up a Windows computer to my internet connection and see whether I get the "best" video quality from my DSL. The complaints I've seen about Netflix video quality are often due to people not being able to sustain the highest quality download. Since we already seem to be right around the max of DSL/cable modem speeds to get in the realm of DVD 480p quality, any HD movies will likely need some serious caching capability or really nasty compression. I'd rather have low-compression 480p than high-compression 720p, but that's because I don't have an HDTV.
It's too bad the cable and phone companies are competing in the streaming movie segment; it'd be nice to have Netflix mirrors sitting at my ISP, but that doesn't seem too likely. It's also unfortunate that without some sort of net neutrality agreement, my ISP could make Netflix streaming all but useless quite easily.
Still, for $99, it shouldn't be too hard to get your money's worth. They certainly priced it right.
It's my understanding and experience that all the video blobs are packaged separately in Ubuntu, and not distributed by Debian (last I checked). From reading the other responses, I'm getting the impression that these binary blobs you're referring to extend to some firmware and such.
If that's the case, fine. Why not just offer an alternative set of kernel packages? It would not be hard at all to just offer an alternative repository which replaces the "offending" Ubuntu packages with free ones. Of course, the FSF's reaction is that simply offering non-free software in your repository is unacceptable; this is what I think most of the
Also, are these firmware blobs part of the vanilla Linux source tree? If they aren't, then those concerned so much with free software (and the article claims this will mostly be developers and hardware testers) can simply install from source. I used to do it, as did most Linux users back before the default kernel packages worked as well as they do now.
All I'm saying is that if you have time on your hands and your goal is to develop and test free software in a "pure" environment, there are more efficient ways of doing that than replicating an entire distribution. Debian is darned close right now; just offer a set of kernel packages in another repository and don't use non-free. If you want to audit every file of source, great; I bet the Debian people would appreciate it and move the software to non-free or develop a replacement.
gNewSense sounds like Ubuntu made to be Debian without the non-free parameter in sources.list. No binary video blobs, fine. Firefox? gNewSense replaces it with Epiphany, while Debian renames it because of trademark issues (specifically, you can't fork Firefox without calling it something else). Debian's course seems idealogical enough already, gNewSense is just over the top, IMO.
The article claims that one benefit of gNewSense is that it is a distribution the FSF can get fully behind. If I recall, the FSF won't endorse Debian because they offer non-free if you enable it in their repositories. That just seems like hairsplitting to me. I can fully understand the desire to have free software/open source replacements and encouraging development of them, but I fail to see how gNewSense achieves that any better than what we had. In Debian you have to go out of your way to get non-free software. In Ubuntu it's fairly straightforward to avoid it if you want to. Is it really worth a distribution with perhaps the worst name I've ever heard for software?
I suppose Apple as we knew it in 1996 is dead, but how many people really miss that Apple? By January 2001 Apple was on the rebound, 3 years after introducing the iMac and about to release Mac OS X 10.0.
I don't think that's what Forrester had in mind, though. I'll take any such company-specific predictions with a grain of salt.
I agree that at this point tablets look like a better bang for the buck, at least for me. These ebooks though blow away tablets in terms of battery life (from maybe a dozen hours with WiFi use to weeks of just reading, according to people here). Also, though I haven't seen one in person, I've heard that the eink screens are really nice on the eyes.
Even though the Iliad is $700, I can't point to a new tablet PC that's cheaper than that. The cheapest I know about is the consumer HP line starting at $900. For my next laptop I'm looking at the Thinkpad line, and the X series tablet starts about $1500 (while the X61 series non-tablet starts about $1100). I think to beat $700 on a (full-featured) tablet you'd have to go used, but I'm definitely interested if you know of something else.
I had a completely opposite reaction to the price when I read about the Nokia N800. Full web browser, WiFi, 4" screen (bigger than ipod touch, significantly smaller than most ebooks) was being sold on Amazon for about $210 last week (they don't appear to sell them directly anymore). The new version adds a keyboard and GPS and goes for about $400. Still, $200 w/ WiFi seems like a much better price point. The full web browser is more useful than the Kindle, and the price is far and away better than the Iliad, provided the screen is big enough. Considering I've used a few Handspring/Palm-based devices as ebook readers before, I'm sure this Nokia thing could work for some people.
Neat stuff. Still, I'd probably only be willing to pay about $300-400 for the Iliad's functionality, not $700 (I'd want WiFi). The cost of the eink screens needs to come down quite a bit so we get low-end readers in the $100-200 range and $300+ occupied by the really hackable ones like the Iliad.
Regarding Wikipedia, the Kindle has a distinct advantage over this: free access to Wikipedia through the cell phone networks rather than WiFi. That almost completely negates the need for an offline (especially if crippled) version. I still think the Kindle is too expensive for what it gives you at this point, but the tie to the cell phone network for no monthly fee was a really good idea. It's hard to imagine any of the smaller ebook players working out a similar agreement.