I've no issue with reading from an LCD at all; I totally agree with you that it's probably confirmation bias. I do it all day at work, and there are eBooks I read from the computer simply because that's more convenient at the time. I can't really say about a Kindle, but my Sony Reader has a massive battery life - that's entirely coming from the screen, of course. There's a small constant drain on the battery (which I guess is about 30 days for the Reader, too) and otherwise the only draw is a screen refresh. On an LCD there's the backlight and a constantly powered screen to contend with. So while my Reader lasts a week or two of reading between charges, the laptop is lasting five hours or so.
That for me is the massive advantage, especially when I'm flying. The other week I was on a trip over the Atlantic and the power sockets on my chair were knackered, so I couldn't run the laptop anyway. The eBook reader survived the journey on its charge, and is still running on the same charge (although it's getting very low now.)
battery life, most likely. it's the main reason i got a sony reader a few years back. sure, the screen's nice to read from but it's the battery life that's a massive benefit.
There's a reason they're calling it a "quasiparticle". A quasiparticle is an effective particle that arises when you perturb a quantum system - they're effectively the quantum analogues of sound waves. Depending on the type of system, you can get various types of quasiparticle. The most basic would be phonons, which are literally quantised sound waves, and which I imagine would crop up in any system (but I'm not a condensed matter physicist and haven't touched it in ten years so there may be systems possible where phonons don't arise and I wouldn't know). In some quantum fluids you can get things called rotons forming, which you could view as kind of quantised vortices. In more complicated systems again you get quasiparticles emerging with all manner of weird and wonderful behaviours, and about ten years back Volovik showed something beautiful, which is that if you take a particular state of superfluid Helium the quasiparticles that emerge have all the symmetries of the standard model of particle physics *and a graviton*. Which is really extremely beautiful when you think about it.
Anyway, those are quasiparticles: well-defined quantum fluctuations of a system.
The particles you're referring to are from speculative high-energy physics, and are on much shakier ground, as the physicists who propose them would readily admit. Those particles are generally "real" in a sense that quasiparticles aren't (although I wouldn't stretch the term "real" too far even for something like virtual photons or gluons or other gauge bosons; even so, the fundamental nature of the particle is very different to the quasiparticle).
All true. Someone else commented on a thread below that Germany (or the separate states) could target revenue streams from German businesses paying Facebook for adverts, for instance. I'd guess physical presence does make it a lot easier for you to be pulled into court, and it's noteworthy that the case is being called in Hamburg, where Facebook have their physical presence, but yes, you're right.
Yes, certainly. Facebook could pull their physical presence from Hamburg (though that would include any servers etc.), so long as other German states or the Federal Government don't decide to do the same. And if they do Facebook can simply pull their physical presence from Germany entirely and be fine. For whatever reason, Facebook have chosen to have a physical office in Hamburg, so I imagine they won't be too keen doing that (especially not for the measly sum of $400k), but it would be a clean solution...
Re:More fixing of things that weren't broken
on
Fedora 16 Released
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· Score: 1
I'm not arguing for changing from splitting into/sbin and/bin - I was just mentioning a Linux with far more extreme changes than those that Fedora make, mainly for interest's sake. I've got no issue with keeping/usr/bin,/sbin,/usr/sbin and/usr/local/bin separate, though I must admit it's not something that keeps me awake at night. (Likewise anything under/opt/bin,/opt/local/bin, or any other binary directory you choose to include.)
Re:More fixing of things that weren't broken
on
Fedora 16 Released
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· Score: 1
If you don't like people moving things around, just be glad you never tried GoboLinux. Personally I quite like it, but you do have to negotiate a completely new system tree. Moving things into/usr/bin is tame in comparison.
I hereby award you the "patronising cunt of the year" award. He was talking about the Star Wars films. Does he have a whole fucking library of Star Wars films? No, sorry, this is Slashdot, of course he fucking does.
As for anything else, watch them on a video player - easy. Hell, you can even digitise it *while* watching it on the VHS. Then when you go to bed that evening you can leave the computer re-encoding it. This isn't rocket science, you know. No-one said he had to spend ten solid days encoding every VHS he owned.
Nah, it's a crude generalisation, not a strawman - it's a reponse to a direct statement by an anonymous coward that he downloads everything and only buys it if they sell it to him cheaply enough. To do that implies that he feels entitled to do so. Your statement could be read either in support of the AC or against him; I took it the latter way because that pleased me.
True, this is Slashdot where a large number of people think they're entitled to everything for free.
Along those lines, only 30% modded me overrated, although an astonishing 40% of the moderators think that it's trolling to ask an off-topic anonymous coward why he feels he's got the right to get everything for free if he doesn't want to pay what the producers ask.
Out of interest, what FLACs can you buy commercially and where? If I buy music it's always on CD except in the rare cases where it's a digital-only release in which case I get the highest bitrate DRM-free AAC I can get and if that doesn't exist, the highest bitrate MP3. I'd probably buy more digitally if someone was actually selling lossless copies of something I wanted to buy.
Wait, why are you modded Informative? No-one made you go out and buy Star Wars on LaserDisc - what, they came round at night and smashed up your video player? No-one then made you go out and buy the Special Edition. Did Lucas have a kill switch on the original LD versions? No-one made you go and buy the DVDs, either. Surely you could have just watched the LaserDisc? You're conflating media unusable because of broken DRM with... someone quite happy to make money from people like you who keep on buying the same damned films on new media and then, bizarrely, complaining about it. You could have carried on watching your VHS. It's my understanding that format switching in the USA hasn't been subject to the same legal grey status as it has in the UK, so you could have digitised your videos perfectly happily. What the hell are you complaining about?
Secondly, you - you, an anonymous coward on Slashdot who for all we know knows as much about media and the entertainment industry as Coco the Clown knew about CPU design - are seeing fit to declare to the entire entertainment industries fair prices. With the number of people who would buy an episode of a TV show, for all you or I know, it cannot be done for less than $1 an episode, not if they want to keep production values up. The same goes for movies, eBooks and music. Sure, the companies are currently making a hefty profit and I've no doubt things could be one hell of a lot cheaper than they are now and still give them a reasonable income, but demanding absurdly low prices and stating "if you don't like it you know where you can shove your opinions" is pretty unhelpful.
And besides that, so you don't like the prices the entertainment industry demand. That's your prerogative - so don't buy. But why on Earth do you still assume you've got the right to download it for free? You can surely understand why they take an extremely dim view of you going and downloading their products for free.
Well, hope it works - let us know if it does. I'm not sure you'll have much luck finding something else that plays properly happily with a modern Nano, since Apple have been busily closing off the iPods, but it'd be great if you did.
Yeah, I actually read further on and found you answering my exact question - no worries. This is an honest question too though - can iTunes not convert the FLAC to ALAC on the fly when it's putting them onto the iPod? I know you can get QuickTime filters that give QuickTime (and therefore iTunes) the ability to play FLAC, so it's feasible that you can then convert the FLAC to ALAC on the fly. But I honestly have no idea if that's possible.
If not, and you don't fancy maintaining two copies of your collection, yeah, I'd find a polite way of selling off the Nano and getting something else - that or convert to high bitrate AAC for the player. (That's what I do; my collection is stored chiefly in FLAC but goes onto the iPod as medium/high bitrate AAC.)
I'll go along with that, I've no idea what would and wouldn't run better back a decade ago. At least on the machines I've used, FLAC and ALAC are basically much of a muchness - in design, in speed, in compression ratio and in decoding speed. My lossless collection is a mix of the two of them depending on whether I had to rip with iTunes or whether I could use anything else (XLD on Mac these days, dbPowerAmp on Windows).
No offense but the iPhone 4S supporting ALAC is hardly a shock since iOS has supported ALAC from the start which should imply that every iPod Touch and iPhone always supported ALAC. And if you check it up, every modern iPod supports ALAC, even the Shuffle. The Classic has supported it for years. Players not supporting ALAC isn't the reason that iTunes doesn't sell ALAC.
I actually don't know the details about ALAC but I know it's not what you're speculating -- FLAC Is built on integer calculations and is a very lightweight lossless codec (especially compared to something like Monkey's Audio or TAC which are very intensive and not so pleasant to use as active media files rather than archiving, although their compression is better) and is good for playback with limited CPU. I'd guess that ALAC is also integer, and that practical differences from FLAC are minor.
I think it comes down partly to a not-invented-here thing, and also that FLAC typically sits in its own container or in an OGG container, while ALAC sits in an MP4 container - not that Apple couldn't have embedded FLAC into MP4 if they really wanted to.
Maybe I'm totally missing the point here but FLAC and ALAC are both lossless. If you've got a Nano Touch and want to put FLAC on it (although given that it doesn't have that much space on it I'd be very inclined to put a lossy format onto it to get more listening time, but whatever floats your boat), you can't. So... convert to ALAC. ALAC is typically slightly less efficient than FLAC but the difference is really pretty minor in anything but fringe cases. You won't lose any quality. All you'll lose is the happy warm glow of having music stored in one lossless format as opposed to another lossless format and, believe me, if that's a great concern in your life then you should be extremely grateful.
(shameless plug coming up: if we're plugging stories feel free to go to my smashwords or amazon profile and get hold of some stuff. there's two free stories on smashwords and the others are a dollar apiece because that seemed to be the cheapest amazon would let me sell things for (i wanted 40c or so). for some reason the amazon profile is currently missing The Train will Never Stop, though it will be added in a day or so. the genre is basically fantasy of one form or another, though as far from sword and sorcery as i can get. i like to pretend there's more of a neil gaiman feel to things, but then i am very self-deluded.)
Focus on converting HTML into ePub - the output from PDFs tends to be really doggy. I know the developers are trying to improve that, but they're really hampered by the fact that PDF really isn't well suited to reflowing, no matter what Adobe do to amend that. But HTML to ePub should be very clean, and ePubs are easy to edit either by hand or with something like Sigil.
(In case you're not aware, to edit an ePub by hand, change the extension from.epub to.zip, unzip it, and go into the OEBS directory, or whatever they've called it. The files will all be in there as either HTML or XHTML, and you can work on them directly to clean up the most stubborn problems. Or just use Sigil and access the files that way.)
Also I don't know how you're planning on selling, but going through Amazon's Kindle Publishing (rather than cutting deals with them directly, which most of us aren't anything like big enough to do) they say they prefer DOC uploads. They accept ePub though so that's what I feed them, and the results have come out absolutely fine. Some of the other online publishing routes -- like Smashwords, which I use in addition to Amazon -- have other requirements. Smashwords only accepts RTFs, and strictly formatted ones at that. For putting things up there, I cheat a bit and use Calibre to swap the ePub to an RTF and then spend an hour or two reformatting the whole damned thing to fit the Smashwords style guide... so that they can convert it back into an ePub almost identical to the one I started with.
You can get Sigil - it's a WYSISYG ePub writer. You can either write in the word processor window, or in the raw XHTML. I've not used it to build ePubs from scratch but I have used it to edit and clean them up and it's reasonably nice once you get used to its quirks.
Calibre's OK, but I'd stick to the command-line tools, if I were you. I find the GUI distracting and not really quite suited for the purpose I put it to, whereas the command-line tools are there to edit metadata (though you might want to edit the results by hand to avoid Calibre leaving its fingerprints everywhere) and convert from a multitude of input formats to a multitude of outputs. ePub -> Mobi/AZW is particularly clean since ultimately so far as I know it's swapping one subset of XHTML to another subset of XHTML.
Both are worth a try. You do lose the easy sharing that you're getting with Google Docs, but you can always replace that with something like DropBox.
Hmm, OK. I still think you're making more problems for yourself than necessary, though. Why don't you use a WYSIWIG HTML editor? Or LibreOffice, which may or may not make cleaner HTML than Google Docs? (I've no idea; I've not tried either. I stopped using word processor HTML export about twelve years ago when Word XP -- or even earlier; I forget -- spat reams of gibberish at me.)
Also, are you closely wedded to the Kindle Convertor? Can you not use Calibre to build a MobiPocket? Or are there features in the Kindle convertor that you need?
Sorry for the questions - genuinely interested. I've always targetted ePub and relied on Calibre to produce a readable MobiPocket for people with Kindles.
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I've no issue with reading from an LCD at all; I totally agree with you that it's probably confirmation bias. I do it all day at work, and there are eBooks I read from the computer simply because that's more convenient at the time. I can't really say about a Kindle, but my Sony Reader has a massive battery life - that's entirely coming from the screen, of course. There's a small constant drain on the battery (which I guess is about 30 days for the Reader, too) and otherwise the only draw is a screen refresh. On an LCD there's the backlight and a constantly powered screen to contend with. So while my Reader lasts a week or two of reading between charges, the laptop is lasting five hours or so.
That for me is the massive advantage, especially when I'm flying. The other week I was on a trip over the Atlantic and the power sockets on my chair were knackered, so I couldn't run the laptop anyway. The eBook reader survived the journey on its charge, and is still running on the same charge (although it's getting very low now.)
So, yeah, pure battery life for me.
battery life, most likely. it's the main reason i got a sony reader a few years back. sure, the screen's nice to read from but it's the battery life that's a massive benefit.
There's a reason they're calling it a "quasiparticle". A quasiparticle is an effective particle that arises when you perturb a quantum system - they're effectively the quantum analogues of sound waves. Depending on the type of system, you can get various types of quasiparticle. The most basic would be phonons, which are literally quantised sound waves, and which I imagine would crop up in any system (but I'm not a condensed matter physicist and haven't touched it in ten years so there may be systems possible where phonons don't arise and I wouldn't know). In some quantum fluids you can get things called rotons forming, which you could view as kind of quantised vortices. In more complicated systems again you get quasiparticles emerging with all manner of weird and wonderful behaviours, and about ten years back Volovik showed something beautiful, which is that if you take a particular state of superfluid Helium the quasiparticles that emerge have all the symmetries of the standard model of particle physics *and a graviton*. Which is really extremely beautiful when you think about it.
Anyway, those are quasiparticles: well-defined quantum fluctuations of a system.
The particles you're referring to are from speculative high-energy physics, and are on much shakier ground, as the physicists who propose them would readily admit. Those particles are generally "real" in a sense that quasiparticles aren't (although I wouldn't stretch the term "real" too far even for something like virtual photons or gluons or other gauge bosons; even so, the fundamental nature of the particle is very different to the quasiparticle).
All true. Someone else commented on a thread below that Germany (or the separate states) could target revenue streams from German businesses paying Facebook for adverts, for instance. I'd guess physical presence does make it a lot easier for you to be pulled into court, and it's noteworthy that the case is being called in Hamburg, where Facebook have their physical presence, but yes, you're right.
Yes, certainly. Facebook could pull their physical presence from Hamburg (though that would include any servers etc.), so long as other German states or the Federal Government don't decide to do the same. And if they do Facebook can simply pull their physical presence from Germany entirely and be fine. For whatever reason, Facebook have chosen to have a physical office in Hamburg, so I imagine they won't be too keen doing that (especially not for the measly sum of $400k), but it would be a clean solution...
Facebook have an office in Hamburg.
I'm not arguing for changing from splitting into /sbin and /bin - I was just mentioning a Linux with far more extreme changes than those that Fedora make, mainly for interest's sake. I've got no issue with keeping /usr/bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin and /usr/local/bin separate, though I must admit it's not something that keeps me awake at night. (Likewise anything under /opt/bin, /opt/local/bin, or any other binary directory you choose to include.)
If you don't like people moving things around, just be glad you never tried GoboLinux. Personally I quite like it, but you do have to negotiate a completely new system tree. Moving things into /usr/bin is tame in comparison.
I hereby award you the "patronising cunt of the year" award. He was talking about the Star Wars films. Does he have a whole fucking library of Star Wars films? No, sorry, this is Slashdot, of course he fucking does.
As for anything else, watch them on a video player - easy. Hell, you can even digitise it *while* watching it on the VHS. Then when you go to bed that evening you can leave the computer re-encoding it. This isn't rocket science, you know. No-one said he had to spend ten solid days encoding every VHS he owned.
Nah, it's a crude generalisation, not a strawman - it's a reponse to a direct statement by an anonymous coward that he downloads everything and only buys it if they sell it to him cheaply enough. To do that implies that he feels entitled to do so. Your statement could be read either in support of the AC or against him; I took it the latter way because that pleased me.
True, this is Slashdot where a large number of people think they're entitled to everything for free.
Along those lines, only 30% modded me overrated, although an astonishing 40% of the moderators think that it's trolling to ask an off-topic anonymous coward why he feels he's got the right to get everything for free if he doesn't want to pay what the producers ask.
Out of interest, what FLACs can you buy commercially and where? If I buy music it's always on CD except in the rare cases where it's a digital-only release in which case I get the highest bitrate DRM-free AAC I can get and if that doesn't exist, the highest bitrate MP3. I'd probably buy more digitally if someone was actually selling lossless copies of something I wanted to buy.
Wait, why are you modded Informative? No-one made you go out and buy Star Wars on LaserDisc - what, they came round at night and smashed up your video player? No-one then made you go out and buy the Special Edition. Did Lucas have a kill switch on the original LD versions? No-one made you go and buy the DVDs, either. Surely you could have just watched the LaserDisc? You're conflating media unusable because of broken DRM with... someone quite happy to make money from people like you who keep on buying the same damned films on new media and then, bizarrely, complaining about it. You could have carried on watching your VHS. It's my understanding that format switching in the USA hasn't been subject to the same legal grey status as it has in the UK, so you could have digitised your videos perfectly happily. What the hell are you complaining about?
Secondly, you - you, an anonymous coward on Slashdot who for all we know knows as much about media and the entertainment industry as Coco the Clown knew about CPU design - are seeing fit to declare to the entire entertainment industries fair prices. With the number of people who would buy an episode of a TV show, for all you or I know, it cannot be done for less than $1 an episode, not if they want to keep production values up. The same goes for movies, eBooks and music. Sure, the companies are currently making a hefty profit and I've no doubt things could be one hell of a lot cheaper than they are now and still give them a reasonable income, but demanding absurdly low prices and stating "if you don't like it you know where you can shove your opinions" is pretty unhelpful.
And besides that, so you don't like the prices the entertainment industry demand. That's your prerogative - so don't buy. But why on Earth do you still assume you've got the right to download it for free? You can surely understand why they take an extremely dim view of you going and downloading their products for free.
Well, hope it works - let us know if it does. I'm not sure you'll have much luck finding something else that plays properly happily with a modern Nano, since Apple have been busily closing off the iPods, but it'd be great if you did.
Yeah, I actually read further on and found you answering my exact question - no worries. This is an honest question too though - can iTunes not convert the FLAC to ALAC on the fly when it's putting them onto the iPod? I know you can get QuickTime filters that give QuickTime (and therefore iTunes) the ability to play FLAC, so it's feasible that you can then convert the FLAC to ALAC on the fly. But I honestly have no idea if that's possible.
If not, and you don't fancy maintaining two copies of your collection, yeah, I'd find a polite way of selling off the Nano and getting something else - that or convert to high bitrate AAC for the player. (That's what I do; my collection is stored chiefly in FLAC but goes onto the iPod as medium/high bitrate AAC.)
I'll go along with that, I've no idea what would and wouldn't run better back a decade ago. At least on the machines I've used, FLAC and ALAC are basically much of a muchness - in design, in speed, in compression ratio and in decoding speed. My lossless collection is a mix of the two of them depending on whether I had to rip with iTunes or whether I could use anything else (XLD on Mac these days, dbPowerAmp on Windows).
No offense but the iPhone 4S supporting ALAC is hardly a shock since iOS has supported ALAC from the start which should imply that every iPod Touch and iPhone always supported ALAC. And if you check it up, every modern iPod supports ALAC, even the Shuffle. The Classic has supported it for years. Players not supporting ALAC isn't the reason that iTunes doesn't sell ALAC.
I actually don't know the details about ALAC but I know it's not what you're speculating -- FLAC Is built on integer calculations and is a very lightweight lossless codec (especially compared to something like Monkey's Audio or TAC which are very intensive and not so pleasant to use as active media files rather than archiving, although their compression is better) and is good for playback with limited CPU. I'd guess that ALAC is also integer, and that practical differences from FLAC are minor.
I think it comes down partly to a not-invented-here thing, and also that FLAC typically sits in its own container or in an OGG container, while ALAC sits in an MP4 container - not that Apple couldn't have embedded FLAC into MP4 if they really wanted to.
Maybe I'm totally missing the point here but FLAC and ALAC are both lossless. If you've got a Nano Touch and want to put FLAC on it (although given that it doesn't have that much space on it I'd be very inclined to put a lossy format onto it to get more listening time, but whatever floats your boat), you can't. So... convert to ALAC. ALAC is typically slightly less efficient than FLAC but the difference is really pretty minor in anything but fringe cases. You won't lose any quality. All you'll lose is the happy warm glow of having music stored in one lossless format as opposed to another lossless format and, believe me, if that's a great concern in your life then you should be extremely grateful.
(shameless plug coming up: if we're plugging stories feel free to go to my smashwords or amazon profile and get hold of some stuff. there's two free stories on smashwords and the others are a dollar apiece because that seemed to be the cheapest amazon would let me sell things for (i wanted 40c or so). for some reason the amazon profile is currently missing The Train will Never Stop, though it will be added in a day or so. the genre is basically fantasy of one form or another, though as far from sword and sorcery as i can get. i like to pretend there's more of a neil gaiman feel to things, but then i am very self-deluded.)
I'll give it another look. I'm very used to hand-coding LaTeX these days but it'll never hurt to have other options :)
No problem :)
Focus on converting HTML into ePub - the output from PDFs tends to be really doggy. I know the developers are trying to improve that, but they're really hampered by the fact that PDF really isn't well suited to reflowing, no matter what Adobe do to amend that. But HTML to ePub should be very clean, and ePubs are easy to edit either by hand or with something like Sigil.
(In case you're not aware, to edit an ePub by hand, change the extension from .epub to .zip, unzip it, and go into the OEBS directory, or whatever they've called it. The files will all be in there as either HTML or XHTML, and you can work on them directly to clean up the most stubborn problems. Or just use Sigil and access the files that way.)
Also I don't know how you're planning on selling, but going through Amazon's Kindle Publishing (rather than cutting deals with them directly, which most of us aren't anything like big enough to do) they say they prefer DOC uploads. They accept ePub though so that's what I feed them, and the results have come out absolutely fine. Some of the other online publishing routes -- like Smashwords, which I use in addition to Amazon -- have other requirements. Smashwords only accepts RTFs, and strictly formatted ones at that. For putting things up there, I cheat a bit and use Calibre to swap the ePub to an RTF and then spend an hour or two reformatting the whole damned thing to fit the Smashwords style guide... so that they can convert it back into an ePub almost identical to the one I started with.
You can get Sigil - it's a WYSISYG ePub writer. You can either write in the word processor window, or in the raw XHTML. I've not used it to build ePubs from scratch but I have used it to edit and clean them up and it's reasonably nice once you get used to its quirks.
Calibre's OK, but I'd stick to the command-line tools, if I were you. I find the GUI distracting and not really quite suited for the purpose I put it to, whereas the command-line tools are there to edit metadata (though you might want to edit the results by hand to avoid Calibre leaving its fingerprints everywhere) and convert from a multitude of input formats to a multitude of outputs. ePub -> Mobi/AZW is particularly clean since ultimately so far as I know it's swapping one subset of XHTML to another subset of XHTML.
Both are worth a try. You do lose the easy sharing that you're getting with Google Docs, but you can always replace that with something like DropBox.
Hmm, OK. I still think you're making more problems for yourself than necessary, though. Why don't you use a WYSIWIG HTML editor? Or LibreOffice, which may or may not make cleaner HTML than Google Docs? (I've no idea; I've not tried either. I stopped using word processor HTML export about twelve years ago when Word XP -- or even earlier; I forget -- spat reams of gibberish at me.)
Also, are you closely wedded to the Kindle Convertor? Can you not use Calibre to build a MobiPocket? Or are there features in the Kindle convertor that you need?
Sorry for the questions - genuinely interested. I've always targetted ePub and relied on Calibre to produce a readable MobiPocket for people with Kindles.