Nice. I wonder if that'll stay in long before he gets issued with cease and desist letters? (Though I doubt they'd have any legitimacy since I think he lives far away from the USA...)
Hmm. To reply to 7) first: I'm not meaning to look like I'm complaining about Amazon at all. RMS is complaining about Amazon. (I was also well aware of the irony of saying anything negative about Amazon while I'm also advertising Amazon eBooks in my sig, but decided not to mention it:) Though on my homepage there's also a link to Smashwords who do things a bit differently.)
1) I didn't know that; I guess that's a more recent firmware revision? I use a Sony so I'm not up to date with what Amazon are doing with the Kindle. The last I knew they wanted you to email books to them to be converted and transferred to your account, which seemed a bit clunky to me. Did they change that?
2) Yes, they do. I don't know if all of them do, but having published a few books on Amazon recently they give you the option of choosing whether you want DRM or not.
3+4) I agree. eBooks in general are still expensive. Amazon are better than most for this.
5) ePub is just zipped XHTML. XHTML+ZIP is pretty standard and pretty easy to read. PDF is generally not that readily reflowable -- at least, not on the ebook readers we've got right now -- while ePub automatically is. On the other hand, if you're writing a comic or something with a lot of tables and formatting, ePub would be a pain in the arse to use, while PDF would suit it fine. I'd say it depends what you're wanting to do. So far as I know -- though I've never built a Mobipocket book -- that's basically just a compiled form of HTML like Windows Help uses, so that's relatively standard. Still, I'd say ePub wins for simplicity. You can build the whole thing by hand in a text editor, so long as you've got a copy of zip lying around too.
6) I didn't buy Glue from Amazon -- I think it was through Waterstones, actually. I also thought "Quality control from the publishers" made it clear I was actually attacking the publishers rather than the distributors. The quality of Glue is pretty rubbish. That's not Waterstones' fault -- it's Random House's fault for being useless.
How long do you tend to go camping for? My ebook reader's battery lasts for a good few weeks. (They claim something like 8,500 page turns and it might be around that. Lasts for ages, anyway.)
Not saying you should buy an ebook reader - horses for courses and all that, and most of the time I still buy the physical book too even though I do reread books and end up with piles of the things around my flat. But they tend to have a massive battery life unless you're actually meaning a tablet, in which case I totally agree that they're useless as eBook readers except on the daily commute when you can charge them again as soon as you're home.
Baen are fantastic if you like that kind of thing. They're also republishing the whole of Poul Anderson's Technic Series, both in print and as eBooks. If you like that kind of thing, I'd highly recommend buying them.
I bought an eReader for exactly your reasons -- I travel a lot for work. It's much nicer carrying something that weighs less than 250g around with me and has a few hundred books on it, than it is carrying around five or ten paperbacks.
One way of doing it is to ensure that you have a copy of all the eBooks you've bought sitting on a local hard drive. That way they can't wipe it, and if they change something you can always go back to the old version, even if doing that will involve unlocking their DRM.
Also you're wrong about the screen capture -- you can do a screen capture on an eBook easily. Just open it on a local computer and take a screen capture. It could be mocked up in two minutes flat by anyone with GIMP or Photoshop, but the same goes for blogs.
Does Calibre unlock books with DRM? Last time I checked he explicitly said that it only accepts DRM-free input -- at least from ePub and Mobipocket, and I think PDF too.
which is surprising in its simplicity: don't buy from Amazon if you don't want their DRM. There are places that sell eBooks without DRM at all (Baen is one of the ones that comes to mind and would appeal to a lot of people on/.), and then there are the other places -- almost the entire market other than Amazon -- who use ePub with Adobe's ADEPT DRM. ADEPT is relatively flexible. It's also, if one is so inclined to do it, very easy to unlock. I tend to view the unlocking of DRM on a book that someone's purchased a bit less dodgy than going onto torrent sites and finding some scanned and OCR'd ruin of a PDF. You get the publisher's version of the book, *and* you've paid the author (although yes, the publishers as well).
What I would like to see though with eBooks:
sane pricing -- no-one will ever convince me that it should cost more to buy an electronic copy than it does to buy a paperback even if I do see the argument that the author, the editor, the type-setters and all the marketing and promotion cost money so it can't be given away *too* cheaply
the dropping of DRM completely -- seriously, if they're happy to use ADEPT then they're basically happy to not use DRM in the slightest, it's so easily broken
standardisation around a set format -- Amazon are the hold-outs here, sticking with Mobipocket formats while everyone else (even Sony) settled on ePub
quality control from the publishers -- I bought "Glue" by Irvine Welsh, and it's so riddled with scanning errors that I may as well have downloaded a dodgy scan and OCR copy. The amount of times "um" became "urn" was quite surprising. Even worse, one of the characters is called "Gally". That became "Gaily" almost every time he was mentioned. For all I know, he was actually "Gaily" and it became "Gally". "Glue" isn't the only eBook I've bought from a publisher that clearly doesn't give a shit, but it's probably the most absurd. If they're going to charge on the basis of the eBook being edited, they should at least fucking edit it.
Yes, because Windows Mobile makes Microsoft as much money as Macs running OSX make Apple. Apple exist to make money. Macs running OSX make money. So Apple won't get rid of it.
In the unlikely event that Apple are stupid enough to actually kill off OSX and wall-garden what few dwindling laptops they had, yes, I'd agree (if by "the Year of Linux" you mean "the Year of Half of Apple's Old Customers" giving a 5% boost in market share or so). But I can't see them being daft enough to do that. They're still selling Mac Pros, they're still selling Macbook Pros and they're still selling iMacs and Macbooks. And they need a decent development environment to keep that App Store filled with fart apps and whatever else is on the thing -- I don't quite think an iPad will cut it. Sure, the Macbook Air will go ARM. Maybe the Macbook will, too, or be killed off. The Macbook Pro I'd imagine will stay, as will the iMac and the Mac Pro. I just can't see Apple killing themselves that way, at least not while they're still run by people who know their arses from their elbows.
Who the hell do you know? And how the hell is that modded Insightful?
Yes, there are Apple cultists, and they're the biggest tits in computing that I've met (other than Linux cultists, who are equally daft. I'm not sure I've ever met a Windows cultist but they must exist. I'll never understand why people pour their sense of self-worth into a fucking operating system of all things, but that's nerds for you.) But in my experience of people with Macs -- which is quite large, since for whatever reason, Unix, nice windows manager, easy to set up and maintain for an academic department -- have... a Mac. Some of them have iPhones too, others have HTCs. I've got a Samsung. Some have iPods (I've got a Classic, not because I'm in love with Apple but because *no-one else at all* gave me a hard drive bigger than 64 gig), others don't. I've got a Dell machine at home along with an old second-hand PowerMac.
I don't know where you're finding these semi-mythical Mac-addicts but the only place I've encountered them is online.
Fuck me. Someone with mod points boost this, it's about the clearest explanation of quantum physics I've seen - including four years of lectures. The amount of people who babble about "observation" apparently seriously believing that "observation" is important is startling. Your first two sentences summarise everything clearly and neatly and without any extra bullshit.
Then you carried on to use elephants, which is only even more laudable.
I once wrote a similar proposal for running a multi-slit experiment using gerbils; since the de Broglie wavelength of a gerbil is so short it would have to have *exceptionally fine* slits. I also added that if animal protection agencies kicked up a stink we could use human slaves instead, since if we can make a diffraction grating fine enough for gerbils we can refine the process only a small amount further and make one for humans. We would, of course, need a trench dug behind the slit to collect the diffraction pattern.
The lecturer seemed quite amused, which surprised me because I did it to piss him off. He stuck it outside his office for the rest of that semester.
I've not used Unity on a netbook but what I've read gives me the impression that it's a bit less of a... culture shock, on a netbook. I'd imagine Asus tested it out and found that it was fine.
That may be true in the future - I'm willing to wait and see - but right now Unity isn't *that* slick. Neither is GNOME 3, by all accounts, though I've not tried it myself so I can't say. Unity might be great in a year's time (or even at 11.10) and if so, well, great. I'm not that wedded to KDE or XFCE... But right now it would seem a bit premature to plump for 11.04.
Fortunately for Asus, though not for me, I didn't actually read anything (even the *title*) and Asus went for 10.10, which is probably what a lot of people would have recommend they do if they really wanted Ubuntu...
Slashdot Mirror
Hahaha
Mod +1 Insightful
Actually, ignore my post just above -- it's third-party so Goyal can't be held responsible for it at all.
Nice. I wonder if that'll stay in long before he gets issued with cease and desist letters? (Though I doubt they'd have any legitimacy since I think he lives far away from the USA...)
Hmm. To reply to 7) first: I'm not meaning to look like I'm complaining about Amazon at all. RMS is complaining about Amazon. (I was also well aware of the irony of saying anything negative about Amazon while I'm also advertising Amazon eBooks in my sig, but decided not to mention it :) Though on my homepage there's also a link to Smashwords who do things a bit differently.)
1) I didn't know that; I guess that's a more recent firmware revision? I use a Sony so I'm not up to date with what Amazon are doing with the Kindle. The last I knew they wanted you to email books to them to be converted and transferred to your account, which seemed a bit clunky to me. Did they change that?
2) Yes, they do. I don't know if all of them do, but having published a few books on Amazon recently they give you the option of choosing whether you want DRM or not.
3+4) I agree. eBooks in general are still expensive. Amazon are better than most for this.
5) ePub is just zipped XHTML. XHTML+ZIP is pretty standard and pretty easy to read. PDF is generally not that readily reflowable -- at least, not on the ebook readers we've got right now -- while ePub automatically is. On the other hand, if you're writing a comic or something with a lot of tables and formatting, ePub would be a pain in the arse to use, while PDF would suit it fine. I'd say it depends what you're wanting to do. So far as I know -- though I've never built a Mobipocket book -- that's basically just a compiled form of HTML like Windows Help uses, so that's relatively standard. Still, I'd say ePub wins for simplicity. You can build the whole thing by hand in a text editor, so long as you've got a copy of zip lying around too.
6) I didn't buy Glue from Amazon -- I think it was through Waterstones, actually. I also thought "Quality control from the publishers" made it clear I was actually attacking the publishers rather than the distributors. The quality of Glue is pretty rubbish. That's not Waterstones' fault -- it's Random House's fault for being useless.
How long do you tend to go camping for? My ebook reader's battery lasts for a good few weeks. (They claim something like 8,500 page turns and it might be around that. Lasts for ages, anyway.)
Not saying you should buy an ebook reader - horses for courses and all that, and most of the time I still buy the physical book too even though I do reread books and end up with piles of the things around my flat. But they tend to have a massive battery life unless you're actually meaning a tablet, in which case I totally agree that they're useless as eBook readers except on the daily commute when you can charge them again as soon as you're home.
Baen are fantastic if you like that kind of thing. They're also republishing the whole of Poul Anderson's Technic Series, both in print and as eBooks. If you like that kind of thing, I'd highly recommend buying them.
I bought an eReader for exactly your reasons -- I travel a lot for work. It's much nicer carrying something that weighs less than 250g around with me and has a few hundred books on it, than it is carrying around five or ten paperbacks.
One way of doing it is to ensure that you have a copy of all the eBooks you've bought sitting on a local hard drive. That way they can't wipe it, and if they change something you can always go back to the old version, even if doing that will involve unlocking their DRM.
Also you're wrong about the screen capture -- you can do a screen capture on an eBook easily. Just open it on a local computer and take a screen capture. It could be mocked up in two minutes flat by anyone with GIMP or Photoshop, but the same goes for blogs.
Does Calibre unlock books with DRM? Last time I checked he explicitly said that it only accepts DRM-free input -- at least from ePub and Mobipocket, and I think PDF too.
which is surprising in its simplicity: don't buy from Amazon if you don't want their DRM. There are places that sell eBooks without DRM at all (Baen is one of the ones that comes to mind and would appeal to a lot of people on /.), and then there are the other places -- almost the entire market other than Amazon -- who use ePub with Adobe's ADEPT DRM. ADEPT is relatively flexible. It's also, if one is so inclined to do it, very easy to unlock. I tend to view the unlocking of DRM on a book that someone's purchased a bit less dodgy than going onto torrent sites and finding some scanned and OCR'd ruin of a PDF. You get the publisher's version of the book, *and* you've paid the author (although yes, the publishers as well).
What I would like to see though with eBooks:
sane pricing -- no-one will ever convince me that it should cost more to buy an electronic copy than it does to buy a paperback even if I do see the argument that the author, the editor, the type-setters and all the marketing and promotion cost money so it can't be given away *too* cheaply
the dropping of DRM completely -- seriously, if they're happy to use ADEPT then they're basically happy to not use DRM in the slightest, it's so easily broken
standardisation around a set format -- Amazon are the hold-outs here, sticking with Mobipocket formats while everyone else (even Sony) settled on ePub
quality control from the publishers -- I bought "Glue" by Irvine Welsh, and it's so riddled with scanning errors that I may as well have downloaded a dodgy scan and OCR copy. The amount of times "um" became "urn" was quite surprising. Even worse, one of the characters is called "Gally". That became "Gaily" almost every time he was mentioned. For all I know, he was actually "Gaily" and it became "Gally". "Glue" isn't the only eBook I've bought from a publisher that clearly doesn't give a shit, but it's probably the most absurd. If they're going to charge on the basis of the eBook being edited, they should at least fucking edit it.
Hmmm, figures. I imagine that somewhere in this world there's a small group of DragonflyBSD cultists too?
I've always assumed that kind of thing is just people arsing around.
Really? Odd. Thanks, I'll get that sorted.
I've never met a Solaris cultist either. I'm counting myself lucky.
Yes, because Windows Mobile makes Microsoft as much money as Macs running OSX make Apple. Apple exist to make money. Macs running OSX make money. So Apple won't get rid of it.
In the unlikely event that Apple are stupid enough to actually kill off OSX and wall-garden what few dwindling laptops they had, yes, I'd agree (if by "the Year of Linux" you mean "the Year of Half of Apple's Old Customers" giving a 5% boost in market share or so). But I can't see them being daft enough to do that. They're still selling Mac Pros, they're still selling Macbook Pros and they're still selling iMacs and Macbooks. And they need a decent development environment to keep that App Store filled with fart apps and whatever else is on the thing -- I don't quite think an iPad will cut it. Sure, the Macbook Air will go ARM. Maybe the Macbook will, too, or be killed off. The Macbook Pro I'd imagine will stay, as will the iMac and the Mac Pro. I just can't see Apple killing themselves that way, at least not while they're still run by people who know their arses from their elbows.
Who the hell do you know? And how the hell is that modded Insightful?
Yes, there are Apple cultists, and they're the biggest tits in computing that I've met (other than Linux cultists, who are equally daft. I'm not sure I've ever met a Windows cultist but they must exist. I'll never understand why people pour their sense of self-worth into a fucking operating system of all things, but that's nerds for you.) But in my experience of people with Macs -- which is quite large, since for whatever reason, Unix, nice windows manager, easy to set up and maintain for an academic department -- have... a Mac. Some of them have iPhones too, others have HTCs. I've got a Samsung. Some have iPods (I've got a Classic, not because I'm in love with Apple but because *no-one else at all* gave me a hard drive bigger than 64 gig), others don't. I've got a Dell machine at home along with an old second-hand PowerMac.
I don't know where you're finding these semi-mythical Mac-addicts but the only place I've encountered them is online.
Had to hunt out that one. I was expecting it to be based in Emacs. Turns out that would be Emacs/W3.
Lynx is your friend.
I thought that was obvious from the start.
Fuck me. Someone with mod points boost this, it's about the clearest explanation of quantum physics I've seen - including four years of lectures. The amount of people who babble about "observation" apparently seriously believing that "observation" is important is startling. Your first two sentences summarise everything clearly and neatly and without any extra bullshit.
Then you carried on to use elephants, which is only even more laudable.
I once wrote a similar proposal for running a multi-slit experiment using gerbils; since the de Broglie wavelength of a gerbil is so short it would have to have *exceptionally fine* slits. I also added that if animal protection agencies kicked up a stink we could use human slaves instead, since if we can make a diffraction grating fine enough for gerbils we can refine the process only a small amount further and make one for humans. We would, of course, need a trench dug behind the slit to collect the diffraction pattern.
The lecturer seemed quite amused, which surprised me because I did it to piss him off. He stuck it outside his office for the rest of that semester.
Yeah. I plan on trying it in November :)
Hmmm. If that's so, then I read wrong. Glad I never tried it.
This is Slashdot.
I've not used Unity on a netbook but what I've read gives me the impression that it's a bit less of a... culture shock, on a netbook. I'd imagine Asus tested it out and found that it was fine.
That may be true in the future - I'm willing to wait and see - but right now Unity isn't *that* slick. Neither is GNOME 3, by all accounts, though I've not tried it myself so I can't say. Unity might be great in a year's time (or even at 11.10) and if so, well, great. I'm not that wedded to KDE or XFCE... But right now it would seem a bit premature to plump for 11.04.
Fortunately for Asus, though not for me, I didn't actually read anything (even the *title*) and Asus went for 10.10, which is probably what a lot of people would have recommend they do if they really wanted Ubuntu...