Basically anything which can be supported without resorting to triggers or stored procedures.
And what's so wrong with stored procedures? Trigger hate I get -- you don't want arbitrary, unknown-complexity code running on every insert. But stored procedures are not triggers. Why exactly do you believe stored procedures are bad? Hint: Any reference to anything MySQL folks have ever said about anything related to relational databases, you automatically lose.
It's a good thing the WD Live devices don't contain a hard drive. They're completely solid state. You can hook up an external drive, but you're better off using them to stream from a NAS or other networked storage.
One thing to note is that a lot of these devices (many of which all use the same Sigma Designs chip internally) don't support DTS audio, or if they do they only support 2-channel DTS and will not downsample. For most people this won't be an issue, but if you plan to rip DVDs or Blu-Rays for archival purposes you'll have to go with the lesser-quality AC3 audio (or worse, re-encode the original DTS to AC3).
I expect you will find virtually all those advances were created by engineers and scientists, not farmers.
Hurr durr. I are smart. No shit the advances were done by engineers and scientists. Farmers are farmers. They farm. That's what they do. Notice that I said "the domain of farming" when referring to technological advancements, meaning that farming (and in particular the need to continually increase yields) has driven a lot of technological advancement for thousands of years, and except for maybe the past 70-80 years or so it has driven almost all technological advancement. Obviously that doesn't mean that a farmer is sitting in a lab somewhere building a better fertilizer (though often it is the case that a farmer will tinker around and build something new and unique that turns out to be widely useful).
I've been saying it for some time now, but farmers have pretty much always been on the cutting edge of technology. The common view of farmers as slack-jawed yokels couldn't be any further from the truth. For thousands of years, most technology advances were the domain of farming. How do you think we can continue to feed the world's growing population and still have food surpluses that can be used for stuff like ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, plastics, etc.?
Growing up as the son of a farmer, we were always playing around with new technology long before anyone else. Think your GPS is pretty sweet? Yeah, we had that in the early 90s for charting harvest yields (X bushels harvested at Y location with a relatively fine scale on the location == pretty yield maps). Wireless real-time stock quotes? We had that in the 80s for the futures markets. Self-driving vehicles? You've been able to buy tractors that would drive themselves in the fields for the past 15+ years, including collision avoidance (fields are not empty -- there are creeks, rocks, power lines, hills, etc that all need to be avoided or otherwise handled). The only thing surprising about this story is that this didn't happen 5 years ago.
Well, it's a good thing Slashdot editors fact check articles before posting them, or that would be embarrassing.
What's that? Editors don't do a damn thing here? Carry on. Nothing to see here. Maybe this story will hit the RSS feed a couple more times before they get it right...
Sounds like you got exactly what you paid for:) Seriously tho, this experience versus buying an iPad...? They might get it right in the end, but 'in the end' is too late for a lot of people.
I did, and I knew exactly what I was paying for when I set up the rain check. The girlfriend has been through the iPad purchasing experience (twice!), and I knew this would be nothing like that. I knew the hardware would have flaws. I knew the software would be half broken and need a lot of coaxing and hacking to get to a usable state. I also knew that I was only spending $150, and for that it would be a toy running Android that I could play around with.
A good comparison here is to early netbooks. I bought one of the 9" EeePc netbooks with 4GB of storage space, and when I got it home the Linux OS blew itself up because the first thing it wanted to do was install a bunch of updates and there wasn't enough space to do that. Out of the box, the thing was a piece of crap and required a ton of hacking to make it work. In that case I was not looking for a toy, so I returned it and ended up buying a Lenovo S10 that was much better. In this case, I knew it'd be a piece of crap that required a ton of hacking to make it work, so I was already in that mindset when I bought it. However if somebody's looking at this as an iPad competitor, they're going to be just as disappointed as I was in that old EeePc.
I suspect KMart is going to get a lot of returns for this device. This would be a great opportunity for hackers to pick up open-box returned devices even cheaper than $150. Keep an eye out at your local KMart.
"No Google Market" is not the same as "No app store". Augen has provided an apk for a different app store (don't remember exactly what it was, but it's not AppBrain and it's not specific to Augen) and it has a decent selection of apps. If you were to get one of these with the Google Market already on it (mine still has that), it's a pretty simple hack to get it working (requires installing the Android SDK and doing some work with the emulator to generate an AndroidId).
This device absolutely can install apps, though the resistive touch screen is crappy enough that I don't think it'd work well for playing them. Also, it has no accelerometer, so tilt-based games won't work (they probably run, but you won't be able to provide input). However it's a great book reader, battery permitting (Aldiko, FBReader, and a few others are available in the provided app store that's not Market). It also does reasonably well with media, though the screen has a pretty low bit-per-pixel count. Based on the banding in the default gradient backgrounds, I'd say it's probably 12bpp. Good enough for kids cartoons and youtube, but don't expect a satisfactory experience for any movie content. Also, you'll need a 2.5" to 3.5" headphone converter or 2.5" headphones.
You're wrong about resistive screens though, I found my old PDA after having used an HTC Desire for a few months, and it was great to be able to feel the screen again, as opposed to having to smudge my finger all over the immovable screen surface of my Desire to do anything. I'd settle for a capacitive/digitizer hybrid though.
Maybe I'm wrong about it for you, but for me I'm completely right. I've had several iPhones and the girlfriend has an iPad and an HTC Incredible. Resistive is decent if you're doing a lot of stylus work (handwriting), but for interface control I much prefer my finger and that works much, much better with capacitive. Even with the stylus, this screen is not very responsive.
Android is designed around finger-based input, so giving it a screen that only works well with a stylus is a terrible waste.
The 7" tablet is not a terrible size. It's bigger than Dell's 5" "tablet". While a 10" tablet would be nice, most of these Chinese knock-offs use a cheap LCD screen that only does 480x800. That would be a criminal resolution at 10" but is workable at 7".
However, bigger/better Android tablets (with capacitive screens!) from reputable are coming. They're just 6-12 months out right now. At the moment, the options are limited to cheap Chinese crap. You're not going to get a good tablet for $100-150, 7" or otherwise.
I put in a rain check with my local KMart early on during the sale, and I just got mine yesterday. Therefore they must be filling the pipeline, albeit slowly (I was told only five units came in). Out of the box, the device has a number of problems:
No Windows 7 drivers at all. There are XP/Vista drivers for 32-bit that may work, but there are no drivers for 64-bit. Flashing does work when you put the device into "fastboot" mode, but for standard connecting it might be a while before there are drivers.
There's an update to add screen calibration and a working recovery mode, but see above about drivers.
Market doesn't work. The device is missing an Android ID with no way to create a new one from the device itself. This is fixable.
Once Market is working, you'll often find that it doesn't want to start any downloads. The problem is that the cache for Market is too small, so once you've downloaded a couple of apps there's no more room for it to download more. This is fixable by frequently clearing the Market cache.
Every device has the same MAC address. This is not really an issue until you get multiple devices on the same network. This should be solvable with a software MAC change, but it's indicative of Augen being forced to release this early to satisfy KMart's sale. Augen wasn't planning on shipping until later in the fall, when they would've had time to sort out a lot of these problems.
There is no HDMI output despite claims to the contrary, no accelerometer for orientation changes, the headphone jack is a 2.5" jack rather than the US standard 3.5", and the MicroSD card slot is poorly design such that it's very possible to push the card into the body of the device rather than getting it into the socket. Not a whole lot that can be done about these hardware flaws with a software update.
I spent a fair chunk of yesterday getting everything working on my device. After rooting, adding shortcuts to manually rotate, changing the launcher since the default won't rotate to portrait mode, getting Market working, etc, the device is in pretty good shape. There's no way someone's parents or grandparents should buy this device, but for a geek who's reasonably comfortable following instructions from hackers it's a neat little device with decent hardware for a good price.
Too bad the resistive screen sucks. But that's not Augen's fault. All resistive touch screens suck once you've used capacitive.
I guess this all fits into my earlier assertion that jailbreaking your phone doesn't turn out to be that useful. It's hard to find what you want, even if it's there.
It depends on how you define "useful". You're defining it as "can find what I want, even if it's there". Others concede that Cydia searching sucks, but that jailbreaking is useful because the items you want are there. You just have to figure out how to find them.
Look for GV Mobile and MyWi. There are free and for-pay versions of GV Mobile, and while MyWi is for-pay it has a weird distribution scheme where it looks like it's free in Cydia but then you have to do a couple of other funky things, get a license, and then it works.
Cydia doesn't really have popular lists like in iTunes, so if you're used to seeing "Most Downloaded" apps you're not going to find it there. Really, I've found the best way to find what I want is to search the web for the concept ("iphone jailbreak wifi tether" for example) and find out what apps people are using to do what I want, and which ones they think are good. Then I search for that app in Cydia and download it. Note that Cydia's search seems to be based off of title and description and not any sort of metadata or semantics, so searching for "tether" does not return MyWi. But if you know that MyWi is what you want, searching for "MyWi" will find it quickly.
Also, as someone who tried out the jailbreaking procedure, it's not that useful right now. You can get a billion different themes, almost all of them ugly. Or there are some apps which aren't that useful and tend to break. The thing that Apple has disallowed that I'd most like to see (Google Voice support) doesn't seem to exist even if you jailbreak the phone.
Did you even bother to look up useful apps, or did you just browse through the latest changes in Cydia and conclude that since themes make up the majority of updates Cydia must only contain themes?
By jailbreaking, you can get access to apps that Apple won't let on the iTunes store at all. There's GV Mobile, the Google Voice app that got blocked from the iTunes store way back when. There's Backgrounder, a tool that allows you to do proper multitasking (as in, having multiple processes actually running at the same time, not the half-assed iOS 4 "multitasking". There are apps that will remove download restrictions when running on 3G rather than wifi, apps that enable tethering without having to pay AT&T an extra $30/mo, an app that allows you to wirelessly sync with iTunes rather than having to find your USB cable and plug in (I don't know why Apple doesn't do this already -- Microsoft does with Zune), "flashlight" apps that aren't restricted by the iTunes store's limitation on brightness APIs (the LCD screen on my 3GS at full bright is a perfectly good flashlight), and more.
If you're just looking for the latest version of Farmville or Bejewelled then there's no reason to jailbreak. If you want to actually use your phone's full capability, you can't not jailbreak.
The only way to keep your iPhone safe is to jailbreak it (using this or another method) and install the "PDF Loading Warner" tweak from Cydia. Once you've done that, you'll get a confirmation any time Safari tries to download a PDF file and you can cancel the navigation.
As such, you would never hear about this kind of problem with operators that DO offer iPhone with their plans because they would be sure to upgrade their network to support iOS4.
Explain to me, then, how my iPhone 3GS on the supported AT&T network had exactly this problem?
Unfortunately many 3G and 3GS phones have trouble upgrading to iOS 4. They upgrade just fine, but then can no longer connect to the cellular data network and lose visual voicemail and MMS (phone calls and text still work). I'm surprised this story has slipped under the radar so far, since it's impacted a lot more people than the iPhone 4. There's still no official fix other than resetting your phone to factory and not applying previous backups to it ever again, but there are several community fixes of greater or lesser value (some only fix cellular data while leaving MMS and VVM broken, but the correct fix is to delete a specific file from your backup that contains the corrupted APN, reset to factory, and then reapply your modified backup and ignore the error when iTunes complains about not completing the backup).
Apple really seems to have fucked up this time around.
I have that Netgear and it has terrible range on 5GHz. I blame the internal antennas, though I had an earlier Linksys (the 400N, I think?) that had internal antennas and better 5GHz range. Too bad the Linksys didn't have gigabit ethernet support and rebooted itself once a week. With the Netgear I just have to deal with suboptimal positioning of the unit in order to cover my highest traffic wifi areas.
I don't want a router. My linux box works quite well for that, thank you very much. However nobody sells a simultaneous dual-band, gigabit, 802.11n access point (at least not in an affordable, consumer-grade package). Instead I have to pay for crap that I don't want and that just makes things more complicated (I have to figure out how to turn stuff off, if it can even be turned off at all).
Also, internal antennas suck, especially for 5GHz. If I put my router/ap in a central closet that I have wired for ethernet and power, I'm lucky if I get 2 bars on 5GHz in my main usage area. Now instead of having my access point neatly tucked away I have to have it sitting out in a different room just so I can cover half of my house. And I don't even have that big of a house!
Last year at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Cody Russell asked Richard Stallman if there was anything that Microsoft could do to ease his fears of patent threats, and he said that there was. Microsoft could come out and publicly state that.NET was open to use and promise not to sue people over it. Days later they did exactly that and Richard did not change his opinion.
Your mistake was assuming that RMS will ever change any of his views regardless of facts. The man is a relic and should be treated like one -- ignored.
Nice, you're excited to save $5 a month. Wait until you watch a DVD (4gb) and get a $2000 bill afterwards for exceeding the data plan.. or leave an IRC or VNC session open and get flooded.. still happy?
Good thing Netflix on iPad doesn't let you run on 3G and the thing can't multitask so you're unlikely to accidentally leave IRC or VNC open. See? They already thought of everything!
A Kindle starts at $259, some of the cheap clones cost even less.
Many of the "cheap clones" have been around longer than the Kindle and are more open. For example, Sony's been in the e-reader game since 2004. Their current line of Sony Readers started almost exactly a year before the Kindle. Check out this list, sort by intro date, and you'll find several manufacturers who produced readers a year or more before Amazon.
PDF as an ebook format needs to die. The only reason it exists right now is because publishers are lazy. They already have the book in PDF format for printing, so they slap on some DRM and sell it as an "ebook", pissing off everybody in the process.
Amazon is obviously the biggest offender with their proprietary outdated format which is almost the same but not quite an epub.
Amazon's "almost but not quite an epub" format is just MobiPocket with a slightly modified DRM (actually, it's not modified at all -- it's just a slightly different key using a character that other Mobi DRM implementations don't support). This makes sense from Amazon's perspective since they purchased MobiPocket a while ago.
But that's okay. Amazon does not sell "ebooks". They sell "Kindle books". The Kindle is not an ebook reader. It's a Kindle book reader. Most of Amazon's content is available at other stores in other formats. For the content that's not, there's the PC Kindle reader. Buy from Amazon, crack the DRM, and convert to your preferred format using Calibre or similar.
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And what's so wrong with stored procedures? Trigger hate I get -- you don't want arbitrary, unknown-complexity code running on every insert. But stored procedures are not triggers. Why exactly do you believe stored procedures are bad? Hint: Any reference to anything MySQL folks have ever said about anything related to relational databases, you automatically lose.
It's a good thing the WD Live devices don't contain a hard drive. They're completely solid state. You can hook up an external drive, but you're better off using them to stream from a NAS or other networked storage.
One thing to note is that a lot of these devices (many of which all use the same Sigma Designs chip internally) don't support DTS audio, or if they do they only support 2-channel DTS and will not downsample. For most people this won't be an issue, but if you plan to rip DVDs or Blu-Rays for archival purposes you'll have to go with the lesser-quality AC3 audio (or worse, re-encode the original DTS to AC3).
Hurr durr. I are smart. No shit the advances were done by engineers and scientists. Farmers are farmers. They farm. That's what they do. Notice that I said "the domain of farming" when referring to technological advancements, meaning that farming (and in particular the need to continually increase yields) has driven a lot of technological advancement for thousands of years, and except for maybe the past 70-80 years or so it has driven almost all technological advancement. Obviously that doesn't mean that a farmer is sitting in a lab somewhere building a better fertilizer (though often it is the case that a farmer will tinker around and build something new and unique that turns out to be widely useful).
I've been saying it for some time now, but farmers have pretty much always been on the cutting edge of technology. The common view of farmers as slack-jawed yokels couldn't be any further from the truth. For thousands of years, most technology advances were the domain of farming. How do you think we can continue to feed the world's growing population and still have food surpluses that can be used for stuff like ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, plastics, etc.?
Growing up as the son of a farmer, we were always playing around with new technology long before anyone else. Think your GPS is pretty sweet? Yeah, we had that in the early 90s for charting harvest yields (X bushels harvested at Y location with a relatively fine scale on the location == pretty yield maps). Wireless real-time stock quotes? We had that in the 80s for the futures markets. Self-driving vehicles? You've been able to buy tractors that would drive themselves in the fields for the past 15+ years, including collision avoidance (fields are not empty -- there are creeks, rocks, power lines, hills, etc that all need to be avoided or otherwise handled). The only thing surprising about this story is that this didn't happen 5 years ago.
Well, it's a good thing Slashdot editors fact check articles before posting them, or that would be embarrassing.
What's that? Editors don't do a damn thing here? Carry on. Nothing to see here. Maybe this story will hit the RSS feed a couple more times before they get it right ...
I did, and I knew exactly what I was paying for when I set up the rain check. The girlfriend has been through the iPad purchasing experience (twice!), and I knew this would be nothing like that. I knew the hardware would have flaws. I knew the software would be half broken and need a lot of coaxing and hacking to get to a usable state. I also knew that I was only spending $150, and for that it would be a toy running Android that I could play around with.
A good comparison here is to early netbooks. I bought one of the 9" EeePc netbooks with 4GB of storage space, and when I got it home the Linux OS blew itself up because the first thing it wanted to do was install a bunch of updates and there wasn't enough space to do that. Out of the box, the thing was a piece of crap and required a ton of hacking to make it work. In that case I was not looking for a toy, so I returned it and ended up buying a Lenovo S10 that was much better. In this case, I knew it'd be a piece of crap that required a ton of hacking to make it work, so I was already in that mindset when I bought it. However if somebody's looking at this as an iPad competitor, they're going to be just as disappointed as I was in that old EeePc.
I suspect KMart is going to get a lot of returns for this device. This would be a great opportunity for hackers to pick up open-box returned devices even cheaper than $150. Keep an eye out at your local KMart.
"No Google Market" is not the same as "No app store". Augen has provided an apk for a different app store (don't remember exactly what it was, but it's not AppBrain and it's not specific to Augen) and it has a decent selection of apps. If you were to get one of these with the Google Market already on it (mine still has that), it's a pretty simple hack to get it working (requires installing the Android SDK and doing some work with the emulator to generate an AndroidId).
This device absolutely can install apps, though the resistive touch screen is crappy enough that I don't think it'd work well for playing them. Also, it has no accelerometer, so tilt-based games won't work (they probably run, but you won't be able to provide input). However it's a great book reader, battery permitting (Aldiko, FBReader, and a few others are available in the provided app store that's not Market). It also does reasonably well with media, though the screen has a pretty low bit-per-pixel count. Based on the banding in the default gradient backgrounds, I'd say it's probably 12bpp. Good enough for kids cartoons and youtube, but don't expect a satisfactory experience for any movie content. Also, you'll need a 2.5" to 3.5" headphone converter or 2.5" headphones.
Maybe I'm wrong about it for you, but for me I'm completely right. I've had several iPhones and the girlfriend has an iPad and an HTC Incredible. Resistive is decent if you're doing a lot of stylus work (handwriting), but for interface control I much prefer my finger and that works much, much better with capacitive. Even with the stylus, this screen is not very responsive.
Android is designed around finger-based input, so giving it a screen that only works well with a stylus is a terrible waste.
The 7" tablet is not a terrible size. It's bigger than Dell's 5" "tablet". While a 10" tablet would be nice, most of these Chinese knock-offs use a cheap LCD screen that only does 480x800. That would be a criminal resolution at 10" but is workable at 7".
However, bigger/better Android tablets (with capacitive screens!) from reputable are coming. They're just 6-12 months out right now. At the moment, the options are limited to cheap Chinese crap. You're not going to get a good tablet for $100-150, 7" or otherwise.
I put in a rain check with my local KMart early on during the sale, and I just got mine yesterday. Therefore they must be filling the pipeline, albeit slowly (I was told only five units came in). Out of the box, the device has a number of problems:
I spent a fair chunk of yesterday getting everything working on my device. After rooting, adding shortcuts to manually rotate, changing the launcher since the default won't rotate to portrait mode, getting Market working, etc, the device is in pretty good shape. There's no way someone's parents or grandparents should buy this device, but for a geek who's reasonably comfortable following instructions from hackers it's a neat little device with decent hardware for a good price.
Too bad the resistive screen sucks. But that's not Augen's fault. All resistive touch screens suck once you've used capacitive.
It depends on how you define "useful". You're defining it as "can find what I want, even if it's there". Others concede that Cydia searching sucks, but that jailbreaking is useful because the items you want are there. You just have to figure out how to find them.
Look for GV Mobile and MyWi. There are free and for-pay versions of GV Mobile, and while MyWi is for-pay it has a weird distribution scheme where it looks like it's free in Cydia but then you have to do a couple of other funky things, get a license, and then it works.
Cydia doesn't really have popular lists like in iTunes, so if you're used to seeing "Most Downloaded" apps you're not going to find it there. Really, I've found the best way to find what I want is to search the web for the concept ("iphone jailbreak wifi tether" for example) and find out what apps people are using to do what I want, and which ones they think are good. Then I search for that app in Cydia and download it. Note that Cydia's search seems to be based off of title and description and not any sort of metadata or semantics, so searching for "tether" does not return MyWi. But if you know that MyWi is what you want, searching for "MyWi" will find it quickly.
Did you even bother to look up useful apps, or did you just browse through the latest changes in Cydia and conclude that since themes make up the majority of updates Cydia must only contain themes?
By jailbreaking, you can get access to apps that Apple won't let on the iTunes store at all. There's GV Mobile, the Google Voice app that got blocked from the iTunes store way back when. There's Backgrounder, a tool that allows you to do proper multitasking (as in, having multiple processes actually running at the same time, not the half-assed iOS 4 "multitasking". There are apps that will remove download restrictions when running on 3G rather than wifi, apps that enable tethering without having to pay AT&T an extra $30/mo, an app that allows you to wirelessly sync with iTunes rather than having to find your USB cable and plug in (I don't know why Apple doesn't do this already -- Microsoft does with Zune), "flashlight" apps that aren't restricted by the iTunes store's limitation on brightness APIs (the LCD screen on my 3GS at full bright is a perfectly good flashlight), and more.
If you're just looking for the latest version of Farmville or Bejewelled then there's no reason to jailbreak. If you want to actually use your phone's full capability, you can't not jailbreak.
The only way to keep your iPhone safe is to jailbreak it (using this or another method) and install the "PDF Loading Warner" tweak from Cydia. Once you've done that, you'll get a confirmation any time Safari tries to download a PDF file and you can cancel the navigation.
Explain to me, then, how my iPhone 3GS on the supported AT&T network had exactly this problem?
Unfortunately many 3G and 3GS phones have trouble upgrading to iOS 4. They upgrade just fine, but then can no longer connect to the cellular data network and lose visual voicemail and MMS (phone calls and text still work). I'm surprised this story has slipped under the radar so far, since it's impacted a lot more people than the iPhone 4. There's still no official fix other than resetting your phone to factory and not applying previous backups to it ever again, but there are several community fixes of greater or lesser value (some only fix cellular data while leaving MMS and VVM broken, but the correct fix is to delete a specific file from your backup that contains the corrupted APN, reset to factory, and then reapply your modified backup and ignore the error when iTunes complains about not completing the backup).
Apple really seems to have fucked up this time around.
I have that Netgear and it has terrible range on 5GHz. I blame the internal antennas, though I had an earlier Linksys (the 400N, I think?) that had internal antennas and better 5GHz range. Too bad the Linksys didn't have gigabit ethernet support and rebooted itself once a week. With the Netgear I just have to deal with suboptimal positioning of the unit in order to cover my highest traffic wifi areas.
But your Asus isn't simultaneous dual-band. It doesn't even have a 5GHz radio at all!
I don't want a router. My linux box works quite well for that, thank you very much. However nobody sells a simultaneous dual-band, gigabit, 802.11n access point (at least not in an affordable, consumer-grade package). Instead I have to pay for crap that I don't want and that just makes things more complicated (I have to figure out how to turn stuff off, if it can even be turned off at all).
Also, internal antennas suck, especially for 5GHz. If I put my router/ap in a central closet that I have wired for ethernet and power, I'm lucky if I get 2 bars on 5GHz in my main usage area. Now instead of having my access point neatly tucked away I have to have it sitting out in a different room just so I can cover half of my house. And I don't even have that big of a house!
Your mistake was assuming that RMS will ever change any of his views regardless of facts. The man is a relic and should be treated like one -- ignored.
Good thing Netflix on iPad doesn't let you run on 3G and the thing can't multitask so you're unlikely to accidentally leave IRC or VNC open. See? They already thought of everything!
Many of the "cheap clones" have been around longer than the Kindle and are more open. For example, Sony's been in the e-reader game since 2004. Their current line of Sony Readers started almost exactly a year before the Kindle. Check out this list, sort by intro date, and you'll find several manufacturers who produced readers a year or more before Amazon.
PDF as an ebook format needs to die. The only reason it exists right now is because publishers are lazy. They already have the book in PDF format for printing, so they slap on some DRM and sell it as an "ebook", pissing off everybody in the process.
Amazon's "almost but not quite an epub" format is just MobiPocket with a slightly modified DRM (actually, it's not modified at all -- it's just a slightly different key using a character that other Mobi DRM implementations don't support). This makes sense from Amazon's perspective since they purchased MobiPocket a while ago.
But that's okay. Amazon does not sell "ebooks". They sell "Kindle books". The Kindle is not an ebook reader. It's a Kindle book reader. Most of Amazon's content is available at other stores in other formats. For the content that's not, there's the PC Kindle reader. Buy from Amazon, crack the DRM, and convert to your preferred format using Calibre or similar.