Mostly I just want the e-edition of the NYT for my lunch breaks.
You might check out Calibre. It has built-in conversion from web sources to ebooks, so you can download the NYTimes in the morning, sync it to whatever ebook reader you use, and enjoy it on your lunch breaks. It may require a subscription to NYT, but if you want the e-edition you're going to have to buy a subscription anyway.
If/when Apple introduces a 5-7" screen model I might just jump on that. Either way, until large screen (3.2"+) smart phones drop in price quite a bit more, the people with ereaders (i.e. $$$) are going to continue to find it convenient to purchase their books rather than hunt for free copies online.
Don't discount the smaller screen of an iPhone or Android smartphone. Their higher pixel density makes it comfortable to read even on a smaller screen. Most of my reading is fiction and non-fiction/news/technical stuff may not work as well, but if you already have such a device it's worth trying it out before dismissing it.
E-ink at this point is pretty much a failed product with the introduction of the iPad at a similar price point with a boat load of more/better features.
This really depends on the market. E-ink readers are great if all you want to do is read, and honestly that's what a majority of people want (look at the threads on MobileRead. There are constantly "I just want to read!" threads complaining about readers with extra features jacking up prices). The girlfriend has an iPad and it's definitely a cool piece of technology, but IMHO it really fails as an ereader. Apple screwed up by significantly reducing the pixel density of the device, such that I find reading on my iPhone a more enjoyable experience than reading on an iPad. Kindle on iPad is okay, but iBooks is actually pretty shitty for all of its "polish" (which is all just surface -- functionality is terrible, with UI chrome laid out haphazardly, stupid metaphors like showing pages of an open book on the side that don't change their height with the amount you've read into the book, etc). The killer for me is that Stanza will never have an official iPad version (Amazon bought Lexcycle and won't let Stanza compete with the closed Kindle app). Jailbreaking and running FullForce gives a satisfactory experience (as opposed to the native pixel-doubling that makes the text too large and blurry), but that's a hack.
Personally, I like e-ink with my main gripe being a lack of backlight. I just recently got my first e-ink reader so I haven't really had time to sit down and play with it extensively, but I can already say that the readability of the e-ink display is superior to the iPad and that the lack of backlight significantly limits where/when I can use the reader (I can read on my iPhone in bed with the lights out. I can't do that with an e-ink reader or with a traditional paper book). What I don't understand is why nobody has yet done a backlight on e-ink. It should work just fine. I'd even be satisfied with a Timex Indiglo-like backlight, which should work perfectly with e-ink technology. Instead, the industry seems to be moving towards color e-ink (why? You don't need color for black-and-white text, dammit!) rather than fixing the one glaring problem of lacking a backlight.
I think you are correct though, as mobile phones improve we will see ereaders as another service people will more seriously consider spending money on. I think we're 10 years off before most people start considering digital readers over physical copies.
I think your timeframe is a little off. E-reading has been happening on handheld devices for 15 years (I've been doing it for 10). Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, etc are all significantly invested, and I think that it'll be more like 2-5 years befo
You missed the fact that many people already have an ebook reader and don't even know it. Do you have an iPhone or iPod Touch? Then you have access to multiple e-readers, from commercial one-store-only readers like Amazon's Kindle, B&N's eReader (reskinned and restricted version of Fictionwise's eReader), or Kobo to open readers like Stanza (the best reader on iDevices by far, though for best iPad support you need to jailbreak and install FullForce). Don't have an iDevice? That's okay. There are e-readers for Android, Windows Mobile, and even Blackberry. If you have a PDA or smartphone, in all likelihood you already have an e-reader.
I also don't think your price discussion is right. Go visit forums like MobileRead and you'll see that many of the posters are actually very price conscious. The current ebook market is in its infancy at the moment and still hasn't come to the realization that DRM-free product will still sell. Until then, the limitations imposed (can't "lend" an ebook like you can a paper book, for example) are pretty obvious to end users and most people are unwilling to pay anywhere close to the price of a paper book for a restricted ebook. (that most ebook DRM has been cracked does not change that fact -- to get the industry to change you have to vote with your wallet, and if you buy DRMed ebooks only to rip off the DRM yourself later the sellers don't see the second half. They just see that they offered DRMed books and you bought them, so obviously people will buy DRMed books).
I first started reading ebooks on a Windows CE device back in 2000, and continued reading on my iPhone since 2007. I got my first eInk reader just this past Friday, and that was only $110 (yay for Woot!). Most of my reading has been free or classic books, with the occasional purchase from Kindle's store. At this point I've pretty much stopped buying paper books.
I understand that most PDF reader software doesn't scale just the text or resize the pages well, but is this an inherent property of the PDF format, or simply representative of the common uses to which it is being applied?
Both. PDF does support some amount of reflowable text, but it has to be a conscious decision by the author to enable it. Most PDF authors either don't know the option is available, don't care, or don't want it ("artistic integrity" demands that you read the book the way they want you to, not the way you want to). Worse, PDF is really a write-only format. It's intended as a final output option prior to printing and thus cannot convert easily to other formats. Sucks to be you if your reader doesn't support PDF (and many don't) but the book you want to read is PDF-only. In other cases of mismatched formats you can usually pull off the DRM and convert using a tool like Calibre, but PDF just doesn't convert well. For me, maybe half of the PDFs I've tried to convert to epub or lrf have worked out well. The rest have various different issues that lead to a sub-par reading experience.
PDF is an epic fail if you're rescaling to a new "paper" size. And each reader is, of course, a different size.
More than this, PDF has only recently added text reflow support, and only then if the PDF is properly tagged (most PDFs are not properly tagged). It's not so much that each reader is a different "paper" size, but that reflowable text is vital to support multiple font sizes. You could have a standard 8.5"x11" screen on your reader and still require reflow if you wanted to allow users to choose a larger font size for readability.
PDF is a shit-tier ebook format. Its popularity stems from the fact that most books are laid out in PDF (or an easily-convertible format like.doc/.rtf) prior to going to printers, making it easy for publishers to release an "ebook" version. Users buy it either because they have no other option or because they don't realize that there are better formats out there. For example, ePub is supported on most readers (Kindle excluded, because Kindle doesn't read "ebooks" -- it reads "Kindle books"). ePub has support from Adobe (using Digital Editions), DRM if you want it (Adobe's easily-cracked ADEPT DRM, Apple's FairPlay that hasn't yet been cracked for recent revisions, etc), and is based on XHTML+CSS in a zip container. ePub is even supported by Overdrive for ebook rentals through libraries (check your local library for participation).
Most formats can convert easily back and forth (mobi/prc, epub, lrf, fb2, txt, even rtf) using tools like Calibre (pronounced "cali-ber", not "ca-leebray"). PDF is the exception to the rule and needs to die as an ebook format.
"... [wait 30 seconds while you pretend to reboot your router]... Rebooted. Problem still exists"). But then you shouldn't need router-side tech support if you're going to run your own Linux router.
Doesn't every ISP allow you to do this? Your ISP provides with a modem of the correct type (DSL or cable) and you provide your own router. If they give you a modem that is also a router, you can turn that off or ask them for a plain old modem. With many ISPs, at least in the US, you can even provide your own modem.
I've been running my own Linux router for the past 12 years across multiple ISPs, from T1 providers back in college to DSL providers to Comcast, and have never had a problem doing so. The tech support may be clueless if you call ("Did you reboot your router?" "Let me do that...
I imagine MythTV (well, Linux in general) will be ready to hop right on this to take advantage of it so we can finally do away with all those STBs.
Not likely. Media Center gets to have access to CableCard tuners because it supports a compatible DRM format. The DCT cards from ATI (dead), Ceton (coming in a couple weeks), Silicon Dust (coming later this year), etc decrypt the incoming cable signal using the CableCard and then re-wrap the stream in Microsoft's PlayReady DRM. No support for PlayReady, no support for CableCard. Apps like SageTV (on Windows) have found a novel away of getting around this restriction -- rather than accessing the tuner directly, they instruct Media Center to schedule the recording, change live TV channels, etc. It's unlikely this is going to ever work on Linux (while you might get Media Center running in Wine, you'll still be missing the tuner card drivers).
While there's obviously the possibility of reverse engineering the process and breaking the encryption, the fact that ATI's DCT has been available for years now yet there's no such crack doesn't give much confidence that new tuners arriving on the scene will change that.
Until I can get a CableCARD PC tuner at Best Buy or Frys, all of this whining about Linux not supporting CableCARD is mindless nonsense.
You again! You're still as full of shit as ever. However since last time you spouted off your ignorant crap, Ceton has launched the pre-order for their InfiniTV 4 quad-tuner, which will ship in approximately 20 days. Ceton is a relatively small company at the moment so retail partnerships will probably take a while to materialize, but the card itself should be available from major online retailers (Amazon, Newegg, etc) once it officially launches at the end of this month. Price is $400, or $100/tuner.
Just today, Silicon Dust just showed off their 3-tuner device, announced a beta testing program, and availability of "in time for the holidays 2010". And since Silicon Dust's existing HDHR products are on the shelves at Fry's and other brick and mortar retailers, you can imagine this will also be available there once it launches. Price is still expected to be $250-260, or $83-86/tuner.
As I mentioned the last two times I had to put you in your place, the PC digital cable tuner market didn't really exist until last fall when Windows 7 shipped the ability to use DCTs without requiring a special OEM BIOS. Prior to that CableLabs had a lock on the market and nobody was interested in playing (ATI tried, but as of April this year they've completely discontinued their lame, expensive DCT offering). Opening up that market allowed for other players, but as the move was relatively sudden you have to allow time for development and manufacturing. Ceton is there now (CableLabs certification has been passed, cards are being manufactured in China for the pre-order run), Silicon Dust is actively engaged, and surely other tuner companies are eyeing the market to see how it pans out.
But they did release the source code to MechCommander some years ago. What with that being a "real-time tactics" game, that's probably a much better place to start if you wanted to do a turn-based MechWarrior.
And how long have PS3 Dev's been prospering off the excellent indie games on PSN?
You can't compare PSN to XBLIG. Don't confuse Indie Games (XBLIG) with Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA). PSN is Sony's equivalent to XBLA, which dev kit investment, certification, timed deployments, etc. Those are for bigger studios that can invest in full development. Indie Games are free for anybody to write (costs $100/year to put it on Xbox, though), are peer-reviewed rather than certified by Microsoft, and are posted as they clear the peer review queue rather than being limited to one or two at a time.
For comparison, The Dishwasher and I Made a Game With Zombies In It were both written by the same guy, but The Dishwasher is an XBLA game (grand prize for winning Dream-Build-Play several years ago) and Zombies is an Indie game.
Sony and Nintendo have no comparable program to Microsoft's XLBIG, where hobby developers can write games with very little up-front costs and get them published on the console.
They got ABP's easylist to add a rule for "arstechnica.com###ars-after-first-post" and then tagged the content of the article with that ID. ABP saw the rule, saw the div with the id, and killed it. Pretty easy to look at ABP's "blockable items" view, see that there's something pretty obviously not an ad being blocked, and remove that one filter.
The better question is, how did they get this into easylist in the first place?
On a personal note from me, I'd far rather all news sites be free to visit, and pay through ad revenue than have to subscribe to every news site I might want to view. Right now, wherever the 'good' news (or whatever) is, I can go and read it. If I had to subscribe to *every* news site in order to get it, I'd be restricted to a pretty limited set of sites. I'd much rather see well-placed and targeted ads than have to actually hand over money.
I honestly don't see the problem with advertising in general. I browse with no ad blocker, and if a site's got daft ads that annoy me, I leave - as I would if anything else about it was crap. If a site doesn't irritate me with its ads and has whatever I was after, I'll stay. I've also, on occasion, clicked through ads for products that interest me.
On slashdot, for example, I've never felt the need to check the 'disable advertising' box, since the ads just don't annoy me, and are occasionally useful.
Good for you. Go ahead and keep browsing with ads and clicking on them. As long as you do, I don't have to. For the same reason, I don't donate to charity, pay for PBS/NPR (other than through my taxes), etc. As long as there's no impact on my access to those resources if I don't pay, there's no reason for me to pay, whether with my eyes or with my wallet. I will continue to block ads and "leech" from sites like Ars (their "adblock block" was trivially simple to bypass without whitelisting the site). I will continue to watch/listen to PBS/NPR programs. I will take as much advantage of "free" sites and services as I can as long as someone else is paying for them. And I will not feel bad about doing it, because if they didn't want me to the sites/services wouldn't be free to begin with.
Lucky for you, people like me are relatively rare. There are people like you who choose to surf without ad blockers, and there's the much, much larger contingent of people who don't even know what an ad blocker is. The impact of "freeloaders" like me is pretty minimal, and is generally built into the model. When you're offering something for free, you're betting that the group of people who are willing to give something back is larger than the group of people who give nothing back because your stuff is free. If that's true, you survive. If it's not, your business model failed. Deal with it.
Ethernet cable is something like $100/1000 ft in boxes, there's no reason not to just pull Cat5e and be done with it. Pulling cable takes an afternoon at worst and then you're done with it forever. Having the coax already run makes it that much easier. We're talking a 2 hour, $100 project to convert the entire house.
I don't know what kind of house you have, but wiring my whole house was a 2-day, 3-man project. My house isn't even that big at just over 1900 sq ft and two stories.
Also, 5E is a lot less expensive, and less fragile.
Cat6 is just a whole ball of wax that doesn't _currently_ offer any performance advantages for virtually any user outside a data-center - and that "currently" isn't likely to change for some time. Since it's cheaper and less problem prone, etc - why not.
But if you're going to pull wire in your house, why not do it once and be good for the next ~20 years or so? If you consider it as an investment in your house, the cost really isn't all that much.
I just finished having my house rewired (I paid somebody to do it because I wanted it done right the first time and I don't care to learn the skills required to pull cable through walls). I ended up having 10 RG6 lines and 9 cat6 lines pulled, for a combined material cost of $470. Compared to labor at $1160 ($58/hr for 20 billed hours, the installers actually spent closer to 24 hours doing the work split between two guys and two days), the material cost is worth it. Now I have whole-house gigabit that can be easily upgraded to 10G by simply changing out switches and NICs, and I won't have to touch it again for a very long time.
I started out the project wanting to replace my aging dasiy-chained coax installation (rooms connected to other rooms) with a proper structural installation (individual drops per room, connected at the strike point) to fix signal issues I was having when trying to record multiple cable channels at once (went from marginal ~80% signal quality with a single channel to 100% signal quality with three channels at once). I figured as long as I'm already paying for labor to have wires snaked through my walls, I may as well put some cat6 in there. I ended up getting some electrical wiring done in the process (outlet in a central hall closet for a wifi AP, outlet in the equipment enclosure to power the amp and switch). All told I ended up spending ~$2700, which is cheap when it comes to home improvement projects. That wasn't the cheapest estimate I was given (had a guy who said he could do it for $1500), but I'd rather pay more to make sure I get quality materials and workmanship.
Actually, the XBOX 360 can do mkv containers thanks to a plugin (beta status) from xvid. Check this out: http://labs.divx.com/mkvwin7preview Works great....
And that's transcoding, as I mentioned. It does work, though I've only tried it through the media center extender interface. I don't know if it works through the dashboard UPnP AV streaming or not. Even so, I'd still prefer a non-transcoding solution, ultimately.
But perhaps more importantly, the Xbox 360 isn't the only device that would need an upgrade; DVD players carrying the DivX logo come with decoders for a subset of MPEG-4 Part 2 but not necessarily H.264.
The 360 can already play h.264 in an mp4 container (only 2-channel AAC, though). Zune will stream that natively, and WMP11 can be coaxed to stream mp4 using a registry hack (WMP will list anything it can see in its library, and while WMP12 understands mp4 immediately WMP11 needs an extra registry key to make it see mp4s). The 360 currently doesn't understand the mkv container, but transcoding can be done pretty efficiently. Now that DivX is using mkv, it'd be nice to get an update that would allow the 360 to understand mkv directly.
The existence of rental property and marriage doesn't make exclusive secret contracts between corporations a good idea.
Who said the contract was secret? Microsoft and Netflix had huge press releases when they made that contract. Not exactly a secret if you're telling anybody and everybody who will listen about it.
Who are they hurting? From my perspective, me. I want something that is prohibited by a secret exclusive contract, so as an advocate for my own interests in this and many other cases, I wish this form of contract were not allowed.
Are you really? If you want an embedded Netflix streaming solution, you can easily go out and buy an Xbox. But more importantly, you have no "right" to have Netflix streaming video embedded in your video player, just as you have no right to my house. As the parent said, I have an exclusive contract on the use of my house due to my ownership of it. I'm hurting you by denying you access to my house. Thus by your logic I shouldn't be allowed to own a house.
And this secret exclusive contract isn't so onerous, but others are, on a sliding scale.
When an exclusive contract is truly damaging (a contract between competitors to fix prices, for example), there's protection for that. Just because certain types of exclusive contracts can be abused doesn't mean that all exclusive contracts should be disallowed.
The truth is that the optimization service is a good one for many people. Best Buy creates the specifics of the optimization service based on feedback from their customers and from the Geek Squad Agents who work on their computers. You must realize that for the majority of the Geek Squad's customers, a computer (tower) is a "router," Toshiba is "Toshibia," Linksys is "Linksky," Windows 7 is "Windows Veesta 7," and that's only if they know the difference between Windows and MS Office (which MANY do not). We're not talking about people with even passing computer knowledge. For these people, not having an icon for Internet Explorer or My Computer on their desktop (as is the case in many freshly-purchased machines) is akin to having a car with no steering wheel or pedals. The optimization service is designed to maximize the usability of a new computer for those customers who need it.
Did you even read the consumerist report from the previous article? The optimization service is only good for Best Buy. It's a waste of time and money for anybody else, and can in fact cause more problems than it "fixes" (in that it never actually fixes anything). Your disdain for customers is pretty obvious (from the butthurt, I'm assuming you're a Geek Squad employee). Rather than looking down on your customers, why not try to educate them? Rather than charging them $40 for you to fuck up their computer, why not charge them $40 for a 1-hour class on how to use their new computer? You get the same money, customers who need it actually get something useful, and customers who don't won't have to pay a ransom just to buy a computer.
The optimization service takes some time (30 minutes to an hour) to complete. To save customers some time, the Geek Squad will "pre-optimize" a small percentage of their computers. In doing this, they are not violating any laws provided they leave any minimum available quantity (if stated in the weekly ad) unopened. If you attempt to purchase a computer and all they have left are pre-optimized units, they are required to sell you the computer at the normal retail price. They can not force you to pay the optimization fee. They do have the option, however, to restore the computer to factory defaults before they allow you to leave with it, and they do not have to give you an open-box discount. If employees are breaking these rules (laws) it is because of the poor management I referred to earlier, but it is certainly not company policy.
If optimization only takes 30-60 minutes, why do you sell it to users by telling them that it saves days of time just downloading Windows updates? You might want to get your facts straight. As for selling pre-optimized computers, re-read that Consumerist article. Maybe they're supposed to do what you say, but most stores don't. Besides, if you opened a brand new computer so you could fuck it up (I mean, "pre-optimize" it), I don't want it at normal price. I definitely don't want it at a "pre-optimized" premium price. I want it at open-box discount prices, because that's what it is now -- an open box PC. I can't be sure that all of the parts are included in the box (see the consumerist article again about missing power cords, contents of boxes swapped between different PCs, etc). Not doing so is a scam, and should be reported to the BBB.
The real villains here are Microsoft and the computer manufacturers for not providing a consistent and customer-friendly experience for new computer buyers. Some of it comes from simply economics and marketing: manufacturers can reduce selling cost by including loads of trial software, not including MS Office and antivirus software, etc. The savings are then (misleadingly) passed to the customer. (I am sure, though, that Best Buy's enormous purchasing power has some say in what the manufacturers do, though.)
Microsoft's OOBE is just fine -- you start the PC, answer a couple of questions about timezo
It probably has something to do with the install DVD having files larger than 2GB on it. I have a copy of the 64bit Pro Edition, and it has a 2.7GB file on it, that's a no-go for for FAT32. Hence why the first guide I found on Google started off with telling you how to format the disk in NTFS (granted, in a rather roundabout way). Perhaps other editions are small enough to work?
That may be true, but it's also somewhat irrelevant. 90% of these "install from USB drive" tutorials are focused directly at netbooks specifically because they don't have built-in optical drives and most people don't have external USB DVD drives they can plug in. As far as I'm aware, currently every netbook is 32-bit (certain Atom processors can run 64-bit, but those CPUs aren't currently shipped in netbooks), thus a 64-bit install doesn't really matter. It seems the 32-bit install does not have > 2GB files, as I've never had it complain copying to/installing from my FAT32-formatted USB key.
Though I also don't understand how the BIOS would know how to boot off the USB drive without you don't something to make it bootable. However, I know some BIOS's can read FAT32 (since they support flashing the BIOS from an image file on a thumbdrive), so maybe they scan the thumbdrive and find the appropiate boot files anyway?
Modern bioses (especially those in netbooks, the target here) can read USB devices for booting purposes. You might have to change boot order if you have it default to your hard drive first. How the BIOSes read the USB drive in order to boot, I don't know. I just know it works.
Crappy ASCII art based shareware game... Kingdom of Kroz... "borrowed" it's name from Zork.
Crappy or not, Kroz ultimately brought us Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, etc. Scott Miller founded Apogee with the release of Kingdom of Kroz, and the rest is history.
Slashdot Mirror
You might check out Calibre. It has built-in conversion from web sources to ebooks, so you can download the NYTimes in the morning, sync it to whatever ebook reader you use, and enjoy it on your lunch breaks. It may require a subscription to NYT, but if you want the e-edition you're going to have to buy a subscription anyway.
Don't discount the smaller screen of an iPhone or Android smartphone. Their higher pixel density makes it comfortable to read even on a smaller screen. Most of my reading is fiction and non-fiction/news/technical stuff may not work as well, but if you already have such a device it's worth trying it out before dismissing it.
This really depends on the market. E-ink readers are great if all you want to do is read, and honestly that's what a majority of people want (look at the threads on MobileRead. There are constantly "I just want to read!" threads complaining about readers with extra features jacking up prices). The girlfriend has an iPad and it's definitely a cool piece of technology, but IMHO it really fails as an ereader. Apple screwed up by significantly reducing the pixel density of the device, such that I find reading on my iPhone a more enjoyable experience than reading on an iPad. Kindle on iPad is okay, but iBooks is actually pretty shitty for all of its "polish" (which is all just surface -- functionality is terrible, with UI chrome laid out haphazardly, stupid metaphors like showing pages of an open book on the side that don't change their height with the amount you've read into the book, etc). The killer for me is that Stanza will never have an official iPad version (Amazon bought Lexcycle and won't let Stanza compete with the closed Kindle app). Jailbreaking and running FullForce gives a satisfactory experience (as opposed to the native pixel-doubling that makes the text too large and blurry), but that's a hack.
Personally, I like e-ink with my main gripe being a lack of backlight. I just recently got my first e-ink reader so I haven't really had time to sit down and play with it extensively, but I can already say that the readability of the e-ink display is superior to the iPad and that the lack of backlight significantly limits where/when I can use the reader (I can read on my iPhone in bed with the lights out. I can't do that with an e-ink reader or with a traditional paper book). What I don't understand is why nobody has yet done a backlight on e-ink. It should work just fine. I'd even be satisfied with a Timex Indiglo-like backlight, which should work perfectly with e-ink technology. Instead, the industry seems to be moving towards color e-ink (why? You don't need color for black-and-white text, dammit!) rather than fixing the one glaring problem of lacking a backlight.
I think your timeframe is a little off. E-reading has been happening on handheld devices for 15 years (I've been doing it for 10). Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, etc are all significantly invested, and I think that it'll be more like 2-5 years befo
You missed the fact that many people already have an ebook reader and don't even know it. Do you have an iPhone or iPod Touch? Then you have access to multiple e-readers, from commercial one-store-only readers like Amazon's Kindle, B&N's eReader (reskinned and restricted version of Fictionwise's eReader), or Kobo to open readers like Stanza (the best reader on iDevices by far, though for best iPad support you need to jailbreak and install FullForce). Don't have an iDevice? That's okay. There are e-readers for Android, Windows Mobile, and even Blackberry. If you have a PDA or smartphone, in all likelihood you already have an e-reader.
I also don't think your price discussion is right. Go visit forums like MobileRead and you'll see that many of the posters are actually very price conscious. The current ebook market is in its infancy at the moment and still hasn't come to the realization that DRM-free product will still sell. Until then, the limitations imposed (can't "lend" an ebook like you can a paper book, for example) are pretty obvious to end users and most people are unwilling to pay anywhere close to the price of a paper book for a restricted ebook. (that most ebook DRM has been cracked does not change that fact -- to get the industry to change you have to vote with your wallet, and if you buy DRMed ebooks only to rip off the DRM yourself later the sellers don't see the second half. They just see that they offered DRMed books and you bought them, so obviously people will buy DRMed books).
I first started reading ebooks on a Windows CE device back in 2000, and continued reading on my iPhone since 2007. I got my first eInk reader just this past Friday, and that was only $110 (yay for Woot!). Most of my reading has been free or classic books, with the occasional purchase from Kindle's store. At this point I've pretty much stopped buying paper books.
Congratulations. You just created ePub, the existing open ebook standard consisting of XHTML+CSS in a zip container. Welcome to 2007.
Both. PDF does support some amount of reflowable text, but it has to be a conscious decision by the author to enable it. Most PDF authors either don't know the option is available, don't care, or don't want it ("artistic integrity" demands that you read the book the way they want you to, not the way you want to). Worse, PDF is really a write-only format. It's intended as a final output option prior to printing and thus cannot convert easily to other formats. Sucks to be you if your reader doesn't support PDF (and many don't) but the book you want to read is PDF-only. In other cases of mismatched formats you can usually pull off the DRM and convert using a tool like Calibre, but PDF just doesn't convert well. For me, maybe half of the PDFs I've tried to convert to epub or lrf have worked out well. The rest have various different issues that lead to a sub-par reading experience.
More than this, PDF has only recently added text reflow support, and only then if the PDF is properly tagged (most PDFs are not properly tagged). It's not so much that each reader is a different "paper" size, but that reflowable text is vital to support multiple font sizes. You could have a standard 8.5"x11" screen on your reader and still require reflow if you wanted to allow users to choose a larger font size for readability.
PDF is a shit-tier ebook format. Its popularity stems from the fact that most books are laid out in PDF (or an easily-convertible format like .doc/.rtf) prior to going to printers, making it easy for publishers to release an "ebook" version. Users buy it either because they have no other option or because they don't realize that there are better formats out there. For example, ePub is supported on most readers (Kindle excluded, because Kindle doesn't read "ebooks" -- it reads "Kindle books"). ePub has support from Adobe (using Digital Editions), DRM if you want it (Adobe's easily-cracked ADEPT DRM, Apple's FairPlay that hasn't yet been cracked for recent revisions, etc), and is based on XHTML+CSS in a zip container. ePub is even supported by Overdrive for ebook rentals through libraries (check your local library for participation).
Most formats can convert easily back and forth (mobi/prc, epub, lrf, fb2, txt, even rtf) using tools like Calibre (pronounced "cali-ber", not "ca-leebray"). PDF is the exception to the rule and needs to die as an ebook format.
Doh! Stupid Slashdot. That should continue:
"... [wait 30 seconds while you pretend to reboot your router] ... Rebooted. Problem still exists"). But then you shouldn't need router-side tech support if you're going to run your own Linux router.
Doesn't every ISP allow you to do this? Your ISP provides with a modem of the correct type (DSL or cable) and you provide your own router. If they give you a modem that is also a router, you can turn that off or ask them for a plain old modem. With many ISPs, at least in the US, you can even provide your own modem.
I've been running my own Linux router for the past 12 years across multiple ISPs, from T1 providers back in college to DSL providers to Comcast, and have never had a problem doing so. The tech support may be clueless if you call ("Did you reboot your router?" "Let me do that ...
Not likely. Media Center gets to have access to CableCard tuners because it supports a compatible DRM format. The DCT cards from ATI (dead), Ceton (coming in a couple weeks), Silicon Dust (coming later this year), etc decrypt the incoming cable signal using the CableCard and then re-wrap the stream in Microsoft's PlayReady DRM. No support for PlayReady, no support for CableCard. Apps like SageTV (on Windows) have found a novel away of getting around this restriction -- rather than accessing the tuner directly, they instruct Media Center to schedule the recording, change live TV channels, etc. It's unlikely this is going to ever work on Linux (while you might get Media Center running in Wine, you'll still be missing the tuner card drivers).
While there's obviously the possibility of reverse engineering the process and breaking the encryption, the fact that ATI's DCT has been available for years now yet there's no such crack doesn't give much confidence that new tuners arriving on the scene will change that.
You again! You're still as full of shit as ever. However since last time you spouted off your ignorant crap, Ceton has launched the pre-order for their InfiniTV 4 quad-tuner, which will ship in approximately 20 days. Ceton is a relatively small company at the moment so retail partnerships will probably take a while to materialize, but the card itself should be available from major online retailers (Amazon, Newegg, etc) once it officially launches at the end of this month. Price is $400, or $100/tuner.
Just today, Silicon Dust just showed off their 3-tuner device, announced a beta testing program, and availability of "in time for the holidays 2010". And since Silicon Dust's existing HDHR products are on the shelves at Fry's and other brick and mortar retailers, you can imagine this will also be available there once it launches. Price is still expected to be $250-260, or $83-86/tuner.
As I mentioned the last two times I had to put you in your place, the PC digital cable tuner market didn't really exist until last fall when Windows 7 shipped the ability to use DCTs without requiring a special OEM BIOS. Prior to that CableLabs had a lock on the market and nobody was interested in playing (ATI tried, but as of April this year they've completely discontinued their lame, expensive DCT offering). Opening up that market allowed for other players, but as the move was relatively sudden you have to allow time for development and manufacturing. Ceton is there now (CableLabs certification has been passed, cards are being manufactured in China for the pre-order run), Silicon Dust is actively engaged, and surely other tuner companies are eyeing the market to see how it pans out.
But they did release the source code to MechCommander some years ago. What with that being a "real-time tactics" game, that's probably a much better place to start if you wanted to do a turn-based MechWarrior.
I played Borderlands on Xbox 360 and it Just Worked®. Of course I have a UPnP daemon running on my linux gateway, which makes it work.
Sorry, no. WiiWare is equivalent to PSN or XBLA, not XBLIG.
You can't compare PSN to XBLIG. Don't confuse Indie Games (XBLIG) with Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA). PSN is Sony's equivalent to XBLA, which dev kit investment, certification, timed deployments, etc. Those are for bigger studios that can invest in full development. Indie Games are free for anybody to write (costs $100/year to put it on Xbox, though), are peer-reviewed rather than certified by Microsoft, and are posted as they clear the peer review queue rather than being limited to one or two at a time.
For comparison, The Dishwasher and I Made a Game With Zombies In It were both written by the same guy, but The Dishwasher is an XBLA game (grand prize for winning Dream-Build-Play several years ago) and Zombies is an Indie game.
Sony and Nintendo have no comparable program to Microsoft's XLBIG, where hobby developers can write games with very little up-front costs and get them published on the console.
They got ABP's easylist to add a rule for "arstechnica.com###ars-after-first-post" and then tagged the content of the article with that ID. ABP saw the rule, saw the div with the id, and killed it. Pretty easy to look at ABP's "blockable items" view, see that there's something pretty obviously not an ad being blocked, and remove that one filter.
The better question is, how did they get this into easylist in the first place?
Good for you. Go ahead and keep browsing with ads and clicking on them. As long as you do, I don't have to. For the same reason, I don't donate to charity, pay for PBS/NPR (other than through my taxes), etc. As long as there's no impact on my access to those resources if I don't pay, there's no reason for me to pay, whether with my eyes or with my wallet. I will continue to block ads and "leech" from sites like Ars (their "adblock block" was trivially simple to bypass without whitelisting the site). I will continue to watch/listen to PBS/NPR programs. I will take as much advantage of "free" sites and services as I can as long as someone else is paying for them. And I will not feel bad about doing it, because if they didn't want me to the sites/services wouldn't be free to begin with.
Lucky for you, people like me are relatively rare. There are people like you who choose to surf without ad blockers, and there's the much, much larger contingent of people who don't even know what an ad blocker is. The impact of "freeloaders" like me is pretty minimal, and is generally built into the model. When you're offering something for free, you're betting that the group of people who are willing to give something back is larger than the group of people who give nothing back because your stuff is free. If that's true, you survive. If it's not, your business model failed. Deal with it.
I don't know what kind of house you have, but wiring my whole house was a 2-day, 3-man project. My house isn't even that big at just over 1900 sq ft and two stories.
But if you're going to pull wire in your house, why not do it once and be good for the next ~20 years or so? If you consider it as an investment in your house, the cost really isn't all that much.
I just finished having my house rewired (I paid somebody to do it because I wanted it done right the first time and I don't care to learn the skills required to pull cable through walls). I ended up having 10 RG6 lines and 9 cat6 lines pulled, for a combined material cost of $470. Compared to labor at $1160 ($58/hr for 20 billed hours, the installers actually spent closer to 24 hours doing the work split between two guys and two days), the material cost is worth it. Now I have whole-house gigabit that can be easily upgraded to 10G by simply changing out switches and NICs, and I won't have to touch it again for a very long time.
I started out the project wanting to replace my aging dasiy-chained coax installation (rooms connected to other rooms) with a proper structural installation (individual drops per room, connected at the strike point) to fix signal issues I was having when trying to record multiple cable channels at once (went from marginal ~80% signal quality with a single channel to 100% signal quality with three channels at once). I figured as long as I'm already paying for labor to have wires snaked through my walls, I may as well put some cat6 in there. I ended up getting some electrical wiring done in the process (outlet in a central hall closet for a wifi AP, outlet in the equipment enclosure to power the amp and switch). All told I ended up spending ~$2700, which is cheap when it comes to home improvement projects. That wasn't the cheapest estimate I was given (had a guy who said he could do it for $1500), but I'd rather pay more to make sure I get quality materials and workmanship.
And that's transcoding, as I mentioned. It does work, though I've only tried it through the media center extender interface. I don't know if it works through the dashboard UPnP AV streaming or not. Even so, I'd still prefer a non-transcoding solution, ultimately.
The 360 can already play h.264 in an mp4 container (only 2-channel AAC, though). Zune will stream that natively, and WMP11 can be coaxed to stream mp4 using a registry hack (WMP will list anything it can see in its library, and while WMP12 understands mp4 immediately WMP11 needs an extra registry key to make it see mp4s). The 360 currently doesn't understand the mkv container, but transcoding can be done pretty efficiently. Now that DivX is using mkv, it'd be nice to get an update that would allow the 360 to understand mkv directly.
Paste into mspaint, select the area you want, copy to the clipboard.
Use PrtScn without alt to get a screenshot of the entire desktop (including multiple monitors). Then see the last answer.
Or you could run your PS3 through a proxy that strips the UA.
Who said the contract was secret? Microsoft and Netflix had huge press releases when they made that contract. Not exactly a secret if you're telling anybody and everybody who will listen about it.
Are you really? If you want an embedded Netflix streaming solution, you can easily go out and buy an Xbox. But more importantly, you have no "right" to have Netflix streaming video embedded in your video player, just as you have no right to my house. As the parent said, I have an exclusive contract on the use of my house due to my ownership of it. I'm hurting you by denying you access to my house. Thus by your logic I shouldn't be allowed to own a house.
When an exclusive contract is truly damaging (a contract between competitors to fix prices, for example), there's protection for that. Just because certain types of exclusive contracts can be abused doesn't mean that all exclusive contracts should be disallowed.
Did you even read the consumerist report from the previous article? The optimization service is only good for Best Buy. It's a waste of time and money for anybody else, and can in fact cause more problems than it "fixes" (in that it never actually fixes anything). Your disdain for customers is pretty obvious (from the butthurt, I'm assuming you're a Geek Squad employee). Rather than looking down on your customers, why not try to educate them? Rather than charging them $40 for you to fuck up their computer, why not charge them $40 for a 1-hour class on how to use their new computer? You get the same money, customers who need it actually get something useful, and customers who don't won't have to pay a ransom just to buy a computer.
If optimization only takes 30-60 minutes, why do you sell it to users by telling them that it saves days of time just downloading Windows updates? You might want to get your facts straight. As for selling pre-optimized computers, re-read that Consumerist article. Maybe they're supposed to do what you say, but most stores don't. Besides, if you opened a brand new computer so you could fuck it up (I mean, "pre-optimize" it), I don't want it at normal price. I definitely don't want it at a "pre-optimized" premium price. I want it at open-box discount prices, because that's what it is now -- an open box PC. I can't be sure that all of the parts are included in the box (see the consumerist article again about missing power cords, contents of boxes swapped between different PCs, etc). Not doing so is a scam, and should be reported to the BBB.
Microsoft's OOBE is just fine -- you start the PC, answer a couple of questions about timezo
That may be true, but it's also somewhat irrelevant. 90% of these "install from USB drive" tutorials are focused directly at netbooks specifically because they don't have built-in optical drives and most people don't have external USB DVD drives they can plug in. As far as I'm aware, currently every netbook is 32-bit (certain Atom processors can run 64-bit, but those CPUs aren't currently shipped in netbooks), thus a 64-bit install doesn't really matter. It seems the 32-bit install does not have > 2GB files, as I've never had it complain copying to/installing from my FAT32-formatted USB key.
Modern bioses (especially those in netbooks, the target here) can read USB devices for booting purposes. You might have to change boot order if you have it default to your hard drive first. How the BIOSes read the USB drive in order to boot, I don't know. I just know it works.
Crappy or not, Kroz ultimately brought us Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, etc. Scott Miller founded Apogee with the release of Kingdom of Kroz, and the rest is history.