I could not be more tired of phone calls from family, friends, and even colleagues that begin with a breathless version of "Hey I need your help I think my computer is totally virus infected I got this warning the other day that I had 2342384 viruses in all these folders and did I want to install a free tool to clean them up and I said okay and it installed but I think I was too slow because now my computer is really slow and keeps doing strange things and I get all of these porn popups?!?! I wish I had clicked yes to automatically download and install it faster, but I clicked yes as fast as I could what should I do now nothing is working and these naked lady popups just keep coming!!!!!?"
that even with this trickeration, the old design is objectively better. Less clutter, less ambiguity. The new design has box after box after box, with labels like "Make it yours." WTF? What's the matter with "Bid" or "Buy?" What's the problem with one photo of a product, one box in which to place your bid? It's not Facebook, it's ecommerce!
Apple's customers are not the same customers as those of other computing companies (a silly, obvious statement, but apparently not so obvious that it doesn't need to be said).
Things that are clear:
Apple is doing very well right now.
Apple is doing very well as a very secretive company.
Apple's current customers, which are the reason it's doing very well, support Apple while it's a very secretive company.
Things that have been the subject of much speculation:
Apple's customers buy in many cases for non-technical reasons.
Apple's customers buy in many cases for social, identity, or personality reasons.
Things that are also clear:
It cannot be ruled out that Apple's secrecy contributes to the loyalty of its customer base, which is not congruent to the customer base of other technology companies.
It cannot be ruled out, therefore, that a reduction in secrecy would alienate some current customers.
It cannot be guaranteed that a reduction in secrecy would gain Apple an equivalent number of new customers.
Synopsis:
If I'm Apple, and I'm having the best few years in a very, very long time for the company, I am not . changing. a . thing .
Those which target "you" and those which target "everybody."
Security through obscurity is great at insulating you from those attacks that target "everybody" (worms, etc.) because the attack is happy to exploit the common case and not bother with specificities, since that will still net it a bunch of bots/slaves/zombies/etc.
For those which target "you" specifically, security through obscurity will solve absolutely nothing.
Most pointedly (and many people on Slashdot miss this) the largest threat to the common Internet user is precisely of the former kind (the odd worm, being a part of a "net public") and not necessarily attacks that specifically want to compromise ONE machine or network somewhere that is the TARGET of the attack.
Security through obscurity is therefore a useful basic defense if you are not particularly interesting as a node.
Don't worry about someone "stealing" your ideas. They don't make money by stealing ideas, they make money by funding other peoples' ideas. A lot of money. They don't need to steal anyone's ideas. If you keep it to yourself, they will be perfectly happy to fund two dozen other people who share their ideas, and to make a killing doing it.
Nobody is that interested in ideas; ideas don't make all that much money, believe it or not. Execution makes the money. If it's a good idea, lots of people will be happy to pay you a comparatively small amount (that well may seem huge to you) for the privilege of bringing it to market. They don't steal ideas; that would be killing off the golden goose. Venture capital and other similar interests don't want the ideas to stop coming to them, which is what would happen if they actually stole ideas.
Same thing with publishing and creative works. When I was younger and working on my first books, I was very wary of publishers. I hated to discuss a manuscript. Everything I sent was plastered with copyright notices and I would be sure to send myself a sealed certified copy first with a postmark date on it and then file it away in a safe deposit box. I was that sure that my prose was precious.
Now I have the better part of a dozen books on the market and I've been through the process a few times and I know much better. The publisher isn't interested in what's in your book. They're not impressed. They've seen tens of thousands of manuscripts. It's no crown jewel to them, no matter how good it is. They just want to know whether or not they can sell it. If they can, they're perfectly happy to pay you the royalty and rake in the dough.
Ideas people often make the mistake of thinking that we live in a world of ideas, in which ideas are precious and he who has them rules. In fact, we live in a world of employees and middlemen, most of whom are perfectly uninterested in ideas. With or without your idea, they'll continue on their merry way to be successful by paying for ideas from someone and turning them into products.
If you don't get over your fear, what will happen is that they'll continue to make money, continue to pay other people for their ideas, and you'll continue to have nothing but your great ideas that nobody knows about.
Just put them out there. Talk about them as much as you can. That's the way that you broaden your network of contacts, potential funders, and potential buyers to the maximum extent possible.
the abhorrent failure of every American taxpayer to send me $10.00 costs the United States nearly 50,000 jobs per year. (Assuming that I would employ as many people as possible at $18,000 per year--well above the federal poverty level--and keep only $700 million or so for myself).
Let's stop this travesty immediately and put another 50,000 people to work. If you're a taxpayer, be sure to send me $10! Meanwhile, I really think that the courts and congress should look into this economic disaster!
experience on this thing in comparison to previous Palm OS devices? In comparison to an iPhone?
The Holy Grail of mobile phones, for me, is the phone that can give a really good browsing experience and can thus replace (at least in some small way) the need to carry a laptop at all times.
Both of these words have existing, very clear definitions and Microsoft is trying to change them to make a profit. It's called fraud.
I can't draw up a contract offering to sell someone a "fully operational car" and then put a little asterisk next to those big letters and down at the bottom, in tiny print, put "P.S. my definition of a fully operational car does not include wheels, an engine, or a steering wheel."
Much less if I am the dominant, perhaps even MONOPOLY car company that has been selling cars in my country for decades, which people use continually, and whose existing cars are being crippled for their intended purpose due to being "end of life."
If I'm in THAT position and I send circulars to the nation advertising a "FULLY FUNCTIONAL CAR, GREAT NEW FEATURES, BE SURE TO UPGRADE, YOUR OLD ONE WON'T LONG BE SAFE ON CURRENT ROADS!*" and THEN put in tiny print at the bottom, "New version does not support wheels, engines, or steering wheels, for those you'll need to upgrade!" well... The FTC would be involved pretty quickly.
Almost makes me wish I'd done the same for my books... though I likely wouldn't have, I'm not a marketer by nature and would have bored of the task quickly. (My publisher has long been vexed at my inability to do basic promotion, leaving the task entirely to them. But hell, I just like to write 'em.)
(1) People want printed copies of the books that are absolutely most important to them personally. This won't change for some time to come, if ever.
(2) People will buy print and electronic copies of your books anyway. Despite the incredible outcry, the piracy market is not bigger than the retail market by any stretch of the imagination, especially in the case of books.
(3) Most of the time, people who pirate things (including books) wouldn't have purchased your book anyway. There are three reasons people pirate: [a] they want it now, easily, and refuse to wait for anything but a download (i.e. convenience dominates their decision), [b] they refuse to pay for it but they wouldn't mind having it for free if it's available that way, and [c] they're willing to pay, but they'd like to save a little money if they can.
Group [a] doesn't apply to you if non-infringing ebook versions are available, since that is more convenient than piracy in most cases; [b] was never going to buy your book anyway so long as you're selling it and probably wouldn't be its best advocates even if you offer it for free, since they don't see it as a great value (the reason they're not willing to part with money for it); [c] is a very small group of people, given the risks and costs and complications of piracy that are well-known today, including needed specialized software, unstable and unreliable download speeds, the dangers of getting virii and trojans from "those" sites if they're running Windows, and the legal issues surrounding piracy which these days are publicized in media all the time.
I don't feel as though any of my six books (also technology textbooks) underperformed as the result of piracy, despite the fact that you can get most of them at bittorrent search sites today. I'd advise you to just sit tight. At most, put up a website for your book and encourage people to buy it, explaining that while there are free copies floating around, you're a real person and more likely to write in the future if they buy it. Maybe put the same thing in your dedication or acknowledgments next time. If they like the book and your writing style, they'll buy it to ensure that you produce more.
But of course the notion that your 66/22 instance is "abnormal" is a normative position based on, at best, a statistical model that says you'll be better off in some way if you sleep "like" a majority of others, and an epistemological ethos that values statistical models as "knowledge."
That's not to say that it's an incorrect assumption for you, but merely to point out that the "nonnormal" evaluation of such a state is a socially constructed matter, not an objective matter.
Certainly if you start calling people dickwads for challenging socially constructed assumptions and definitions, you deserve to be seen as at least a little bit ideologically unreflective.
Regarding the nature of disease and the trend toward unhealth: Michel Foucault.
Regarding the reductionist worldview and its alternatives in science: Jentsch ("The Self Organizing Universe") and people like Luhmann studying dissipative systems, social systems, entropy dynamics, etc.
There are new, powerful paradigms that illuminate and unify natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, language, networks, etc. under central abstractions that have been afoot for two decades and that are powerful analytical tools, but it will take another half century before they leave the realm of "radical" and become the "norm.'
to teach. There is a train. I wish I could save money by taking it. I come close.
My car gets 20 mpg (28-30 on the highway, but not in NYC traffic). I have to pay several hundred per academic year for parking (which you'd better buy if you want to actually get to class on time, rather than looking for parking in neighborhoods for half an hour and then walking half a mile). I also have to pay bridge tolls each way, which even with EZPass comes to a lot after I do this every day of the week. The drive is about 25 miles each way. Plus of course there's oil and gas and the fact that my car is 26 years old with nearly 300k miles on it (Volvo) and could give out at any time, so I have to keep an AAA membership (because you don't want to be without AAA's help in NYC if you think you might break down anywhere).
After adding it all up, it came to slightly cheaper than taking the train... Only the train would take an extra two hours a day longer, which I just don't have.
So I drive.
But if the train were to come out cheaper at some point, or if they could reduce the extra time involved, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
If you mean what kinds of files will it recognize as books and/or music, I'm only positive about MobiPocket, Amazon, and mp3 the rest need to be converted AFAIK.
But MobiPocket Creator is free and packages up Text, HTML, and PDF files easily for you.
And more to the point, I'm busy. I just use the email service. I email Amazon the text file or PDF file and a couple of seconds later it appears on my Kindle for a modest fee of $0.10.
Some people here would balk at that, clearly. For me, it's unclear why anyone would want to @#$&*% around with the USB cable at all.
I'm just waiting for the day when the classic works (say, Economy and Society by Weber) are on Kindle, in addition to "current" publications and "reference" volumes.
That is indeed a good question. I know that my wife doesn't get mileage out of the Kindle like I do because she has a vast library in Polish, which Kindle doesn't support.
I'd love to see them do something more international-friendly in a standards-compliant way.
I have file cabinets full of journal papers printed out and paperclipped and driving me nuts when I need to find something.
This would make my life exactly 241.3 times easier.
One wish/hope: that it's got a faster implementation/hardware than the Kindle 1.0 that I have. I'd really love to be able to search/browse/flip through paper PDFs as fast as I can click, rather than just at "reading speed."
See what I mean? FUD. You obviously read the Slashdot story that was completely false in its accusations, as many posters to the story said, and were modded up for it.
What Amazon CAN do is prevent you from re-downloading any of the books once your account is closed, from their website or from the whispernet service. The Kindle continues to work fine, and your books ON the Kindle continue to work fine.
FUD. And people talking out their A$$ with no idea what they're talking about.
there is a switch that you can use to turn wireless off. And it's clear that it actually does so, as turning the switch of extends battery life by a massive margin.
No wireless, no connection to Amazon.
You can still get your books, even the DRM ones, just buy them on Amazon, download them, and copy them over with USB.
We pay almost $500 for the ability to read ebooks using this device's user interface. If another make duplicates it or someone comes up with an open platform that does exactly the same things in the same way with a similar industrial design, I'll be happy to buy it.
If you don't need ebooks read on e-ink using the Kindle's interface, I don't know why you'd pay $500 for such a Linux platform.
And, I should also add, there is an INDEX of the things that YOU have highlighted, browseable as a list and clickable so that you can go to that page and see your highlight in context.
Slashdot Mirror
I could not be more tired of phone calls from family, friends, and even colleagues that begin with a breathless version of "Hey I need your help I think my computer is totally virus infected I got this warning the other day that I had 2342384 viruses in all these folders and did I want to install a free tool to clean them up and I said okay and it installed but I think I was too slow because now my computer is really slow and keeps doing strange things and I get all of these porn popups?!?! I wish I had clicked yes to automatically download and install it faster, but I clicked yes as fast as I could what should I do now nothing is working and these naked lady popups just keep coming!!!!!?"
that even with this trickeration, the old design is objectively better. Less clutter, less ambiguity. The new design has box after box after box, with labels like "Make it yours." WTF? What's the matter with "Bid" or "Buy?" What's the problem with one photo of a product, one box in which to place your bid? It's not Facebook, it's ecommerce!
at http://www.watchitshred.com/ Perhaps the most impressively physical set of videos I've ever seen.
mount -t auto /dev/sdb1 /mnt/why_do_my_partitions_keep_getting_erased
Apple's customers are not the same customers as those of other computing companies (a silly, obvious statement, but apparently not so obvious that it doesn't need to be said).
Things that are clear:
Apple is doing very well right now.
Apple is doing very well as a very secretive company.
Apple's current customers, which are the reason it's doing very well, support Apple while it's a very secretive company.
Things that have been the subject of much speculation:
Apple's customers buy in many cases for non-technical reasons.
Apple's customers buy in many cases for social, identity, or personality reasons.
Things that are also clear:
It cannot be ruled out that Apple's secrecy contributes to the loyalty of its customer base, which is not congruent to the customer base of other technology companies.
It cannot be ruled out, therefore, that a reduction in secrecy would alienate some current customers.
It cannot be guaranteed that a reduction in secrecy would gain Apple an equivalent number of new customers.
Synopsis:
If I'm Apple, and I'm having the best few years in a very, very long time for the company, I am not . changing. a . thing .
"attacks."
Those which target "you" and those which target "everybody."
Security through obscurity is great at insulating you from those attacks that target "everybody" (worms, etc.) because the attack is happy to exploit the common case and not bother with specificities, since that will still net it a bunch of bots/slaves/zombies/etc.
For those which target "you" specifically, security through obscurity will solve absolutely nothing.
Most pointedly (and many people on Slashdot miss this) the largest threat to the common Internet user is precisely of the former kind (the odd worm, being a part of a "net public") and not necessarily attacks that specifically want to compromise ONE machine or network somewhere that is the TARGET of the attack.
Security through obscurity is therefore a useful basic defense if you are not particularly interesting as a node.
Don't worry about someone "stealing" your ideas. They don't make money by stealing ideas, they make money by funding other peoples' ideas. A lot of money. They don't need to steal anyone's ideas. If you keep it to yourself, they will be perfectly happy to fund two dozen other people who share their ideas, and to make a killing doing it.
Nobody is that interested in ideas; ideas don't make all that much money, believe it or not. Execution makes the money. If it's a good idea, lots of people will be happy to pay you a comparatively small amount (that well may seem huge to you) for the privilege of bringing it to market. They don't steal ideas; that would be killing off the golden goose. Venture capital and other similar interests don't want the ideas to stop coming to them, which is what would happen if they actually stole ideas.
Same thing with publishing and creative works. When I was younger and working on my first books, I was very wary of publishers. I hated to discuss a manuscript. Everything I sent was plastered with copyright notices and I would be sure to send myself a sealed certified copy first with a postmark date on it and then file it away in a safe deposit box. I was that sure that my prose was precious.
Now I have the better part of a dozen books on the market and I've been through the process a few times and I know much better. The publisher isn't interested in what's in your book. They're not impressed. They've seen tens of thousands of manuscripts. It's no crown jewel to them, no matter how good it is. They just want to know whether or not they can sell it. If they can, they're perfectly happy to pay you the royalty and rake in the dough.
Ideas people often make the mistake of thinking that we live in a world of ideas, in which ideas are precious and he who has them rules. In fact, we live in a world of employees and middlemen, most of whom are perfectly uninterested in ideas. With or without your idea, they'll continue on their merry way to be successful by paying for ideas from someone and turning them into products.
If you don't get over your fear, what will happen is that they'll continue to make money, continue to pay other people for their ideas, and you'll continue to have nothing but your great ideas that nobody knows about. Just put them out there. Talk about them as much as you can. That's the way that you broaden your network of contacts, potential funders, and potential buyers to the maximum extent possible.
the abhorrent failure of every American taxpayer to send me $10.00 costs the United States nearly 50,000 jobs per year. (Assuming that I would employ as many people as possible at $18,000 per year--well above the federal poverty level--and keep only $700 million or so for myself).
Let's stop this travesty immediately and put another 50,000 people to work. If you're a taxpayer, be sure to send me $10! Meanwhile, I really think that the courts and congress should look into this economic disaster!
experience on this thing in comparison to previous Palm OS devices? In comparison to an iPhone?
The Holy Grail of mobile phones, for me, is the phone that can give a really good browsing experience and can thus replace (at least in some small way) the need to carry a laptop at all times.
an "Operating System."
Both of these words have existing, very clear definitions and Microsoft is trying to change them to make a profit. It's called fraud.
I can't draw up a contract offering to sell someone a "fully operational car" and then put a little asterisk next to those big letters and down at the bottom, in tiny print, put "P.S. my definition of a fully operational car does not include wheels, an engine, or a steering wheel."
Much less if I am the dominant, perhaps even MONOPOLY car company that has been selling cars in my country for decades, which people use continually, and whose existing cars are being crippled for their intended purpose due to being "end of life."
If I'm in THAT position and I send circulars to the nation advertising a "FULLY FUNCTIONAL CAR, GREAT NEW FEATURES, BE SURE TO UPGRADE, YOUR OLD ONE WON'T LONG BE SAFE ON CURRENT ROADS!*" and THEN put in tiny print at the bottom, "New version does not support wheels, engines, or steering wheels, for those you'll need to upgrade!" well... The FTC would be involved pretty quickly.
Almost makes me wish I'd done the same for my books... though I likely wouldn't have, I'm not a marketer by nature and would have bored of the task quickly. (My publisher has long been vexed at my inability to do basic promotion, leaving the task entirely to them. But hell, I just like to write 'em.)
and I wouldn't worry about it if I were you.
(1) People want printed copies of the books that are absolutely most important to them personally. This won't change for some time to come, if ever.
(2) People will buy print and electronic copies of your books anyway. Despite the incredible outcry, the piracy market is not bigger than the retail market by any stretch of the imagination, especially in the case of books.
(3) Most of the time, people who pirate things (including books) wouldn't have purchased your book anyway. There are three reasons people pirate: [a] they want it now, easily, and refuse to wait for anything but a download (i.e. convenience dominates their decision), [b] they refuse to pay for it but they wouldn't mind having it for free if it's available that way, and [c] they're willing to pay, but they'd like to save a little money if they can.
Group [a] doesn't apply to you if non-infringing ebook versions are available, since that is more convenient than piracy in most cases; [b] was never going to buy your book anyway so long as you're selling it and probably wouldn't be its best advocates even if you offer it for free, since they don't see it as a great value (the reason they're not willing to part with money for it); [c] is a very small group of people, given the risks and costs and complications of piracy that are well-known today, including needed specialized software, unstable and unreliable download speeds, the dangers of getting virii and trojans from "those" sites if they're running Windows, and the legal issues surrounding piracy which these days are publicized in media all the time.
I don't feel as though any of my six books (also technology textbooks) underperformed as the result of piracy, despite the fact that you can get most of them at bittorrent search sites today. I'd advise you to just sit tight. At most, put up a website for your book and encourage people to buy it, explaining that while there are free copies floating around, you're a real person and more likely to write in the future if they buy it. Maybe put the same thing in your dedication or acknowledgments next time. If they like the book and your writing style, they'll buy it to ensure that you produce more.
But of course the notion that your 66/22 instance is "abnormal" is a normative position based on, at best, a statistical model that says you'll be better off in some way if you sleep "like" a majority of others, and an epistemological ethos that values statistical models as "knowledge."
That's not to say that it's an incorrect assumption for you, but merely to point out that the "nonnormal" evaluation of such a state is a socially constructed matter, not an objective matter.
Certainly if you start calling people dickwads for challenging socially constructed assumptions and definitions, you deserve to be seen as at least a little bit ideologically unreflective.
Regarding the nature of disease and the trend toward unhealth: Michel Foucault.
Regarding the reductionist worldview and its alternatives in science: Jentsch ("The Self Organizing Universe") and people like Luhmann studying dissipative systems, social systems, entropy dynamics, etc.
There are new, powerful paradigms that illuminate and unify natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, language, networks, etc. under central abstractions that have been afoot for two decades and that are powerful analytical tools, but it will take another half century before they leave the realm of "radical" and become the "norm.'
to teach. There is a train. I wish I could save money by taking it. I come close.
My car gets 20 mpg (28-30 on the highway, but not in NYC traffic). I have to pay several hundred per academic year for parking (which you'd better buy if you want to actually get to class on time, rather than looking for parking in neighborhoods for half an hour and then walking half a mile). I also have to pay bridge tolls each way, which even with EZPass comes to a lot after I do this every day of the week. The drive is about 25 miles each way. Plus of course there's oil and gas and the fact that my car is 26 years old with nearly 300k miles on it (Volvo) and could give out at any time, so I have to keep an AAA membership (because you don't want to be without AAA's help in NYC if you think you might break down anywhere).
After adding it all up, it came to slightly cheaper than taking the train... Only the train would take an extra two hours a day longer, which I just don't have.
So I drive.
But if the train were to come out cheaper at some point, or if they could reduce the extra time involved, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
either unprotected MobiPocket or converted .TXT and .PDF files.
And they're archived on my hard drive (along with my Kindle DRM files).
And still no sudden screens saying:
"TURN ON WIRELESS NOW SO THAT WE CAN DISABLE YOUR DEVICE OR YOUR DEVICE WILL DISABLE ITSELF."
I guess that's always possible, though.
Anything's possible.
Even if it did happen, I've had enough use out of mine that I'd feel as though I got my money's worth.
By the way: what's stopping your Laptop from doing the same? Or your GSM phone?
You can store what you want on it.
If you mean what kinds of files will it recognize as books and/or music, I'm only positive about MobiPocket, Amazon, and mp3 the rest need to be converted AFAIK.
But MobiPocket Creator is free and packages up Text, HTML, and PDF files easily for you.
And more to the point, I'm busy. I just use the email service. I email Amazon the text file or PDF file and a couple of seconds later it appears on my Kindle for a modest fee of $0.10.
Some people here would balk at that, clearly. For me, it's unclear why anyone would want to @#$&*% around with the USB cable at all.
and college professor. For what it's worth.
I'm just waiting for the day when the classic works (say, Economy and Society by Weber) are on Kindle, in addition to "current" publications and "reference" volumes.
That is indeed a good question. I know that my wife doesn't get mileage out of the Kindle like I do because she has a vast library in Polish, which Kindle doesn't support.
I'd love to see them do something more international-friendly in a standards-compliant way.
I have file cabinets full of journal papers printed out and paperclipped and driving me nuts when I need to find something.
This would make my life exactly 241.3 times easier.
One wish/hope: that it's got a faster implementation/hardware than the Kindle 1.0 that I have. I'd really love to be able to search/browse/flip through paper PDFs as fast as I can click, rather than just at "reading speed."
See what I mean? FUD. You obviously read the Slashdot story that was completely false in its accusations, as many posters to the story said, and were modded up for it.
What Amazon CAN do is prevent you from re-downloading any of the books once your account is closed, from their website or from the whispernet service. The Kindle continues to work fine, and your books ON the Kindle continue to work fine.
FUD. And people talking out their A$$ with no idea what they're talking about.
there is a switch that you can use to turn wireless off. And it's clear that it actually does so, as turning the switch of extends battery life by a massive margin.
No wireless, no connection to Amazon.
You can still get your books, even the DRM ones, just buy them on Amazon, download them, and copy them over with USB.
We pay almost $500 for the ability to read ebooks using this device's user interface. If another make duplicates it or someone comes up with an open platform that does exactly the same things in the same way with a similar industrial design, I'll be happy to buy it.
If you don't need ebooks read on e-ink using the Kindle's interface, I don't know why you'd pay $500 for such a Linux platform.
And, I should also add, there is an INDEX of the things that YOU have highlighted, browseable as a list and clickable so that you can go to that page and see your highlight in context.
Try to do THAT with a traditional book.
See my comment immediately above.
And yes, it actually does.
You can quickly highlight text, and you can "fold down the corners" on important pages.