There is no question e-ink is superior to a backlit screen. However, the kindle is not the only e-ink device:-)
I personally like my Sony Reader Wifi a lot. I also own a nook and a no-name device. Not a kindle though, because I prefer not to be locked into a specific eco-system.
Current state of affairs, unless you are willing to fiddle quite a bit, is that DRM free kindle files you have bought, potentially can be very hard to extract from your kindle application. (I do not know about dedicated readers).
For some versions of the kindle reader, it is as easy as getting the.prc file from the local storage. However, this is not a foolproof method. Recent versions of the android kindle reader stores the.prc files in app-private space (or whatever), making it only accesible if you root the device.
If you use the amazon/kindle offline reader, the content is actually stored unencrypted, but compressed in your browsers cache/database. It takes some javascript-foo to extract it, but it is possible. Google search/translate is your friend here, but be prepared to fiddle a bit.
IMHO you should seek alternatives to Kindle, if you are not prepared to read your books on a kindle device/app. Adobe DRM on epubs is trivial to remove, using wine and Adobe Digital Editions, and as such is a much more suitable format for cross-device ebook reading. Of course, just selling us books as files, without DRM would be much better. I assume I am not the only one waiting for tor.com to put their announced DRM free store online soon.
Reading the comments, is sort of depressing. I thought you guys were nerds!
The guys behind Copenhagen Suborbitals surely are. The main designer, Peter Madsen, is a true tinkerer, he even built a working submarine. In his spare time!
What they aim to do, is to put a man into space, without the backing of a large commercial entity or goverment. Meanwhile, their work is Open Source, and based almost exclusively on private donations. Check our their website for more, including a number of youtube videos.
You could repeat your entire argument with horses, and argue that you should be allowed to ride horses in the traffic. Or whatever weird means of transportation you would prefer.
Somehow I really can't see why the fact that you think driving a potential killer machine is "fun and enjoyable", should stop the rest of the world from eagerly choose a safer, more flexible alternative (Yes, *more* flexible as in: "I am pissed and needs to go home", or "Gotta send the car to pick up the kids from sport").
If you want fun and enjoyment, get out of the traffic and onto some dedicated area/track/whatever. Sorry, that is just what it is. The public roads are for the vehicles that have a useful purpose and are deemed safe enough. When person-driven vehicles no longer stand for that criteria, that must go somewhere else, like horses, racercars motorcrosscycles, etc.
Can't disagree much with anything you wrote, perhaps expect:
What should humanities contribution to global warming be? If we say '0', basically you're asking to kill 6 billion people, destroy every factory, car, power plant ever produced and go back to an 80% mortality rate before we're 5 years old. That's probably not a great goal. I suppose it means no abortions, but I don't think even religious nutters would be willing to take that tradeoff.
I think you are underestimating the religious. They are nutters, after all...:-)
I think people in the US/North America need to educate themselves about energy and ressource usage.
58,000 gallons is approximately 220 m3. This is about twice as much water as we use in our family pr. year, with 2 grown ups and two kids. And, we use quite a lot, compared to other families in my country.
Apart from watering the lawns, I suspect the people in TFA have ineffecient utilities (toilets, washing machines, etc), leading them to use way more water than they need to.
TFA mentions several hundres of dollars worth of savings from going from 299,000 gallons/year to 58,000 gallons/year. Say it is $500, then it must be about $2 / 1000 gallon. Compare this to our prices, which is about $40 / 1000 gallon.
Given the right incitaments, you can clearly optimize your ressource usage a lot. Most often *without* having to change your lifestyle (OK, they ripped out the lawn, but I am talking about other ressource usage).
Oh, and the country I am living in is Denmark, in case you were wondering.
Or, maybe you could have a turn knob. Perhaps attached to some sort of metal stick, which you could insert into a slot, then turn right to turn on, left to turn off.
Come to think of it, that would not do, as it is too much like a key. Darn - we really want those pushbuttons, so much better than a key. Now what to do?
For all everyone's complaining here, did he really do anything that negatively impacted your lives? He sued IBM and Novell, and he made the state of linux licensing slightly (very slightly) uncertain.
Yes, that impacted my life negatively. The FUD influenced a lot of companies to hold back on Linux adoption at a critical point in time. This in turn, reduced the value of e.g. my knowledge and skills. So, yes, it did. And, this was most likely completely intentional from MS/SCOs side.
Have you ever considered why those are your only options? (And, btw, isn't law in the US made by more than a single person?)
I am pretty tech-savy (having a Ph.D. in Computer Science helps), and I am also active in politics, both national and local (I am a member of my city council in DK, approx. 45000 residents, and was a candicate for the last national election). And, while one of my major motivations for joining politics was to work for better laws in the tech area, I quickly realised that in order to have any influence, or getting elected to anything you need a much wider scope. Tech stuff simply does not interest enough people to get you any votes. This is OK, by definition, the voters have a right to focus on what interest them. The problem with that however is, that in order to stay sharp on the issues of "the masses", in order to get any votes at all, you lack the time to work on/stay updated on "fringe" issues. But I digress.
Now, what pisses me off in your sentiment, which is echoed by many, is the inherent "it does not matter anyway" attitude. It does freaking matter what you do. But laying on the couch, waiting for a perfect candicate to get enough exposure that you discover him, and can vote on him, will never help. For the candicate it is a chicken and egg problem: As long as he can not demonstrate that tech issues has the interesst of a sufficient number of voters, he/she gets no leverage on the party. For fringe candidates (and most that are tech savy are that), you simply can not get any leverage on these issues. The candicate needs you to get off that couch and take part in the public debate (and, no, that is not Slashdot, believe me) and make this an issue that engages influential people or the media. Then, you will see tech savy candidates to your elections. So, get off that couch right now. Find the local candidate that are tech savy, and support the one that matches your overall political profile best. And by support, I mean: join his party, call him, go to meetings, write letters to the newspapers, let your neighbours, friends and coworkers know that this is something that matters to you. Join your local branch of whatever passes for a digital rights group in your area (EU: http://www.edri.org/).
As long as the political parties are made up of people that couldn't give less about IP and tech stuff, it is simply to hard to get any leverage for these issues, and the companies that are able to post large amount of money into professional lobbyists will get their way. Sure they will. But, you _can_ make a difference. And if you do not try to make a difference, quit complaining - you are wasting bandwitdh, really. (On satelitte here, btw, so I am entitled to complain about bandwidth:-).
I do not at all agree that you can generalize like that, and I would really like for you to quote some of your sources for many of your statements.
I have a son, which is now 7, and he started asking questions about the universe at the age of 4-5. That was really no game, he really was interessted in this, as are many five year olds. (Note that many 5 years olds - at least boys - are quite facinated by trains and rockets, in that age. Others are not. This, I have been told by kindergarden professionals, is a very common stage for boys).
I realized that he really took some of the explanations to heart, when, at his 5 years birthday, he patiently explained his grandfather the concepts of athmosphere and at what point one could argue that one is now in the "real" space, as opposed to just beeing in space. (Which he reckoned we always are - Earth residing in space, we beeing on earth). Interesstingly, his grandfather (which is a laywer) was under the impression that space was "filled with air". He really learned something:-)
And so did I. Taking my sons questions seriously, and explaining abstract concepts to him, has been really really rewarding. The other night we discussed briefly (during dinner) the structure of atoms, and he surprised me (he still does) on is ability to project the information he gets on to the "real macro-scale world", e.g. that batteries works by "pushing" "free electrons" through/along mediums that can carry these electrons, thereby getting an idea about why some stuff conducst, while others don't.
I guess my point is: never underestimate the brains of your child. Follow through on their wish to investigate and understand the world. You will be glad you did.
Re:Perfect cadget to connect to the integrationser
on
Hacking the Tux Droid
·
· Score: 1
Yes, but the pingvin is way more fun!
We have all the software to notify from our integrationserver. This would just be fun.
And, its only 99 anyway. (Sold out though:-( )
Perfect cadget to connect to the integrationserver
on
Hacking the Tux Droid
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
And, have it scream, while flapping its wings, "Dudes! broke the build with commit !", whenever appropriate.
I reckon it will be no problem getting the bosses to pay for that:-)
Or, "its time for lunch", "remember the team meating in 5 minutes", and other stuff.
Well, I always thought it was also about beeing clever, and implementing stuff that in some sense was "better" than what non-hackers would think up.
And, even applying my most friendly view on it, there is nothing clever about powering a (5V) fan from the (12V) power supply on a portable hd.
In addition to that, its a somewhat dangerous solution, and it is suboptimal even to the cheapest ventilator you can buy. (Which will most likely rotate, and thereby make the airflow more tolerable). So I do not believe it qualifies for beeing better in any sense.
But, perhaps I am just beeing harsh because I did not expect slashdot to post such a "story".
Regards hack value: Last year, some guy posted a story about doing his own air-condition. That was a worthy hack, IMO.
I have been using kimdaba for some years now, and I find it to be an excellent program for tagging and searching in my images. Even my wife can figure it out.
Whats the big deal about picasa - anybody know both programs and could compare them?
As an example of a long word in Danish, I can write the name of the device that used to sit on trams in order to clean the rails while the tram was running: Sporvognsskinneskidtskraber. (literally tramraildirtcleaner)
Obviously, the guy in charge of it was a sporvognsskinneskidtskraberassistent (you figure it out), while the stuff used to polish the emblem of his cap, was sporvognsskinneskidtskraberassistentkasketemblempu dsemiddel.
Even for a dane, that gets pretty hard to read, while it is absolutely no problem to say or hear.
(Note, in my preview, slashdot inserts a space in my perfectly legal danish word...)
On a related note, this is one reasone why soft hyphens are such a needed thing in these languages.
Actually, a decent compiler should be able to regonize if a recursive function is tail-recursive, and optimize the code such that it is as effective as any queue.
In other words: You can "reuse" your whole stackframe, given the right circumstances.
And, then there is the whole issue of premature optimization. Get it right first, then optimize it, if it eat cycles.
And, yes, I do write code for a living, that needs to run reasonably fast (tons of transactions), and the reality is, that sometimes a few hundreds of recursive calls dwarfs in comparision to the rest of the task, and optimizing them is simply not worth it.
For inner city transportation, I can not recall there ever beeing anybody but a single train guy to run a train. Traditionally, he have also been monitoring the doors, stuff like that, using (tada) video cameras mounted on the station.
More recently, there are several trains in Europe, with no personell whatsoever. Here in Copenhagen, Denmark, there is the "Metro train" (http://www.m.dk/), which serves about 100.000 people (perhaps more) daily. Trains are 3 minutes apart, and spend 10-15 seconds on each station, using double doors, etc.
Of course, a big part of Europe going automated is probably that minimum wages in Europe are _way_ higher than in the US. Visiting the US, I am always amazed on the number of people that do totally trivial tasks in airports, restaurants, etc. With no intention to troll: It reminds me of the former east european contries ("Whats that guy by the escalator doing?", "Oh, he is watching the escalator").
I more or less believe that the only long time thing you can credit Microsoft for, is that they have learned ordinary users that computers fail.
This again, have lowered the standards for software tremendously. (Note, I am not saying that current Windows is crap - I would not really know - I am saying that through using Microsoft software (and related Windows software) people have learned that software fails _often_).
Try asking your mom and dad, or any Windows user, if they would be ready to accept the level of failure they experience on their Windows platform and software, in their car, phone, watch, microwave oven, washing machine. Most people would say no.
But, the "Microsoft Experience" is becomming more widespread. As electronics _do_ become a larger and larger part of e.g. washing machines, they do have the occasional software failure. And people learn to accept that, _because_ they have learned that any device that contains computers will fail.
And, that is crap. We should _demand_ solid quality systems all around us. Otherwise we will get crap: mp3 players with sucky firmware, washing machines that sometimes just do not wash the clothes, etc.
That is, I believe, what is the greates danger about Microsoft. As your post actually demonstrates, many people believe Microsoft have brought us gold, when in fact they have learned people to not only accept crap software, but to actually expect crap software.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no question e-ink is superior to a backlit screen. However, the kindle is not the only e-ink device :-)
I personally like my Sony Reader Wifi a lot. I also own a nook and a no-name device. Not a kindle though, because I prefer not to be locked into a specific eco-system.
Perhaps - I do not have access to Windows versions of the kindle reader. :-/
Current state of affairs, unless you are willing to fiddle quite a bit, is that DRM free kindle files you have bought, potentially can be very hard to extract from your kindle application. (I do not know about dedicated readers).
For some versions of the kindle reader, it is as easy as getting the .prc file from the local storage. However, this is not a foolproof method. Recent versions of the android kindle reader stores the .prc files in app-private space (or whatever), making it only accesible if you root the device.
If you use the amazon/kindle offline reader, the content is actually stored unencrypted, but compressed in your browsers cache/database. It takes some javascript-foo to extract it, but it is possible. Google search/translate is your friend here, but be prepared to fiddle a bit.
IMHO you should seek alternatives to Kindle, if you are not prepared to read your books on a kindle device/app. Adobe DRM on epubs is trivial to remove, using wine and Adobe Digital Editions, and as such is a much more suitable format for cross-device ebook reading. Of course, just selling us books as files, without DRM would be much better. I assume I am not the only one waiting for tor.com to put their announced DRM free store online soon.
Reading the comments, is sort of depressing. I thought you guys were nerds!
The guys behind Copenhagen Suborbitals surely are. The main designer, Peter Madsen, is a true tinkerer, he even built a working submarine. In his spare time!
What they aim to do, is to put a man into space, without the backing of a large commercial entity or goverment. Meanwhile, their work is Open Source, and based almost exclusively on private donations. Check our their website for more, including a number of youtube videos.
http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/
These guys can use all the support they can get.
You could repeat your entire argument with horses, and argue that you should be allowed to ride horses in the traffic. Or whatever weird means of transportation you would prefer.
Somehow I really can't see why the fact that you think driving a potential killer machine is "fun and enjoyable", should stop the rest of the world from eagerly choose a safer, more flexible alternative (Yes, *more* flexible as in: "I am pissed and needs to go home", or "Gotta send the car to pick up the kids from sport").
If you want fun and enjoyment, get out of the traffic and onto some dedicated area/track/whatever. Sorry, that is just what it is. The public roads are for the vehicles that have a useful purpose and are deemed safe enough. When person-driven vehicles no longer stand for that criteria, that must go somewhere else, like horses, racercars motorcrosscycles, etc.
Can't disagree much with anything you wrote, perhaps expect:
What should humanities contribution to global warming be? If we say '0', basically you're asking to kill 6 billion people, destroy every factory, car, power plant ever produced and go back to an 80% mortality rate before we're 5 years old. That's probably not a great goal. I suppose it means no abortions, but I don't think even religious nutters would be willing to take that tradeoff.
I think you are underestimating the religious. They are nutters, after all... :-)
I think people in the US/North America need to educate themselves about energy and ressource usage.
58,000 gallons is approximately 220 m3. This is about twice as much water as we use in our family pr. year, with 2 grown ups and two kids. And, we use quite a lot, compared to other families in my country.
Apart from watering the lawns, I suspect the people in TFA have ineffecient utilities (toilets, washing machines, etc), leading them to use way more water than they need to.
TFA mentions several hundres of dollars worth of savings from going from 299,000 gallons/year to 58,000 gallons/year. Say it is $500, then it must be about $2 / 1000 gallon. Compare this to our prices, which is about $40 / 1000 gallon.
Given the right incitaments, you can clearly optimize your ressource usage a lot. Most often *without* having to change your lifestyle (OK, they ripped out the lawn, but I am talking about other ressource usage).
Oh, and the country I am living in is Denmark, in case you were wondering.
Or, maybe you could have a turn knob. Perhaps attached to some sort of metal stick, which you could insert into a slot, then turn right to turn on, left to turn off.
Come to think of it, that would not do, as it is too much like a key. Darn - we really want those pushbuttons, so much better than a key. Now what to do?
For all everyone's complaining here, did he really do anything that negatively impacted your lives? He sued IBM and Novell, and he made the state of linux licensing slightly (very slightly) uncertain.
Yes, that impacted my life negatively. The FUD influenced a lot of companies to hold back on Linux adoption at a critical point in time. This in turn, reduced the value of e.g. my knowledge and skills. So, yes, it did. And, this was most likely completely intentional from MS/SCOs side.
There is really solid work for live patching a Linux kernel for security updates in http://www.ksplice.com/ - saw a demo of it last week at Eurosys, really impressive: http://www.ksplice.com/paper .
Have you ever considered why those are your only options? (And, btw, isn't law in the US made by more than a single person?)
:-).
I am pretty tech-savy (having a Ph.D. in Computer Science helps), and I am also active in politics, both national and local (I am a member of my city council in DK, approx. 45000 residents, and was a candicate for the last national election). And, while one of my major motivations for joining politics was to work for better laws in the tech area, I quickly realised that in order to have any influence, or getting elected to anything you need a much wider scope. Tech stuff simply does not interest enough people to get you any votes. This is OK, by definition, the voters have a right to focus on what interest them. The problem with that however is, that in order to stay sharp on the issues of "the masses", in order to get any votes at all, you lack the time to work on/stay updated on "fringe" issues. But I digress.
Now, what pisses me off in your sentiment, which is echoed by many, is the inherent "it does not matter anyway" attitude. It does freaking matter what you do. But laying on the couch, waiting for a perfect candicate to get enough exposure that you discover him, and can vote on him, will never help. For the candicate it is a chicken and egg problem: As long as he can not demonstrate that tech issues has the interesst of a sufficient number of voters, he/she gets no leverage on the party. For fringe candidates (and most that are tech savy are that), you simply can not get any leverage on these issues. The candicate needs you to get off that couch and take part in the public debate (and, no, that is not Slashdot, believe me) and make this an issue that engages influential people or the media. Then, you will see tech savy candidates to your elections. So, get off that couch right now. Find the local candidate that are tech savy, and support the one that matches your overall political profile best. And by support, I mean: join his party, call him, go to meetings, write letters to the newspapers, let your neighbours, friends and coworkers know that this is something that matters to you. Join your local branch of whatever passes for a digital rights group in your area (EU: http://www.edri.org/).
As long as the political parties are made up of people that couldn't give less about IP and tech stuff, it is simply to hard to get any leverage for these issues, and the companies that are able to post large amount of money into professional lobbyists will get their way. Sure they will. But, you _can_ make a difference. And if you do not try to make a difference, quit complaining - you are wasting bandwitdh, really. (On satelitte here, btw, so I am entitled to complain about bandwidth
I do not at all agree that you can generalize like that, and I would really like for you to quote some of your sources for many of your statements.
:-)
I have a son, which is now 7, and he started asking questions about the universe at the age of 4-5. That was really no game, he really was interessted in this, as are many five year olds. (Note that many 5 years olds - at least boys - are quite facinated by trains and rockets, in that age. Others are not. This, I have been told by kindergarden professionals, is a very common stage for boys).
I realized that he really took some of the explanations to heart, when, at his 5 years birthday, he patiently explained his grandfather the concepts of athmosphere and at what point one could argue that one is now in the "real" space, as opposed to just beeing in space. (Which he reckoned we always are - Earth residing in space, we beeing on earth). Interesstingly, his grandfather (which is a laywer) was under the impression that space was "filled with air". He really learned something
And so did I. Taking my sons questions seriously, and explaining abstract concepts to him, has been really really rewarding. The other night we discussed briefly (during dinner) the structure of atoms, and he surprised me (he still does) on is ability to project the information he gets on to the "real macro-scale world", e.g. that batteries works by "pushing" "free electrons" through/along mediums that can carry these electrons, thereby getting an idea about why some stuff conducst, while others don't.
I guess my point is: never underestimate the brains of your child. Follow through on their wish to investigate and understand the world. You will be glad you did.
Yes, but the pingvin is way more fun!
:-( )
We have all the software to notify from our integrationserver. This would just be fun.
And, its only 99 anyway. (Sold out though
And, have it scream, while flapping its wings, "Dudes! broke the build with commit !", whenever appropriate.
:-)
:-)
I reckon it will be no problem getting the bosses to pay for that
Or, "its time for lunch", "remember the team meating in 5 minutes", and other stuff.
I am halfway serious, actually.
Wikipedia to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JavaScript_en gines
d /building_applications.html
kjscmd is a shell with a nice KDE/Qt integration, actually.
http://www.sourcextreme.com/presentations/KJSEmbe
Well, I always thought it was also about beeing clever, and implementing stuff that in some sense was "better" than what non-hackers would think up.
And, even applying my most friendly view on it, there is nothing clever about powering a (5V) fan from the (12V) power supply on a portable hd.
In addition to that, its a somewhat dangerous solution, and it is suboptimal even to the cheapest ventilator you can buy. (Which will most likely rotate, and thereby make the airflow more tolerable). So I do not believe it qualifies for beeing better in any sense.
But, perhaps I am just beeing harsh because I did not expect slashdot to post such a "story".
Regards hack value: Last year, some guy posted a story about doing his own air-condition. That was a worthy hack, IMO.
Honestly. That seems to be about the most silly thing I have seen in ages.
A floor ventilator around the corner from where I am sitting, goes at about $30.
Smaller models (like the one he is using) goes as low as $10-15.
If your time worth so little (and remember, the FTA says its for those that _has_ to work) that this is a solution for you, find a better paying job!
I have been using kimdaba for some years now, and I find it to be an excellent program for tagging and searching in my images. Even my wife can figure it out.
Whats the big deal about picasa - anybody know both programs and could compare them?
As an example of a long word in Danish, I can write the name of the device that used to sit on trams in order to clean the rails while the tram was running: Sporvognsskinneskidtskraber. (literally tramraildirtcleaner)
u dsemiddel.
Obviously, the guy in charge of it was a sporvognsskinneskidtskraberassistent (you figure it out), while the stuff used to polish the emblem of his cap, was sporvognsskinneskidtskraberassistentkasketemblemp
Even for a dane, that gets pretty hard to read, while it is absolutely no problem to say or hear.
(Note, in my preview, slashdot inserts a space in my perfectly legal danish word...)
On a related note, this is one reasone why soft hyphens are such a needed thing in these languages.
Actually, a decent compiler should be able to regonize if a recursive function is tail-recursive, and optimize the code such that it is as effective as any queue.
In other words: You can "reuse" your whole stackframe, given the right circumstances.
And, then there is the whole issue of premature optimization. Get it right first, then optimize it, if it eat cycles.
And, yes, I do write code for a living, that needs to run reasonably fast (tons of transactions), and the reality is, that sometimes a few hundreds of recursive calls dwarfs in comparision to the rest of the task, and optimizing them is simply not worth it.
As others have pointed out, you seem to miss the bigger picture, with lots of different people involved.
Also, 600 MB/sec is 5.9 Gb/sec using standard conventions for using 1024 for B and 1000 for b.
Closed with double doors. So, you can not get on the track while there are no train.
Really, there are several driverless trains throughout Europe - probably Japan too.
No big deal.
For inner city transportation, I can not recall there ever beeing anybody but a single train guy to run a train. Traditionally, he have also been monitoring the doors, stuff like that, using (tada) video cameras mounted on the station.
More recently, there are several trains in Europe, with no personell whatsoever. Here in Copenhagen, Denmark, there is the "Metro train" (http://www.m.dk/), which serves about 100.000 people (perhaps more) daily. Trains are 3 minutes apart, and spend 10-15 seconds on each station, using double doors, etc.
Of course, a big part of Europe going automated is probably that minimum wages in Europe are _way_ higher than in the US. Visiting the US, I am always amazed on the number of people that do totally trivial tasks in airports, restaurants, etc. With no intention to troll: It reminds me of the former east european contries ("Whats that guy by the escalator doing?", "Oh, he is watching the escalator").
Thanks for the correction, and the nice words - I appreciate both.
;-)
(But I am now rather nervous about my "performance"
I more or less believe that the only long time thing you can credit Microsoft for, is that they have learned ordinary users that computers fail.
This again, have lowered the standards for software tremendously. (Note, I am not saying that current Windows is crap - I would not really know - I am saying that through using Microsoft software (and related Windows software) people have learned that software fails _often_).
Try asking your mom and dad, or any Windows user, if they would be ready to accept the level of failure they experience on their Windows platform and software, in their car, phone, watch, microwave oven, washing machine. Most people would say no.
But, the "Microsoft Experience" is becomming more widespread. As electronics _do_ become a larger and larger part of e.g. washing machines, they do have the occasional software failure. And people learn to accept that, _because_ they have learned that any device that contains computers will fail.
And, that is crap. We should _demand_ solid quality systems all around us. Otherwise we will get crap: mp3 players with sucky firmware, washing machines that sometimes just do not wash the clothes, etc.
That is, I believe, what is the greates danger about Microsoft. As your post actually demonstrates, many people believe Microsoft have brought us gold, when in fact they have learned people to not only accept crap software, but to actually expect crap software.