I keep hearing every couple of years or so that "books are doomed"
I don't doubt that eventually, it'll be possible to produce an electronic book that is acceptable to the vast majority of people (as opposed to today's solutions, which are generally not acceptable to most people).
For those of you following along at home, here are the major issues you need to resolve before electronic books replace the paperback:
Display resolution & contrast - I see good progress here, maybe in a couple more years.
Portability - Okay, no problem there
Batteries - You need either really long life, or solar cells. If I can't read it on the beach when I'm on vacation, it's not a "book".
Content rights management - I don't want to have to buy a new "e-book" for each novel I want to read, that'd be a waste. On the other hand, the authors need compensation.
Distribution outlets - Yeah, well, obviously the Internet. But who's going to manage the whole author->reader chain? Traditional publishing houses?
A reasonable user interface - Take a look at Acrobat Reader for an excellent example of how >b>not to design an interface for reading books. Ideally, you want something that takes advantage of the unique strengths of the medium (hypertext, multimedia, etc)
And, last but not least, cost. Books are still pretty darn cheap. Any electronic competitor needs to be either far superior, or not much more expensive, to compete.
On the other hand, anything that reduces the demand for paper has got to be a good thing...
What happens if you happen to be said person's twin brother (or sister)? You should be arrested and/or harassed because of the misdeeds of someone else? What if you were separated at birth and you never even met your twin?
Yeah, that's a potential problem, all right. I'm sure that a very small number of people get harassed by the police because they look like somebody else and happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Fundamentally, this equipment doesn't change anything. It does make it a lot easier for the police to scan a large crowd for "familiar faces", but that's not really any different than having a bunch of officers with binoculars do the same thing "by hand".
If you want to boil a frog, you don't do it by setting the flame to high, you do it by setting the flame to the lowest possible setting and slowly increasing it.
I don't suppose you have a scientific study to back that up, do you?:-)
I just don't see this system as a significant encroachment of my rights, as long as it's used in the way described. I think the votes are in, and as a society we've decided that security cameras are worth the loss of privacy for the increase in security.
No different from going out in public anyway
on
The Unblinking Eye
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· Score: 3
As pointed out by the law professor quoted in the article, "People have no reasonable expectation that when out in public, they cannot be photographed."
If you've got a criminal record, don't go somewhere where somebody might recognize you. Duh.
Now if they started KEEPING all those photographs against a possible future need, that'd be a different thing altogether...
Yeah, I don't get it either. It's literally TEN TIMES as expensive as Delphi for Windows. I guess they're a bit worried about support costs on Linux...
> It is well known that g++, the GNU C++
> compiler, just turns C++ code into C code and
> then uses gcc to compile.
"Well known" by somebody who's never used it, perhaps. The g++ compiler is a native c++ compiler, just like Borland's.
Driver support (NeXT's experience)
on
OS X on x86?
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· Score: 1
While I was working at NeXT, one of the jobs I had there was running a hardware compatibility test program for Intel-based PC's.
The system never worked particularly well, despite the best efforts of the people at NeXT and the people at the PC vendors. NeXT was never able to form the kind of high-level relationships necessary to ensure that a particular PC vendor didn't gratuitously break compatibility with our OS with a hardware change.
Microsoft didn't have to worry about that - "It still runs windows" was on the list of things to check with any hardware change. Hell, it was probably the ONLY thing on the list.
Apple will only do better if they can convince a PC manufacturer like IBM or Dell that maintaining compatibility with MacOS X/Intel is just as important as maintaining compatibility with Windows.
Or they need a different approach entirely, though I really don't know what that would look like. I don't think open-source drivers will be an acceptable answer to very many consumers.
I just returned one of these players (the same exact model) to the store I bought it from last month. Not only would it not play CD-R's, but it refused to play about 80% of the retail CD's I tried to play on it. Probably not one of Sony's better products...
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I don't doubt that eventually, it'll be possible to produce an electronic book that is acceptable to the vast majority of people (as opposed to today's solutions, which are generally not acceptable to most people).
For those of you following along at home, here are the major issues you need to resolve before electronic books replace the paperback:
Display resolution & contrast - I see good progress here, maybe in a couple more years.
Portability - Okay, no problem there
Batteries - You need either really long life, or solar cells. If I can't read it on the beach when I'm on vacation, it's not a "book".
Content rights management - I don't want to have to buy a new "e-book" for each novel I want to read, that'd be a waste. On the other hand, the authors need compensation.
Distribution outlets - Yeah, well, obviously the Internet. But who's going to manage the whole author->reader chain? Traditional publishing houses?
A reasonable user interface - Take a look at Acrobat Reader for an excellent example of how >b>not to design an interface for reading books. Ideally, you want something that takes advantage of the unique strengths of the medium (hypertext, multimedia, etc)
And, last but not least, cost. Books are still pretty darn cheap. Any electronic competitor needs to be either far superior, or not much more expensive, to compete.
On the other hand, anything that reduces the demand for paper has got to be a good thing...
Yeah, that's a potential problem, all right. I'm sure that a very small number of people get harassed by the police because they look like somebody else and happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Fundamentally, this equipment doesn't change anything. It does make it a lot easier for the police to scan a large crowd for "familiar faces", but that's not really any different than having a bunch of officers with binoculars do the same thing "by hand".
If you want to boil a frog, you don't do it by setting the flame to high, you do it by setting the flame to the lowest possible setting and slowly increasing it.
I don't suppose you have a scientific study to back that up, do you? :-)
I just don't see this system as a significant encroachment of my rights, as long as it's used in the way described. I think the votes are in, and as a society we've decided that security cameras are worth the loss of privacy for the increase in security.
As pointed out by the law professor quoted in the article, "People have no reasonable expectation that when out in public, they cannot be photographed."
If you've got a criminal record, don't go somewhere where somebody might recognize you. Duh.
Now if they started KEEPING all those photographs against a possible future need, that'd be a different thing altogether...
Yeah, I don't get it either. It's literally TEN TIMES as expensive as Delphi for Windows. I guess they're a bit worried about support costs on Linux...
> It is well known that g++, the GNU C++
> compiler, just turns C++ code into C code and
> then uses gcc to compile.
"Well known" by somebody who's never used it, perhaps. The g++ compiler is a native c++ compiler, just like Borland's.
While I was working at NeXT, one of the jobs I had there was running a hardware compatibility test program for Intel-based PC's.
The system never worked particularly well, despite the best efforts of the people at NeXT and the people at the PC vendors. NeXT was never able to form the kind of high-level relationships necessary to ensure that a particular PC vendor didn't gratuitously break compatibility with our OS with a hardware change.
Microsoft didn't have to worry about that - "It still runs windows" was on the list of things to check with any hardware change. Hell, it was probably the ONLY thing on the list.
Apple will only do better if they can convince a PC manufacturer like IBM or Dell that maintaining compatibility with MacOS X/Intel is just as important as maintaining compatibility with Windows.
Or they need a different approach entirely, though I really don't know what that would look like. I don't think open-source drivers will be an acceptable answer to very many consumers.
I just returned one of these players (the same exact model) to the store I bought it from last month. Not only would it not play CD-R's, but it refused to play about 80% of the retail CD's I tried to play on it. Probably not one of Sony's better products...