I can easily set up rules to put emails into folders to reduce clutter and increase organization. AND IT WORKS.
You can do the exact same thing in Gmail (select email, More, "Filter messages like these). The label thing is sort of annoying, but I mentally have mapped them to 'folders' and it doesn't bug me any more (at least 50% of my Gmail interaction is via IMAP with Thunderbird so I only see folders there anyway).
On rare occasions the labeling has even been useful - you can have an email labeled with multiple labels, allowing more complex filtering. (I assume they end up copied between folders, but I've never actually checked.)
Making a product which everyone has decided they don't want isn't how you succeed in the long run. That's the sign of a company in its death throws.
Making new products and trying new things is the only way you can find out if they're going to succeed or fail though.
To me this whole campaign doesn't seem like a flailing around, clutching at straws affair (...like almost everything Blackberry does). I can't imagine HTC or Facebook are in that much strife - it looks more like a toe in the water to gauge reaction. So far from what (little) I've seen reaction hasn't been great, so winding it back gracefully and trying something else is probably their next step.
I like seeing companies try new things, even when they fail or go nowhere. That is innovation. Some of the ideas will be terrible, some merely bad - learning from those and shaping products lines will help them develop something good.
As the guy responsible for EPUB at Kobo, I can assure you that we use EPUB for all our books, and have done for quite some time now. The files inside the archive are encrypted or not based on the wishes of the publisher: Harry Potter books aren't encrypted, for example.
I was intrigued by this because every time I've looked at the Kobo store it just says " Download options: Adobe DRM EPUB ".
The Harry Potter books don't have that at all - it looks like I have to go off-site (i.e., away from the actual Kobo store) to Pottermore to buy them?
I've sent a couple of inquiries to the Kobo store about when they're going to have DRM free epub options directly but no response.
At the moment I seem to only be able to buy epubs from places like Baen - but happily able to put them on my Kobo and read them. Would love there to be a proper division between DRM-free epubs in the Kobo store - until then I won't be spending any money in there.
I ended up making some tiny changes to my WP install that basically causes requests to/wp-admin to die immediately, unless you're accessing it via a specific HTTP port that I've opened in Apache specifically for this purpose.
I've got disk permissions set up so that the regular Apache user cannot write at all to the disk - a common source of WP problems seems to be exploits writing new files to disk, so stopping that seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately it also bones a lot of WP functionality like being able to automatically install skins/plugins.
Using some Apache module (can't remember which one) I've set it up so that requests made to/wp-admin under the correct Apache port operate under a different user - one that/does/ have write access to the disk. So it means I can do any administrative stuff and take advantage of the full WP functionality without having to leave write access in there for normal use.
Conceptually this seems like a much more default setup for WP - certainly I haven't had any security problems. As a side benefit it means I don't need to worry about random attacks like this.
There's a few minor problems I haven't resolved (most notably when adding new posts, the URL it stores for them includes the administrative port in them and publicly displays them in things like the RSS feed:) but I'm hoping to find time one day to resolve those.
...if your email is not in at least two physically separate places, you are at risk of losing all of it, forever.
It's weird Shaw can't restore from a backup - the article is a bit weird on the exact details about what happened and just ends with "the emails were not backed up".
If your online mail provider does not allow you to access or export your data to your own PC (via IMAP, POP, or whatever) then you should switch to one that does - and start backing up your own email if you want to be more confident that it's going to survive catastrophes.
Recording devices are going to be ubiquitous soon - if they're not already with mobile phones.
Sure, Google Glasses are different in that they're on your head and ready to record a little more subtly, but if it's not them, it's going to be something else.
Reactionary policies like this won't really address the problem - technology is fundamentally changing how privacy works.
Citizens need to be made aware of the issue from both sides - when it's OK to record someone, and when they need to be conscious of the fact that they might be being recorded.
They need to be aware of the technical advances (e.g., face recognition combined with social network trawling) and cognisant of the risks. Even today, in a (mostly) Google Glasses free world, people should be aware of the fact that what they're doing might be recorded by someone, somewhere.
Behaviour will need to change to adapt to the new technology - just like it already has to some large degree because of things social networks and ubiquitous digital cameras. Know your rights to privacy, but be aware that a lot of them end when you step outside.
You can tie them together in your own free open source PBX.. such as Asterisk.
We do this. My sysadmins gave me Jitsi when I asked about getting a phone at home. It was dead easy to set up; I just run my VPN client, fire up Jitsi and I can make calls using my headset painlessly and easily. In fact I prefer making calls from home now because I can use my awesome gaming headset instead of the crappy handset I have on my desk phone; it's easier to hear people and I can type/take notes while I talk.
Personally, I don't think reporters get called enough on their BS. I am not a big Elon Musk fan (he came across like a baby after the "Top Gear" situation), but his response in this situation raised my opinion of him a couple of notches.
Hmm. FWIW I was up until the Tesla event, a very casual Top Gear watcher. I enjoyed watching it - I know nothing about cars at all - but took it as an entertaining, fact-based car show. I assumed that everything that they did, while very funny, was done in a relatively factual way - but from what I've heard the Tesla thing was basically outright deceptive.
Maybe it becomes more obvious if you watch a lot of Top Gear but I would have watched that episode casually and assumed the car ran out of juice and was rubbish as a result. It wouldn't have crossed my mind that it was just entertainment, which is (as I understand) what the judge said in the case - everyone KNOWS it's just for fun so who gives a shit what they say?
I never really watched it for real information - I'm not going to be dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars on a car, ever - but I assumed the stuff they said was based on reality at least in some way. Knowing the Tesla thing was basically a total fabrication has made me much less interested in watching the show.
People here in Australia often bitch about Valve because of the regionalised pricing of video games - it's not uncommon for some games to cost almost 2x as much as they do in the USA (given the strong value of our dollar).
However, it's not Valve that sets the prices for the games - it's the publisher.
In this case I don't know if Valve are just honoring requirements set by the publishers, or if this just a part of their platform. Either way, I think Steam would be a much tougher sell to publishers if one of the features they provided to gamers was the ability to sell your account at a discounted price to someone else.
(If you want to sell games on Steam, my advice would be to separate out game purchases into different email accounts. Then you can sell the email account and the associated games. I'm sure it's still against T&Cs to do that - and it's a giant pain in the ass - but at least it means you can buy and sell Steam games in discrete chunks.)
... because you can bet on this vote. He has won tens of thousands of dollars, beating the bookies every year for the last few years. He thought this whole thing was pretty funny but hopes it doesn't affect his chances next year.
I long ago changed my preferences on Slashdot so that anything moderated Funny gets ignored - just went looking for the setting but I can't find it in options any more so not sure where to direct you. But it means all those jokes are just removed from browsing the comments and it makes it much more bearable.
One approach that might work is to focus instead on newcomers - all the people with a band practicing in the garage or writing music in their bedroom.
We have a great place here in Australia for this - http://www.triplejunearthed.com/ . It has launched the career of many artists.
It is provided by the ABC, our state-owned media broadcaster, as part of their youth radio network Triple J. It is a fantastic service. I've gotten a lot of free music from them and exposure to really awesome bands.
Oh yes, please tell me all about the computer geniuses that wrote the PHP scripts that power facebook!
Well, I know PHP bashing is all the rage, so how about the computer geniuses at Facebook that wrote HipHop, their PHP-to-binary compiler?
I think it is a pretty cool technical thing (and according to their stats it dropped their CPU usage by some significant figure) - and even better, they open sourced it. Like they do with a lot of their stuff.
Erm... The difference between light and day isn't much
Oops. Was either supposed to read "light and dark" or "night and day" but the message got confused between my brain and my hands somewhere.
But what differences are we talking about?
They say stability and UI speed - the two colleagues I work with that have Galaxy Nexuses both had regular problems with what they call general stability and complained regularly about the UI being slow and laggy to respond.
Apparently JB fixed all that stuff up to such a degree that the device went from a regular struggle to use to a much more pleasant experience.
As I posted elsewhere the Galaxy S upgrade path is even easier, though not OTA. Plug the phone into the computer, Kies pops up a message and says and upgrade is ready, and one click later you're upgraded without any configs getting clobbered, and even the carrier customisations were applied. And the Galaxy S users make up a MASSIVE portion of the Android userbase.
Again I'd be fascinated to see numbers on how many of those users actually ever bothered to upgrade. I had to install Kies on my machine to do something with a friend's S2 once (can't remember - run it as a USB disk? Something that I thought it was silly to have to install other software for, anyway) and found the whole thing to be the fairly typical crappy software experience.
I would guess that without OTA upgrades - or without actually tying the phone to the machine for its day to day use, like iPhone does w/ iTunes integration - you'd see much lower upgrade compliance. I know the numbers for Android show they're generally all over the place but there's just so many factors that just kill the OS upgrade path dead it's hard to know what they should focus on.
I really want an S3; I like the look of the phone and I love the idea of shoving another purchase of it in Apple's stupid face - but I can't bring myself to get a phone where I'm stuck waiting for someone else to decide when I should get OS updates (regardless of how good they are) and I'm not interested in self-updating via jailbreaking or whatever - so the Nexus is again the path for me.
Actually it seems you're just running around with your eyes closed. Nexus users simply get a notification when an update is available and the update works in 2 clicks, one to download and one to reboot the phone after the download is finished.
What percentage of Android users are Nexus users though? I am, but almost everyone else I know with an Android doesn't have a Nexus.
I'm looking to buy a Galaxy Nexus to upgrade from my dated Nexus One (..which still does almost everything I want) specifically because I know it is the only path to smooth Android upgrades. Most civilians don't know that and don't understand why it is important - they just end up at the mercy of their carrier or device manufacturer.
FWIW, everyone I know on a Galaxy Nexus said the difference between ICS and JB is like light and day - YMMV!
As a professional researcher, it's much more reliable to use the paper version of manuals and hardware documentation.
As a professional researcher, you should have no problems citing a study that backs up the claim that it is more reliable to use paper version than electronic versions!:)
Very interesting. Are there concerns with the safety of self-canned food? I remember reading in maybe early high school science about problems with early canned food attempts, with various toxins getting into the food (maybe it was just the type of cans they were using or something..?)
The site you linked has some general info but just wondering if you had any experience or concerns with that aspect of it.
As someone else points out, Calibre, solves a lot of those problems for you. I use it to convert to ePub from various other formats - it is a great piece of open source software!
I actually do most of my reading on my phone. Some people seem to really struggle long-term reading but me (and my girlfriend) do it for hours with no problems. I can't explain why, but the one tip I would say is when reading at night or in dark environments, make sure you change colours - many book readers (I use FBReader on Android) have a 'night mode', but it is often white text on black background. Change to red text on black background and it is MASSIVELY less stressful on the eyes.
I can't figure out the world of e-book publishing. I'm generally happy to buy the Hugo Award winners (and even nominees) figuring that half the work in finding at least some good SF has been done for me, but I can't just go to the publisher's website and buy the fucking book directly from them in an ePub version.
I find this especially weird for Tor given that they seem to understand DRM sucks and they made a big noise about all their ebooks going DRM free.
But on their buy page (which I found from this article in the Tor blog after doing a Google search for the name) only lets me pick from a bunch of ebook retailers like Amazon, B&N, Google Books... and I know at least some of those won't be available as options for me because I'm here in Australia and not in the USA (Google Books for example is not available to us here).
Further, most of the other options are for specific devices - I happen to have a Kobo, but when I follow the link for that, it takes me to the Kobo search page - either the book is not available there at all, or it's not available for my region. I've tried buying "DRM free" ebooks from Amazon and could not figure out how to do it easily without a Kindle (you don't seem to ever got prompted to download a file; I assume it is all back-end device specific magic tied to your account...?)
In short - I just want to download an ePub file. I know many many users don't want to have to do this, but it is seriously the absolute simplest form of distribution you could come up with - just let me download a.epub file directly in my browser so I can do whatever the hell I want with it!
To be fair though, a lot of that stuff you could still sort of get on an iPad - just install a terminal/ssh application and connect to your development environment (...assuming it is Linux). You'll then have all the access to SVN, databases, etc that you need.
I still think it would be utterly utterly awkward trying to do any serious development on, but it might be enough to bang out a quick emergency fix, or to try out a small idea, or whatever.
It conflates "some problems exist" with "nothing ever works for anyone". It also ignores that many of the same exact problems exist for Windows which is a monopoly product produced by a large company and supported by an entire industry of large companies.
Hmm. I sort of agree, but every couple years I install Linux onto a partition (usually Ubuntu) to see how it is going, and I regularly encounter problems, many of those of which are listed in that document (e.g., "There's no guarantee whatsoever that your system will (re)boot successfully after GRUB" has happened to me several times doing a dist-upgrade, the problems with sound, the problems with laptop buttons not working, etc).
I'm a savvy computer user guy and know enough Linuxstuff to work around or solve many of those problems. But I experience them and it is a pain. I think the percentage of those problems are a lot higher on Linux than they are on Windows and the depth and breadth of them are simply a lot bigger.
Those sorts of problems though are certainly why I stick with Windows on my laptop for 99% of my day-to-day use - and why Linux is relegated to the second option just when I want to use it for something specific.
The western capitalist system has no need for state propaganda.
Actually, in Australian, political spamming is basically except from our spam legislation. See the ACMA (the body here that is responsible for handling spam complaints):
Electronic messages from certain sources are exempted from the Spam Act. These include messages from:
government bodies
registered political parties
charities
religious organisations
educational institutions (sent to current and former students and their households).
We had an incident here a couple years ago where one of our prime ministers paid his son's IT company to send spam on his behalf.
It is not really widely done - I think people are too scared of becoming labeled as jerk spammers as happened to Howard - but the fact that they've left these loopholes in the legislation is a little irritating.
In your case (and for the most part, everyone else), you host advertisements to support the service offered by you. From reading the comments, you only receive payment from the advertising companies *if* I click on an advertisement? Additionally, you say that as part of the unwritten contract of me using your service, I accept to be exposed to advertisements?
Actually with our core agency we get paid just from the exposure, not from the click. It is different to the Google model.
(However, from some basic testing, the net result is the same - if we switched to Google only advertising, the click rate is high enough that with our traffic we'd make about the same amount of money. I guess smart marketers have figured out all the maths and money behind how this works....?)
Slashdot Mirror
I can easily set up rules to put emails into folders to reduce clutter and increase organization. AND IT WORKS.
You can do the exact same thing in Gmail (select email, More, "Filter messages like these). The label thing is sort of annoying, but I mentally have mapped them to 'folders' and it doesn't bug me any more (at least 50% of my Gmail interaction is via IMAP with Thunderbird so I only see folders there anyway).
On rare occasions the labeling has even been useful - you can have an email labeled with multiple labels, allowing more complex filtering. (I assume they end up copied between folders, but I've never actually checked.)
Making a product which everyone has decided they don't want isn't how you succeed in the long run. That's the sign of a company in its death throws.
Making new products and trying new things is the only way you can find out if they're going to succeed or fail though.
To me this whole campaign doesn't seem like a flailing around, clutching at straws affair (...like almost everything Blackberry does). I can't imagine HTC or Facebook are in that much strife - it looks more like a toe in the water to gauge reaction. So far from what (little) I've seen reaction hasn't been great, so winding it back gracefully and trying something else is probably their next step.
I like seeing companies try new things, even when they fail or go nowhere. That is innovation. Some of the ideas will be terrible, some merely bad - learning from those and shaping products lines will help them develop something good.
As the guy responsible for EPUB at Kobo, I can assure you that we use EPUB for all our books, and have done for quite some time now. The files inside the archive are encrypted or not based on the wishes of the publisher: Harry Potter books aren't encrypted, for example.
I was intrigued by this because every time I've looked at the Kobo store it just says " Download options: Adobe DRM EPUB ".
The Harry Potter books don't have that at all - it looks like I have to go off-site (i.e., away from the actual Kobo store) to Pottermore to buy them?
I've sent a couple of inquiries to the Kobo store about when they're going to have DRM free epub options directly but no response.
At the moment I seem to only be able to buy epubs from places like Baen - but happily able to put them on my Kobo and read them. Would love there to be a proper division between DRM-free epubs in the Kobo store - until then I won't be spending any money in there.
i just want to copy/paste the books folders on my pc direct to the kobo.
any explanation why you people are against folder support?
That is what I do with my Kobo Touch. I mostly use Calibre to manage it but have also copied epubs over with no problems. What device do you have?
I ended up making some tiny changes to my WP install that basically causes requests to /wp-admin to die immediately, unless you're accessing it via a specific HTTP port that I've opened in Apache specifically for this purpose.
I've got disk permissions set up so that the regular Apache user cannot write at all to the disk - a common source of WP problems seems to be exploits writing new files to disk, so stopping that seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately it also bones a lot of WP functionality like being able to automatically install skins/plugins.
Using some Apache module (can't remember which one) I've set it up so that requests made to /wp-admin under the correct Apache port operate under a different user - one that /does/ have write access to the disk. So it means I can do any administrative stuff and take advantage of the full WP functionality without having to leave write access in there for normal use.
Conceptually this seems like a much more default setup for WP - certainly I haven't had any security problems. As a side benefit it means I don't need to worry about random attacks like this.
There's a few minor problems I haven't resolved (most notably when adding new posts, the URL it stores for them includes the administrative port in them and publicly displays them in things like the RSS feed :) but I'm hoping to find time one day to resolve those.
...if your email is not in at least two physically separate places, you are at risk of losing all of it, forever.
It's weird Shaw can't restore from a backup - the article is a bit weird on the exact details about what happened and just ends with "the emails were not backed up".
If your online mail provider does not allow you to access or export your data to your own PC (via IMAP, POP, or whatever) then you should switch to one that does - and start backing up your own email if you want to be more confident that it's going to survive catastrophes.
Recording devices are going to be ubiquitous soon - if they're not already with mobile phones.
Sure, Google Glasses are different in that they're on your head and ready to record a little more subtly, but if it's not them, it's going to be something else.
Reactionary policies like this won't really address the problem - technology is fundamentally changing how privacy works.
Citizens need to be made aware of the issue from both sides - when it's OK to record someone, and when they need to be conscious of the fact that they might be being recorded.
They need to be aware of the technical advances (e.g., face recognition combined with social network trawling) and cognisant of the risks. Even today, in a (mostly) Google Glasses free world, people should be aware of the fact that what they're doing might be recorded by someone, somewhere.
Behaviour will need to change to adapt to the new technology - just like it already has to some large degree because of things social networks and ubiquitous digital cameras. Know your rights to privacy, but be aware that a lot of them end when you step outside.
The Skype guys have a mobile app called Qik Video that does this; I have it on my Android phone for situations like this.
You can tie them together in your own free open source PBX.. such as Asterisk.
We do this. My sysadmins gave me Jitsi when I asked about getting a phone at home. It was dead easy to set up; I just run my VPN client, fire up Jitsi and I can make calls using my headset painlessly and easily. In fact I prefer making calls from home now because I can use my awesome gaming headset instead of the crappy handset I have on my desk phone; it's easier to hear people and I can type/take notes while I talk.
Personally, I don't think reporters get called enough on their BS. I am not a big Elon Musk fan (he came across like a baby after the "Top Gear" situation), but his response in this situation raised my opinion of him a couple of notches.
Hmm. FWIW I was up until the Tesla event, a very casual Top Gear watcher. I enjoyed watching it - I know nothing about cars at all - but took it as an entertaining, fact-based car show. I assumed that everything that they did, while very funny, was done in a relatively factual way - but from what I've heard the Tesla thing was basically outright deceptive.
Maybe it becomes more obvious if you watch a lot of Top Gear but I would have watched that episode casually and assumed the car ran out of juice and was rubbish as a result. It wouldn't have crossed my mind that it was just entertainment, which is (as I understand) what the judge said in the case - everyone KNOWS it's just for fun so who gives a shit what they say?
I never really watched it for real information - I'm not going to be dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars on a car, ever - but I assumed the stuff they said was based on reality at least in some way. Knowing the Tesla thing was basically a total fabrication has made me much less interested in watching the show.
People here in Australia often bitch about Valve because of the regionalised pricing of video games - it's not uncommon for some games to cost almost 2x as much as they do in the USA (given the strong value of our dollar).
However, it's not Valve that sets the prices for the games - it's the publisher.
In this case I don't know if Valve are just honoring requirements set by the publishers, or if this just a part of their platform. Either way, I think Steam would be a much tougher sell to publishers if one of the features they provided to gamers was the ability to sell your account at a discounted price to someone else.
(If you want to sell games on Steam, my advice would be to separate out game purchases into different email accounts. Then you can sell the email account and the associated games. I'm sure it's still against T&Cs to do that - and it's a giant pain in the ass - but at least it means you can buy and sell Steam games in discrete chunks.)
... because you can bet on this vote. He has won tens of thousands of dollars, beating the bookies every year for the last few years. He thought this whole thing was pretty funny but hopes it doesn't affect his chances next year.
I long ago changed my preferences on Slashdot so that anything moderated Funny gets ignored - just went looking for the setting but I can't find it in options any more so not sure where to direct you. But it means all those jokes are just removed from browsing the comments and it makes it much more bearable.
One approach that might work is to focus instead on newcomers - all the people with a band practicing in the garage or writing music in their bedroom.
We have a great place here in Australia for this - http://www.triplejunearthed.com/ . It has launched the career of many artists.
It is provided by the ABC, our state-owned media broadcaster, as part of their youth radio network Triple J. It is a fantastic service. I've gotten a lot of free music from them and exposure to really awesome bands.
Oh yes, please tell me all about the computer geniuses that wrote the PHP scripts that power facebook!
Well, I know PHP bashing is all the rage, so how about the computer geniuses at Facebook that wrote HipHop, their PHP-to-binary compiler?
I think it is a pretty cool technical thing (and according to their stats it dropped their CPU usage by some significant figure) - and even better, they open sourced it. Like they do with a lot of their stuff.
Erm ... The difference between light and day isn't much
Oops. Was either supposed to read "light and dark" or "night and day" but the message got confused between my brain and my hands somewhere.
But what differences are we talking about?
They say stability and UI speed - the two colleagues I work with that have Galaxy Nexuses both had regular problems with what they call general stability and complained regularly about the UI being slow and laggy to respond.
Apparently JB fixed all that stuff up to such a degree that the device went from a regular struggle to use to a much more pleasant experience.
As I posted elsewhere the Galaxy S upgrade path is even easier, though not OTA. Plug the phone into the computer, Kies pops up a message and says and upgrade is ready, and one click later you're upgraded without any configs getting clobbered, and even the carrier customisations were applied. And the Galaxy S users make up a MASSIVE portion of the Android userbase.
Again I'd be fascinated to see numbers on how many of those users actually ever bothered to upgrade. I had to install Kies on my machine to do something with a friend's S2 once (can't remember - run it as a USB disk? Something that I thought it was silly to have to install other software for, anyway) and found the whole thing to be the fairly typical crappy software experience.
I would guess that without OTA upgrades - or without actually tying the phone to the machine for its day to day use, like iPhone does w/ iTunes integration - you'd see much lower upgrade compliance. I know the numbers for Android show they're generally all over the place but there's just so many factors that just kill the OS upgrade path dead it's hard to know what they should focus on.
I really want an S3; I like the look of the phone and I love the idea of shoving another purchase of it in Apple's stupid face - but I can't bring myself to get a phone where I'm stuck waiting for someone else to decide when I should get OS updates (regardless of how good they are) and I'm not interested in self-updating via jailbreaking or whatever - so the Nexus is again the path for me.
Actually it seems you're just running around with your eyes closed. Nexus users simply get a notification when an update is available and the update works in 2 clicks, one to download and one to reboot the phone after the download is finished.
What percentage of Android users are Nexus users though? I am, but almost everyone else I know with an Android doesn't have a Nexus.
I'm looking to buy a Galaxy Nexus to upgrade from my dated Nexus One (..which still does almost everything I want) specifically because I know it is the only path to smooth Android upgrades. Most civilians don't know that and don't understand why it is important - they just end up at the mercy of their carrier or device manufacturer.
FWIW, everyone I know on a Galaxy Nexus said the difference between ICS and JB is like light and day - YMMV!
As a professional researcher, it's much more reliable to use the paper version of manuals and hardware documentation.
As a professional researcher, you should have no problems citing a study that backs up the claim that it is more reliable to use paper version than electronic versions! :)
Very interesting. Are there concerns with the safety of self-canned food? I remember reading in maybe early high school science about problems with early canned food attempts, with various toxins getting into the food (maybe it was just the type of cans they were using or something..?)
The site you linked has some general info but just wondering if you had any experience or concerns with that aspect of it.
As someone else points out, Calibre, solves a lot of those problems for you. I use it to convert to ePub from various other formats - it is a great piece of open source software!
I actually do most of my reading on my phone. Some people seem to really struggle long-term reading but me (and my girlfriend) do it for hours with no problems. I can't explain why, but the one tip I would say is when reading at night or in dark environments, make sure you change colours - many book readers (I use FBReader on Android) have a 'night mode', but it is often white text on black background. Change to red text on black background and it is MASSIVELY less stressful on the eyes.
I can't figure out the world of e-book publishing. I'm generally happy to buy the Hugo Award winners (and even nominees) figuring that half the work in finding at least some good SF has been done for me, but I can't just go to the publisher's website and buy the fucking book directly from them in an ePub version.
I find this especially weird for Tor given that they seem to understand DRM sucks and they made a big noise about all their ebooks going DRM free.
But on their buy page (which I found from this article in the Tor blog after doing a Google search for the name) only lets me pick from a bunch of ebook retailers like Amazon, B&N, Google Books... and I know at least some of those won't be available as options for me because I'm here in Australia and not in the USA (Google Books for example is not available to us here).
Further, most of the other options are for specific devices - I happen to have a Kobo, but when I follow the link for that, it takes me to the Kobo search page - either the book is not available there at all, or it's not available for my region. I've tried buying "DRM free" ebooks from Amazon and could not figure out how to do it easily without a Kindle (you don't seem to ever got prompted to download a file; I assume it is all back-end device specific magic tied to your account...?)
In short - I just want to download an ePub file. I know many many users don't want to have to do this, but it is seriously the absolute simplest form of distribution you could come up with - just let me download a .epub file directly in my browser so I can do whatever the hell I want with it!
To be fair though, a lot of that stuff you could still sort of get on an iPad - just install a terminal/ssh application and connect to your development environment (...assuming it is Linux). You'll then have all the access to SVN, databases, etc that you need.
I still think it would be utterly utterly awkward trying to do any serious development on, but it might be enough to bang out a quick emergency fix, or to try out a small idea, or whatever.
That page is hysterical nonsense.
It conflates "some problems exist" with "nothing ever works for anyone". It also ignores that many of the same exact problems exist for Windows which is a monopoly product produced by a large company and supported by an entire industry of large companies.
Hmm. I sort of agree, but every couple years I install Linux onto a partition (usually Ubuntu) to see how it is going, and I regularly encounter problems, many of those of which are listed in that document (e.g., "There's no guarantee whatsoever that your system will (re)boot successfully after GRUB" has happened to me several times doing a dist-upgrade, the problems with sound, the problems with laptop buttons not working, etc).
I'm a savvy computer user guy and know enough Linuxstuff to work around or solve many of those problems. But I experience them and it is a pain. I think the percentage of those problems are a lot higher on Linux than they are on Windows and the depth and breadth of them are simply a lot bigger.
Those sorts of problems though are certainly why I stick with Windows on my laptop for 99% of my day-to-day use - and why Linux is relegated to the second option just when I want to use it for something specific.
The western capitalist system has no need for state propaganda.
Actually, in Australian, political spamming is basically except from our spam legislation. See the ACMA (the body here that is responsible for handling spam complaints):
Electronic messages from certain sources are exempted from the Spam Act. These include messages from:
government bodies
registered political parties
charities
religious organisations
educational institutions (sent to current and former students and their households).
We had an incident here a couple years ago where one of our prime ministers paid his son's IT company to send spam on his behalf.
It is not really widely done - I think people are too scared of becoming labeled as jerk spammers as happened to Howard - but the fact that they've left these loopholes in the legislation is a little irritating.
In your case (and for the most part, everyone else), you host advertisements to support the service offered by you. From reading the comments, you only receive payment from the advertising companies *if* I click on an advertisement? Additionally, you say that as part of the unwritten contract of me using your service, I accept to be exposed to advertisements?
Actually with our core agency we get paid just from the exposure, not from the click. It is different to the Google model.
(However, from some basic testing, the net result is the same - if we switched to Google only advertising, the click rate is high enough that with our traffic we'd make about the same amount of money. I guess smart marketers have figured out all the maths and money behind how this works....?)