I do hope that the supplier of the ebooks for this device take a little more care than do the current crop of ebook producers. Most of the books I read now are ebooks through eReader or Fictionwise, and they often are so poorly converted into electronic form that it hurts to read them.
The one I'm currently reading is obviously an OCR job, because there are occasional soft-turned-hard hyphens peppered through it, and some lines where the wordspacing was evidently tight in the original, leadingtoareallylongwordin the ebook. Another one used hyphens for dashes too-which is extremely jarring in a proportional font-as this sentence demonstrates. Quotation marks and apostrophes are usually just the ASCII ones, which really isn't very professional-looking in print.
Then you see situations where the culture shock just got too much for the converter and they gave up. The sample book in the SonyStyle web page, The Da Vinci Code, has some pictograms in it. Those probably just get included in the ebook as a low-resolution bitmap. They certainly did on my copy from Fictionwise. I've lost count of the books which have hard-coded page references ("see page 321"), which is useless considering that pagination is up to the device itself. Forget about tappable hyperlinks; I've only seen one such ebook in the dozens I've read.
Don't get me wrong. I love my ebooks, and they compare well to Australian dead-tree books in price. But there's more to releasing an ebook than spitting out a plaintext file. If the parent poster is right about manga, hooray, finally. But history doesn't make me optimistic.
On another tack . . Royal . . Gentoo . . Adelie . . detecting a theme?
I think that one of the biggest problems that Linux is going to face in the coming years is that there are only seventeen or so different species of penguin.
Probably fewer will be good names for products. Would you install "Little or Fairy" Linux?
As countless others have mentioned, all it means is that PalmSource is no longer going to provide the Palm Desktop and HotSync manager.
No serious Mac user goes anywhere near Palm Desktop if it can possibly be helped: most of its functionality has been usurped by Mac OS' own applications, which already sync via iSync.
True, iSync is currently built as a conduit on top of the HotSync manager, but it would be trivial for Apple to port it to use one of the open source hotsync replacements such as pilot-link or ColdSync, or proprietary solutions like Missing Sync. (Sony Clie users are already in this boat anyway, because Sony doesn't provide a Mac sync component and never has.)
PalmSource is simply admitting that its tools for the Mac aren't being used much anyway, so there's no point continuing to develop them.
Much more problematic is that the Palm OS Simulator is a Windows-only affair (PalmSource laughably argues that this is because x86 byte order matches ARM byte order and PowerPC doesn't). If you want to develop for anything later than PalmOS 4.1 you are going to have to locate a Windows box.
"SUSE was looking to more effectively reach our business audience--capitalizing on our strengths as the pioneer in commercial Linux as well as our reputation as the Linux engineering experts," said Dr. Uwe Schmid
Capitalizing indeed. I didn't realize that the letter "u" was one of SuSE's strengths.
Note the second of this designer's entries with the big-headed geek saying:
YES! With a single push of this button I can bring any website to it's [sic] knees, just like Slashdot!!
Take a look at the spelling of "it's" there. This is either a terribly sad indictment or masterfully brilliant observation; I haven't figured out which yet.
If you want to do business stuff (such as Internet, in this case), get a Palm Pilot or something.
Apparently Palm Pilot (well, Palm OS) is for games too. See This story on a forthcoming PalmOS-based gaming device from Tapwave. It's also expected to have all of Palm OS' usual PIM applications. But it's not due for at least another six months, and the fact that its specifications are better than most high-end Palm OS devices out now gives a suggestion of vapourware.
I've already had my (university-owned) laptop scanned for MP3s by Monash University, as has everyone else in my School. The Faculty is presumably conducting these audits to see how much of a liability its staff is. Rumour has it that someone had been suspended for trading MP3s, and the University is getting grief over it from the Australian Record Industry Association. It's interesting to know that this is happening at other universities around Australia too.
There have been a number of memos from the Dean lately about copyrighted material, including music. The University's stance is that any copies of music, whether you own an original or not, are illegal unless you have written permission from the copyright holder. I believe that this is consistent with Australian copyright law, which (correct me if I'm wrong) doesn't seem to have a Fair Use clause. If that's true, it makes me wonder why you can buy solid-state MP3 players in this country at all.
find / -name "*.mp3" -print returned nothing on my laptop, so it's not a big deal to me, and since it's the University's equipment, they're entitled to set their own rules. But searching our hard disks doesn't exactly foster a trusting relationship between staff and university. More to the point, it's also going to have a nasty effect on research on audio compression.
I was going to ask how you get your ideas for your columns. But after this whole Slashdot "Ask Dave Barry" thing is over, I figure you'll probably have enough high-quality material to last months.
When you inevitably write a Miami Herald column about how weird we all are, will you please have Mister Language Person explain to Slashdotters about exactly how to use apostrophes' (I'm sorry, I mean "apostrophe's") correctly?
The technology to do this has existed for quite some time. They've been using this for speed- and red-light-cameras for years. It's recently been put into practice in "tollboothless" tollways such as CityLink (in Melbourne). Here's a description of how it works (look under the section "Travel on CityLink"). I'm told that it even works halfway decently, for various values of "works". (Except for the likely umpteen followups who have counterexamples.)
The CityLink toll was applied to a road that used to be free. There was much furore over this at the time, with people suggesting that the traffic would be worse in surrounding areas as cheapskate drivers looked for alternate routes. Now that the whole thing has been ironed out and in production for a couple of years, the protests have largely died away and we have a pay-per-use road that is very, very useful for getting across town (if you can afford the toll). The traffic isn't significantly worse in surrounding streets. Here is a vaguely independent report on CityLink by Victoria's motoring club.
Now it looks like it's London's turn to go through the same thing.
MIPS (the 32-bit version) was the precursor of almost
all RISC architectures that are still extant. PowerPC, Alpha, ARM - they are all very
similar in feel to MIPS. These other architectures may have small differences, but the load/store, three-address, pipelined design from MIPS is very much an integral part of them.
I don't know how your particular university teaches architecture and assembly language programming, but I'm sure that it tries to teach concepts and methodologies which will outlive the language of instruction.
So relax, even if (heaven forbid) MIPS ceases to be viable, its nephews and nieces will continue to live on, and your education will not suddenly stop being useful.
(I am speaking as someone who teaches MIPS assembly language and architecture at a university, though not one renowned for its computer architecture research, at least in the past 25 years. I quiver in fear at the prospect of ever having to teach first-year students IA-64 VLIW programming.)
One of the funnier myths perceived to be true is that 'Microsoft's technical support is the best in the industry and is superior to that offered by the Linux community.'
I think I have an idea why that is thought to be true . . .
Here at the Damian Conway Memorial University,
Computer Science is just one part of the bigger IT Faculty.
While we have a focus on Linux (Red Hat 6 is what's installed) we're severely among
minority. Pretty much the rest of the University uses Windows, because it's good enough
for their needs.
So why the perception I quoted above, which runs rife among CS students who "have to" use Linux? Because their perception of tech support comes from Helpdesk, which I've
seen manned by second-year students, whom I teach and thus know can't debug
their way out of a paper bag
(and certainly can't solve someone else's computer problem). (*) Anything more difficult than "I need to change my password" and you're largely on your own.
Naturally, Helpdesk is far more interested in supporting Windows than they are in supporting Linux, because that's what their customers (most of the University) want.
Thus almost everything about the Univeristy's computer networks
is optimized for Windows. It's no surprise that the computers work better running Windows than they do running Linux.
As a result, students get more problems running Linux than they do with Windows. And they go to Helpdesk with the problem, get no appreciable help, and come
away with the notion that their problem is that they're running Linux, and if they just switched to Windows everything would work fine and dandy.
This attitude is rampant among my students (not the ones here who read slashdot, but many of the others, who complain to me about being made to use Linux). It's not surprising that they take their Helpdesk experience away with them
and extrapolate it to Linux support in general.
I realize that there's a circular argument there. But logic isn't
a prerequisite for justifying a University department's choices.
(*) Yes, not all of Helpdesk is like that. I happen to know that some very talented people support Linux on a measly University salary here. But they're far removed from Helpdesk, so students don't see them.
I suppose I have a slightly different perspective on
this than most folks on slashdot. I teach the one
and only Perl course at Monash University. Damian's
office is three doors down the hall from mine (when
he's in his office at all, which isn't often). I had
the good fortune to be taught by Damian when I was
an undergrad.
On one hand: This is great for Perl. Anyone who
has dabbled in the language knows that Damian
has Plans for Perl what we mere mortals can never
truly understand. I'm still drooling over the
thought of a proper switch statement in
Perl. As for curried expressions, well, if they're
anything as good as curried chicken, I'm all for it.
On the other hand:
There's a whole generation of Monash University
students growing up without having the joy of
being taught by Damian. The poor things are
getting substandard teaching (well, actually,
they're probably getting standard teaching; what
I know they're not getting is superstandard
teaching), and they are graduating without
the fond memories of the acted-out-in-lectures
singles-bar analogy for
C++ polymorphism. (You Monash graduates know what
I'm talking about.)
On the gripping hand:
I'm easily the next-best Perl programmer to
be teaching at Monash University. With Damian out of the
way, it's only a matter of time before total
domination of Monash is mine . . .
Slashdot Mirror
I do hope that the supplier of the ebooks for this device take a little more care than do the current crop of ebook producers. Most of the books I read now are ebooks through eReader or Fictionwise, and they often are so poorly converted into electronic form that it hurts to read them.
The one I'm currently reading is obviously an OCR job, because there are occasional soft-turned-hard hyphens peppered through it, and some lines where the wordspacing was evidently tight in the original, leadingtoareallylongwordin the ebook. Another one used hyphens for dashes too-which is extremely jarring in a proportional font-as this sentence demonstrates. Quotation marks and apostrophes are usually just the ASCII ones, which really isn't very professional-looking in print.
Then you see situations where the culture shock just got too much for the converter and they gave up. The sample book in the SonyStyle web page, The Da Vinci Code, has some pictograms in it. Those probably just get included in the ebook as a low-resolution bitmap. They certainly did on my copy from Fictionwise. I've lost count of the books which have hard-coded page references ("see page 321"), which is useless considering that pagination is up to the device itself. Forget about tappable hyperlinks; I've only seen one such ebook in the dozens I've read.
Don't get me wrong. I love my ebooks, and they compare well to Australian dead-tree books in price. But there's more to releasing an ebook than spitting out a plaintext file. If the parent poster is right about manga, hooray, finally. But history doesn't make me optimistic.
I live in the southern hemisphere, you insensitive clods!
The difference is that here in Australia, most of our dickheads drive taxis.
On another tack . . Royal . . Gentoo . . Adelie . . detecting a theme?
I think that one of the biggest problems that Linux is going to face in the coming years is that there are only seventeen or so different species of penguin.
Probably fewer will be good names for products. Would you install "Little or Fairy" Linux?
Shades of not enough TLAs.
As countless others have mentioned, all it means is that PalmSource is no longer going to provide the Palm Desktop and HotSync manager.
No serious Mac user goes anywhere near Palm Desktop if it can possibly be helped: most of its functionality has been usurped by Mac OS' own applications, which already sync via iSync.
True, iSync is currently built as a conduit on top of the HotSync manager, but it would be trivial for Apple to port it to use one of the open source hotsync replacements such as pilot-link or ColdSync, or proprietary solutions like Missing Sync. (Sony Clie users are already in this boat anyway, because Sony doesn't provide a Mac sync component and never has.)
PalmSource is simply admitting that its tools for the Mac aren't being used much anyway, so there's no point continuing to develop them.
Much more problematic is that the Palm OS Simulator is a Windows-only affair (PalmSource laughably argues that this is because x86 byte order matches ARM byte order and PowerPC doesn't). If you want to develop for anything later than PalmOS 4.1 you are going to have to locate a Windows box.
Capitalizing indeed. I didn't realize that the letter "u" was one of SuSE's strengths.
Perhaps it meant to say "trogons", though exactly what hazard is brought about by Central American birds I haven't figured out yet.
You mean like this (from a 2001 conference)?
Some ideas just happen spontaneously, I suppose.
Note the second of this designer's entries with the big-headed geek saying:
Take a look at the spelling of "it's" there. This is either a terribly sad indictment or masterfully brilliant observation; I haven't figured out which yet.
Not any more. Thanks a bundle.
<cue chase music in brain, set to infinite repeat>
Apparently Palm Pilot (well, Palm OS) is for games too. See This story on a forthcoming PalmOS-based gaming device from Tapwave. It's also expected to have all of Palm OS' usual PIM applications. But it's not due for at least another six months, and the fact that its specifications are better than most high-end Palm OS devices out now gives a suggestion of vapourware.
Soon there'll be another way to fake a hard day at the office.
There have been a number of memos from the Dean lately about copyrighted material, including music. The University's stance is that any copies of music, whether you own an original or not, are illegal unless you have written permission from the copyright holder. I believe that this is consistent with Australian copyright law, which (correct me if I'm wrong) doesn't seem to have a Fair Use clause. If that's true, it makes me wonder why you can buy solid-state MP3 players in this country at all.
find / -name "*.mp3" -print returned nothing on my laptop, so it's not a big deal to me, and since it's the University's equipment, they're entitled to set their own rules. But searching our hard disks doesn't exactly foster a trusting relationship between staff and university. More to the point, it's also going to have a nasty effect on research on audio compression.
I was going to ask how you get your ideas for your columns. But after this whole Slashdot "Ask Dave Barry" thing is over, I figure you'll probably have enough high-quality material to last months.
When you inevitably write a Miami Herald column about how weird we all are, will you please have Mister Language Person explain to Slashdotters about exactly how to use apostrophes' (I'm sorry, I mean "apostrophe's") correctly?
Thank's.
Alert Reader Debbie.
The technology to do this has existed for quite some time. They've been using this for speed- and red-light-cameras for years. It's recently been put into practice in "tollboothless" tollways such as CityLink (in Melbourne). Here's a description of how it works (look under the section "Travel on CityLink"). I'm told that it even works halfway decently, for various values of "works". (Except for the likely umpteen followups who have counterexamples.)
The CityLink toll was applied to a road that used to be free. There was much furore over this at the time, with people suggesting that the traffic would be worse in surrounding areas as cheapskate drivers looked for alternate routes. Now that the whole thing has been ironed out and in production for a couple of years, the protests have largely died away and we have a pay-per-use road that is very, very useful for getting across town (if you can afford the toll). The traffic isn't significantly worse in surrounding streets. Here is a vaguely independent report on CityLink by Victoria's motoring club.
Now it looks like it's London's turn to go through the same thing.
In case anyone here is thinking about switching to The Z Shell, here's the perfect reason:
Tetris for zsh. It's a terminal-based version of the game that is implemented entirely in zsh commands.
Just source the file and then zle tetris (which you could bind to a keystroke) and off you go.
Try doing that in <your favourite shell>.
I don't know how your particular university teaches architecture and assembly language programming, but I'm sure that it tries to teach concepts and methodologies which will outlive the language of instruction.
So relax, even if (heaven forbid) MIPS ceases to be viable, its nephews and nieces will continue to live on, and your education will not suddenly stop being useful.
(I am speaking as someone who teaches MIPS assembly language and architecture at a university, though not one renowned for its computer architecture research, at least in the past 25 years. I quiver in fear at the prospect of ever having to teach first-year students IA-64 VLIW programming.)
I think I have an idea why that is thought to be true . . .
Here at the Damian Conway Memorial University, Computer Science is just one part of the bigger IT Faculty. While we have a focus on Linux (Red Hat 6 is what's installed) we're severely among minority. Pretty much the rest of the University uses Windows, because it's good enough for their needs.
So why the perception I quoted above, which runs rife among CS students who "have to" use Linux? Because their perception of tech support comes from Helpdesk, which I've seen manned by second-year students, whom I teach and thus know can't debug their way out of a paper bag (and certainly can't solve someone else's computer problem). (*) Anything more difficult than "I need to change my password" and you're largely on your own.
Naturally, Helpdesk is far more interested in supporting Windows than they are in supporting Linux, because that's what their customers (most of the University) want. Thus almost everything about the Univeristy's computer networks is optimized for Windows. It's no surprise that the computers work better running Windows than they do running Linux.
As a result, students get more problems running Linux than they do with Windows. And they go to Helpdesk with the problem, get no appreciable help, and come away with the notion that their problem is that they're running Linux, and if they just switched to Windows everything would work fine and dandy.
This attitude is rampant among my students (not the ones here who read slashdot, but many of the others, who complain to me about being made to use Linux). It's not surprising that they take their Helpdesk experience away with them and extrapolate it to Linux support in general.
I realize that there's a circular argument there. But logic isn't a prerequisite for justifying a University department's choices.
(*) Yes, not all of Helpdesk is like that. I happen to know that some very talented people support Linux on a measly University salary here. But they're far removed from Helpdesk, so students don't see them.
On one hand: This is great for Perl. Anyone who has dabbled in the language knows that Damian has Plans for Perl what we mere mortals can never truly understand. I'm still drooling over the thought of a proper switch statement in Perl. As for curried expressions, well, if they're anything as good as curried chicken, I'm all for it.
On the other hand: There's a whole generation of Monash University students growing up without having the joy of being taught by Damian. The poor things are getting substandard teaching (well, actually, they're probably getting standard teaching; what I know they're not getting is superstandard teaching), and they are graduating without the fond memories of the acted-out-in-lectures singles-bar analogy for C++ polymorphism. (You Monash graduates know what I'm talking about.)
On the gripping hand: I'm easily the next-best Perl programmer to be teaching at Monash University. With Damian out of the way, it's only a matter of time before total domination of Monash is mine . . .