Daemon would be even better than Snow Crash. Sure, it's not technically Cyber Punk, but it has all of the elements and is much more up-to-date and terrifying.
Besides, The Delivinator won't work any more because the pizza delivery scene dropped the '30 minutes or free' thing for exactly the reasons that it was so sensational in Snow Crash. That is, pizza drivers who were afraid they'd have to pay for a late pizza would drive like crazy and occasionally get people killed.
I generally buy my eBooks from WebScription, which is mostly Baen SciFi, or FictionWise, which is everything else. Both are much cheaper than Amazon and both offer non-DRM'd books, often in multiple formats. Sure, their site design is not as snazy as Amazon or Kobo or even Diesel, but I can find what I want and get it at a reasonable cost with no DRM most of the time.
I started with Kobo, but, at one point, I bought a book listed as "mobile", which I assumed was suitable for an eBook reader in a venue without WiFi, but discovered that, by "mobile", they meant online. Even though I hadn't read a page, they wouldn't refund my money, so I looked elsewhere, discovered WebScription and FictionWise and haven't looked back. Both are, not only cheaper than Amazon, but also generally cheaper than Kobo as an added benefit.
The proprietary version of the software, StarOffice / Oracle Open Office, had a lot of other goodies like additional file filters, clip art, document templates and enterprise environment management features. If Oracle was willing to give that stuff to the OO.o foundation as well, then a merger would definitely be worthwhile.
Agreed. In fact Scala has introduced Parallel Collections with version 2.8 that allow looping methods on parallel collections that spread the work of the iterations across multiple processors and handle the partitioning of the work automatically. Very cool stuff.
SuperGenPass is a simple bookmarklet that can generate hashed passwords based on a master password. Like KeePass and LastPass you only need to remember one password, but unlike those, it doesn't store anything and you can use it pretty much anywhere.
Although I love my Alex eReader, I am little disappointed that e-paper is being used as a display instead of being used like paper like it was originally conceived.
The basic idea was that you'd get a special electrostatic printer that you'd load with a ream of e-paper and print out your documents as usual, then, when you're done with a document just return it to the hopper so that some other document could be printed on it. It was supposed to be the ultimate recyclable paper.
I suppose that it was never really likely that e-paper would reach the price point where such a thing would be reasonable, but it was an interesting concept.
Even though people complained that computers, not only didn't hearken the arrival of the paperless office, but actually increased the amount of paper that was used, I think that the trend is going the other way and people are beginning to print less and less. So, the demand peak for a product like this has likely passed and few would see it as a valuable option.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm in no rush to use either of these since I have a device with a physical keyboard and they totally neglect thumb typing in all of the scenarios discussed. As far as the size, it doesn't look like it takes up much more room than the regular software keyboard, so I don't see that as a uniquely serious drawback.
The first link in the original post is to the product home page. It does seem to be the same thing you're referring to. There are also videos on that page that look fairly compelling. Their FAQ makes it seem like they do plan to add customization at some point.
Something that can be operated with one hand using the thumb would be ideal. There were also some interesting motion input strategies back when Palm was de rigueur, but they were all proprietary and expensive and went nowhere at the time.
Why not just use Graffiti. I think it would be much easier to learn and provides visual feedback. It's also now available for Android platforms.
Although very cool at the time, the original Apple Newton handwriting recognition recognition was somewhat weak and suffered from too much emphasis on predictive dictionary lookup. So much so that even a perfectly formed "falafel" always resulted in "father" until falafel was added to the dictionary. The solution was Graffiti. Later Newtons had much better handwriting recognition and Graffiti was no longer needed, but the Palm Pilot, a Newton competitor, adopted Graffiti and was, thus able to run on much cheaper hardware and take over the PDA market. After many years, legal wrangling put the ownership of Graffiti in the hands of Access, which has made it available for Android.
ZOE meets all of your requirements, though data import is a bit of a problem. There are several different strategies for data import, so one of them may meet your requirements.
Unfortunately, ZOE is abandonware so it's not for the faint of heart. The original author was on the bleeding edge and tended to make 'interesting' technology choices like Tapestry for the framework, and using his own, home-grown build system and a Creative Commons license that isn't usually used for software. He eventually abandoned Java development for Lua and let the registration for the home page lapse. As a result, it's difficult to recommend this for all but the most determined, high functioning users.
So, the core problem is not the Kindle or eReaders themselves, but the use of proprietary DRM'd eBooks on eReaders. So, if we just limit the schools that recommend eReaders to using Open Textbook content in an open format, and fix the audio navigation issue on the Kindle or use something like the Alex, then everything would be fine and there would be more of an incentive to fund Open Textbook initiatives.
Of course, Amazon prefers to sell DRM'd versions of books even when non-DRM'd versions are available from the publisher, but they'd be cut out of this whole process, so it becomes a non-issue.
They also have a TV calibration service where they send a technician to your house, place an optical sensor with a suction cup on the screen, connect up some calibration equipment to the TV and run a series of tests and claim to optimally configure your TV.
Most posts I've seen on the topic seem to be woefully uninformed and focus on the setup in the stores that is intended to show the difference between a calibrated and uncalibrated TV, which some reports claim is deceptive.
I've only seen one post that has a comment that mentions Imaging Science Certification and hints at what they're doing and why it's not something you can do yourself.
Does anybody out there have any better information on this service?
With a centralized authorization server, the industry could easily accumulate usage statistics. I'm sure they'd love that just for the sake of popularity ranking, but it opens the door to the massive privacy invasion of monitoring individuals as well.
Unless there's some sort of anonymizer, such a thing could be put to all sorts of nefarious uses. Even if all they do is profile user habits and offer others a better deal on downloads because they like popular tunes, then I'd say it's something to worry about.
To truly 'brick' a machine, it should be unusable afterwards. Even if truecrypt makes the data inaccessible, the thief can just install an OS and re-sell the device.
Some posters have suggested some sort of explosive for bricking, but I suspect that there are more reasonable solutions. In the Comodore Pet days, there was a poke that would route 12V to the drive controller and fry it. Another would stop the raster and, if left long enough, damage the phosphor at the center of the screen.
These days, you can get a similar effect with XVidtune deliberately configured to damage the display (I accidentally smoked a CRT monitor that way once). A bit of research for the specifications of the particular hardware on the poster's device could probably find a few other hardware damaging tricks that could be employed to make the device useless to a thief.
One way to get option B is to use something like an Android phone.
Sure, Google/T-Mobile still control the 'Market Place' and have banned some applications (eg: tethering), but you can still install applications that you download over or copy to the memory card. It might even be possible to write another store application to get applications from other locations.
Hopefully, negative press/reviews/articles like this will encourage people to buy more open platforms, like Android and Open Moko, and put pressure on the more restrictive platforms to become more open. Power to the press;)
and to email it you have to give them the email address.
Use spamgourmet for this sort of thing. You can then give them a throw-away email address that works long enough to get their confirmation email, but not long enough to get any actual SPAM from them or whoever they sell your, confirmed valid, email address to.
Unfortunately, the new beta thread navigation feature on slashdot breaks some of the AJAX features like expanding hidden comments in-line without a page reload:( Of course, you can just turn off the beta and everything works as expected.
I always thought that something like this would be ideal for a KVM. The idea is to mix and match various input and output blocks with whatever connector type or protocol is required for the device or machines you have to get the mix you actually need.
There would be a backplane, then you'd chose a keyboard input block (USB, PS2 or DIN), a mouse input block (USB, PS2, DIN), and, perhaps a microphone (RCA, Phone, Mini, sub-mini) or Game input block (Joystick etc) to plug into one side of the backplane. Then add however many switch blocks you need to serve the number of computers you have. Each switch block would get a keyboard, mouse and microphone output block of the appropriate type and a video input block and audio input block plugged into them. Finally, add a video output block (VGA, DVI) and an audio mixer block on the far end of the backplane. Or maybe do away with the back plan and stack the inputs on the left, followed by the switches with inputs on one side of each switch and outputs on the other and follow the switches with the video and audio outputs on the end.
If this pipe dream ever came true, I could finally hook up my M-101 and TrackMan marble on one end, my Mac G4 and three legacy Linux boxen in the middle and my Cinema HD Monitor and a SINGLE set of speakers on the other. I'm not going to hold my breath on this one though...:(
Even MS Word doesn't preserve format from system to system. All you need to do is have a different default printer than the person who sent you the document and it will lay it out differently for you than it did for them. Page boundaries, fonts, pretty much every aspect of the document can change simply by not having the same printer driver they have.
While I'd agree that SUN doesn't have a stellar reputation where GUI's are concerned, they didn't invent this stuff yesterday... they bought most of it. SavaJe had been working on the VM for almost eight years now, Linux on mobile platforms has been around just as long and JavaFX is just a scripting language, that has also been under development for a while, that sits on top of existing Swing libraries.
Of course, I'll be the first to admit that it'll take a while before they have it all integrated and have some professional level tools out there, but it's an encouraging, solid, first step. Also, on this particular platform, it's already most of the way there regardless of how long it takes them to solve the consumer VM issues on other platforms.
At JavaOne 2007, SUN announced their new Java phone that includes JavaFX script mobile. Their demo showed a very interactive user experience that was very similar to the iPhone and a, potentially, easy to work with development story. After doing some digging, it turns out that their phone is essentially the old SavaJe platform running JavaFX mobile on top of Linux on an OpenMoko phone.
So, it does seem that a good, interactive, UI will be available, accessible to regular developers and have a good starting point based on work done by professionals at SUN.
It's also interesting to note that all of this stuff predates the iPhone despite the eerie similarities.
Slashdot Mirror
Daemon would be even better than Snow Crash. Sure, it's not technically Cyber Punk, but it has all of the elements and is much more up-to-date and terrifying.
Besides, The Delivinator won't work any more because the pizza delivery scene dropped the '30 minutes or free' thing for exactly the reasons that it was so sensational in Snow Crash. That is, pizza drivers who were afraid they'd have to pay for a late pizza would drive like crazy and occasionally get people killed.
I generally buy my eBooks from WebScription, which is mostly Baen SciFi, or FictionWise, which is everything else. Both are much cheaper than Amazon and both offer non-DRM'd books, often in multiple formats. Sure, their site design is not as snazy as Amazon or Kobo or even Diesel, but I can find what I want and get it at a reasonable cost with no DRM most of the time.
I started with Kobo, but, at one point, I bought a book listed as "mobile", which I assumed was suitable for an eBook reader in a venue without WiFi, but discovered that, by "mobile", they meant online. Even though I hadn't read a page, they wouldn't refund my money, so I looked elsewhere, discovered WebScription and FictionWise and haven't looked back. Both are, not only cheaper than Amazon, but also generally cheaper than Kobo as an added benefit.
The proprietary version of the software, StarOffice / Oracle Open Office, had a lot of other goodies like additional file filters, clip art, document templates and enterprise environment management features. If Oracle was willing to give that stuff to the OO.o foundation as well, then a merger would definitely be worthwhile.
Agreed. In fact Scala has introduced Parallel Collections with version 2.8 that allow looping methods on parallel collections that spread the work of the iterations across multiple processors and handle the partitioning of the work automatically. Very cool stuff.
SuperGenPass is a simple bookmarklet that can generate hashed passwords based on a master password. Like KeePass and LastPass you only need to remember one password, but unlike those, it doesn't store anything and you can use it pretty much anywhere.
Although I love my Alex eReader, I am little disappointed that e-paper is being used as a display instead of being used like paper like it was originally conceived.
The basic idea was that you'd get a special electrostatic printer that you'd load with a ream of e-paper and print out your documents as usual, then, when you're done with a document just return it to the hopper so that some other document could be printed on it. It was supposed to be the ultimate recyclable paper.
I suppose that it was never really likely that e-paper would reach the price point where such a thing would be reasonable, but it was an interesting concept.
Even though people complained that computers, not only didn't hearken the arrival of the paperless office, but actually increased the amount of paper that was used, I think that the trend is going the other way and people are beginning to print less and less. So, the demand peak for a product like this has likely passed and few would see it as a valuable option.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm in no rush to use either of these since I have a device with a physical keyboard and they totally neglect thumb typing in all of the scenarios discussed. As far as the size, it doesn't look like it takes up much more room than the regular software keyboard, so I don't see that as a uniquely serious drawback.
The first link in the original post is to the product home page. It does seem to be the same thing you're referring to. There are also videos on that page that look fairly compelling. Their FAQ makes it seem like they do plan to add customization at some point.
Something that can be operated with one hand using the thumb would be ideal. There were also some interesting motion input strategies back when Palm was de rigueur, but they were all proprietary and expensive and went nowhere at the time.
Why not just use Graffiti. I think it would be much easier to learn and provides visual feedback. It's also now available for Android platforms.
Although very cool at the time, the original Apple Newton handwriting recognition recognition was somewhat weak and suffered from too much emphasis on predictive dictionary lookup. So much so that even a perfectly formed "falafel" always resulted in "father" until falafel was added to the dictionary. The solution was Graffiti. Later Newtons had much better handwriting recognition and Graffiti was no longer needed, but the Palm Pilot, a Newton competitor, adopted Graffiti and was, thus able to run on much cheaper hardware and take over the PDA market. After many years, legal wrangling put the ownership of Graffiti in the hands of Access, which has made it available for Android.
Back in the day, ZOE was exactly what you're looking for. It's an open source, cross platform turn-key, solution (Simple Server is built-in) that is designed to archive, index and search your email (using the Apache Lucene search engine). Jon Udel has a good article on O'Reilly that includes some screen shots.
ZOE meets all of your requirements, though data import is a bit of a problem. There are several different strategies for data import, so one of them may meet your requirements.
Unfortunately, ZOE is abandonware so it's not for the faint of heart. The original author was on the bleeding edge and tended to make 'interesting' technology choices like Tapestry for the framework, and using his own, home-grown build system and a Creative Commons license that isn't usually used for software. He eventually abandoned Java development for Lua and let the registration for the home page lapse. As a result, it's difficult to recommend this for all but the most determined, high functioning users.
Wahoo! Now Skype can be moved off of their proprietary protocol on to an open standards compliant... oh, wait you said Cicso... never mind.
So, the core problem is not the Kindle or eReaders themselves, but the use of proprietary DRM'd eBooks on eReaders. So, if we just limit the schools that recommend eReaders to using Open Textbook content in an open format, and fix the audio navigation issue on the Kindle or use something like the Alex, then everything would be fine and there would be more of an incentive to fund Open Textbook initiatives.
Of course, Amazon prefers to sell DRM'd versions of books even when non-DRM'd versions are available from the publisher, but they'd be cut out of this whole process, so it becomes a non-issue.
There... problem solved... next ;)
They also have a TV calibration service where they send a technician to your house, place an optical sensor with a suction cup on the screen, connect up some calibration equipment to the TV and run a series of tests and claim to optimally configure your TV.
Most posts I've seen on the topic seem to be woefully uninformed and focus on the setup in the stores that is intended to show the difference between a calibrated and uncalibrated TV, which some reports claim is deceptive.
I've only seen one post that has a comment that mentions Imaging Science Certification and hints at what they're doing and why it's not something you can do yourself.
Does anybody out there have any better information on this service?
A modified version of OS/2 is still being sold by Serenity Systems as eComStation.
With a centralized authorization server, the industry could easily accumulate usage statistics. I'm sure they'd love that just for the sake of popularity ranking, but it opens the door to the massive privacy invasion of monitoring individuals as well.
Unless there's some sort of anonymizer, such a thing could be put to all sorts of nefarious uses. Even if all they do is profile user habits and offer others a better deal on downloads because they like popular tunes, then I'd say it's something to worry about.
To truly 'brick' a machine, it should be unusable afterwards. Even if truecrypt makes the data inaccessible, the thief can just install an OS and re-sell the device.
Some posters have suggested some sort of explosive for bricking, but I suspect that there are more reasonable solutions. In the Comodore Pet days, there was a poke that would route 12V to the drive controller and fry it. Another would stop the raster and, if left long enough, damage the phosphor at the center of the screen.
These days, you can get a similar effect with XVidtune deliberately configured to damage the display (I accidentally smoked a CRT monitor that way once). A bit of research for the specifications of the particular hardware on the poster's device could probably find a few other hardware damaging tricks that could be employed to make the device useless to a thief.
One way to get option B is to use something like an Android phone.
Sure, Google/T-Mobile still control the 'Market Place' and have banned some applications (eg: tethering), but you can still install applications that you download over or copy to the memory card. It might even be possible to write another store application to get applications from other locations.
Hopefully, negative press/reviews/articles like this will encourage people to buy more open platforms, like Android and Open Moko, and put pressure on the more restrictive platforms to become more open. Power to the press ;)
Maybe it's not the lefties who like this, but the 1337 haxor wannabe's who find this password appealing?
Scala is a functional language,which is part of why it was recommended.
Unfortunately, the new beta thread navigation feature on slashdot breaks some of the AJAX features like expanding hidden comments in-line without a page reload
If they allow this, shouldn't they also allow X-rated photos on wikipedia pages for porn stars?
:(
pda post @ lunchtime = short post w/o links
I always thought that something like this would be ideal for a KVM. The idea is to mix and match various input and output blocks with whatever connector type or protocol is required for the device or machines you have to get the mix you actually need.
:(
There would be a backplane, then you'd chose a keyboard input block (USB, PS2 or DIN), a mouse input block (USB, PS2, DIN), and, perhaps a microphone (RCA, Phone, Mini, sub-mini) or Game input block (Joystick etc) to plug into one side of the backplane. Then add however many switch blocks you need to serve the number of computers you have. Each switch block would get a keyboard, mouse and microphone output block of the appropriate type and a video input block and audio input block plugged into them. Finally, add a video output block (VGA, DVI) and an audio mixer block on the far end of the backplane. Or maybe do away with the back plan and stack the inputs on the left, followed by the switches with inputs on one side of each switch and outputs on the other and follow the switches with the video and audio outputs on the end.
If this pipe dream ever came true, I could finally hook up my M-101 and TrackMan marble on one end, my Mac G4 and three legacy Linux boxen in the middle and my Cinema HD Monitor and a SINGLE set of speakers on the other. I'm not going to hold my breath on this one though...
Even MS Word doesn't preserve format from system to system. All you need to do is have a different default printer than the person who sent you the document and it will lay it out differently for you than it did for them. Page boundaries, fonts, pretty much every aspect of the document can change simply by not having the same printer driver they have.
While I'd agree that SUN doesn't have a stellar reputation where GUI's are concerned, they didn't invent this stuff yesterday... they bought most of it. SavaJe had been working on the VM for almost eight years now, Linux on mobile platforms has been around just as long and JavaFX is just a scripting language, that has also been under development for a while, that sits on top of existing Swing libraries.
They have some very slick demos that compare well with Flash.
Of course, I'll be the first to admit that it'll take a while before they have it all integrated and have some professional level tools out there, but it's an encouraging, solid, first step. Also, on this particular platform, it's already most of the way there regardless of how long it takes them to solve the consumer VM issues on other platforms.
At JavaOne 2007, SUN announced their new Java phone that includes JavaFX script mobile. Their demo showed a very interactive user experience that was very similar to the iPhone and a, potentially, easy to work with development story. After doing some digging, it turns out that their phone is essentially the old SavaJe platform running JavaFX mobile on top of Linux on an OpenMoko phone.
So, it does seem that a good, interactive, UI will be available, accessible to regular developers and have a good starting point based on work done by professionals at SUN.
It's also interesting to note that all of this stuff predates the iPhone despite the eerie similarities.