This is exactly why I made a point of buying an e-reader that supports ePub; I don't want my content tied to anyone's specific platform. (In my case, I went with Kobo because they're a Canadian company, they've got their reader software on every platform I care about, and they use ePub.)
Sure you can use handy tools like calibre to convert between formats, but it can't always do it cleanly... sometimes you get confused tables of contents, or headings are formatted as regular text, for example.
Amazon's moving rapidly towards having monopoly power over ebook sales; this exclusive deal just makes it worse.
You'd have Rogers/Bell/Telus ranked 1st, 2nd, 3rd in the Canadian market, and whoever "won" would crow about how awesome they are. And all three would take the study to the CRTC and demonstrate how Canada's cell providers are the top three, and Canadians aren't being totally boned for craptastic service from an oligopoly.
Same way Rogers/Bell/Telus look at the various international ISP rankings and declare that Canada's still a world-leader in home broadband.
This is why I bought a Kobo eReader; works with industry-standard ePub files.
The ones I buy from Kobo's store have 'Adobe DRM' on them, but I'm assuming it'll be trivial to crack if I ever have to. I mean hey, it's Adobe.
It's really nice to be able to buy books from wherever and not worry about having to convert or 'import' them onto my reader... just toss the file on and go.
I also like that Kobo's a Canadian company, but not attempting to create a walled garden for their device was a huge plus for me. I don't like that publishers are just as idiotic about ebook rights as music/movie publishers are. How the hell can an ebook be out of print?!
Right now, my Firefox (7.0 beta? why don't they display build number or something?) currently has two disabled "incompatible" extensions, Evernote Web Clipper and Firebug.
Evernote might have been installed from their website, but Firebug is on the add-ons page. Why is it broken?
The only thing keeping me from switching over to Safari for a bit (I'm on a Mac) to see how things are is the ultra-convenient sync functionality that keeps my bookmarks and whatnot up-to-date between my office computer and my home computer.
... Silverlight is even worse. Yes it performs better - but only on the single officially supported platform.
To be fair, Silverlight runs pretty well on Mac OS X, too. When I used to work for a company that only used MS technologies, it was nice being able to test our app on my Mac laptop without firing up a VM.
The folks at Dundas Data Visualization have a nice Silverlight-based digital dashboarding solution. (Full disclosure: I used to work for Dundas, but I didn't do any Silverlight stuff there.)
Netflix apparently uses it, and, um, some other video-streaming things. And there are demos.
I think MS is showing some ADHD with Silverlight; they seemed really gung-ho about it, and then sort of fizzled out when it didn't immediately kill Flash and take over the net. And they appear to have boned their partners again by convincing them it's the next big thing, and then not actually getting behind it.
The "official corporate browser" is slowly moving from IE6 to IE7 though, so I fail to see how IE9's rapid development affects anyone stuck using XP and other IT-approved antiques.
When that happens on my system, it's usually the Firefox Plugin Process going stupid (usually due to some Flash content, oddly enough).
Use Activity Monitor to kill the Firefox Plugin Process that's gone rogue and you should be good. Note that this will disable whatever Flash bits were running in that particular instance of the Plugin Process... and nothing of value was lost.:-)
Text messages are $0.50 each to send or receive in Canada. So very awesome having a three-way confusopoly controlling 95% of the market.
It's even worse when you learn that texts are max 160 bytes because that's the amount of space left in the packets your phone is sending to the tower anyway (see this article). They cost absolutely nothing in terms of bandwidth. 100% profit.
Oh but they do have fiber services, just not to your home. The "Fibe" stuff is fiber to your neighbourhood, and if you're lucky you'll be close enough to their remote to actually get something like the speeds they're advertising.
Of course, they could sell you the 25MBit/sec tier and deliver 1MBit/sec speeds because it's all "up to".
As crap as Canada's wireless cartel are, they're still required to let you port your number from one carrier to another. In practice it takes a couple of hours, although they do warn you it could take a day or so.
Of course, here three year contracts are standard, and the three companies that own ~95% of the market offer essentially the same services/products at the same prices, so I don't think most people take advantage of this.
None of that money is going to pay the developers though; game development salaries are quite a bit lower (see the salary surveys posted on Gamasutra every year and compare to your non-gaming industry) because "everyone" wants a gaming job. That's the same reason why working conditions are so bad... the number of warm bodies willing to do the job is much, much higher than the number of jobs.
Even better, most ISPs (at least in North America) advertise unlimited Internet.
They've redefined "unlimited" to mean "always connected", but still.
I'd like to see some truth in advertising law action that would force them to describe what they're actually selling:
an always-on connection
some unknown portion of the bandwidth you've subscribed to (based on number of concurrent users in your area, how crappy the wires are between the ISP's drop and your house, cosmic rays, etc.)
limited uses (handy up-stream ports blocked, like http, maybe ssh; down-stream will be throttled based on the whims of your ISP and/or whoever they're buying last-mile access from)
services formerly provided by your ISP (mail, for example) pawned off on free "partners" (Yahoo!, MSN, etc.) in exchange for insane amounts of co-branding, advertising, etc.
I'd just like to see the majority of ISPs here be a little less dishonest. But I realize that's bad for business.
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This is exactly why I made a point of buying an e-reader that supports ePub; I don't want my content tied to anyone's specific platform. (In my case, I went with Kobo because they're a Canadian company, they've got their reader software on every platform I care about, and they use ePub.)
Sure you can use handy tools like calibre to convert between formats, but it can't always do it cleanly... sometimes you get confused tables of contents, or headings are formatted as regular text, for example.
Amazon's moving rapidly towards having monopoly power over ebook sales; this exclusive deal just makes it worse.
You'd have Rogers/Bell/Telus ranked 1st, 2nd, 3rd in the Canadian market, and whoever "won" would crow about how awesome they are. And all three would take the study to the CRTC and demonstrate how Canada's cell providers are the top three, and Canadians aren't being totally boned for craptastic service from an oligopoly.
Same way Rogers/Bell/Telus look at the various international ISP rankings and declare that Canada's still a world-leader in home broadband.
This is why I bought a Kobo eReader; works with industry-standard ePub files.
The ones I buy from Kobo's store have 'Adobe DRM' on them, but I'm assuming it'll be trivial to crack if I ever have to. I mean hey, it's Adobe.
It's really nice to be able to buy books from wherever and not worry about having to convert or 'import' them onto my reader... just toss the file on and go.
I also like that Kobo's a Canadian company, but not attempting to create a walled garden for their device was a huge plus for me. I don't like that publishers are just as idiotic about ebook rights as music/movie publishers are. How the hell can an ebook be out of print?!
Lots and lots of dead/abandoned Open Source projects at sourceforge.net, codeplex.com, etc.
I don't think we need a new service for this, just go look for projects that haven't been updated in 3+ years, you'll find lots of them.
Right now, my Firefox (7.0 beta? why don't they display build number or something?) currently has two disabled "incompatible" extensions, Evernote Web Clipper and Firebug.
Evernote might have been installed from their website, but Firebug is on the add-ons page. Why is it broken?
The only thing keeping me from switching over to Safari for a bit (I'm on a Mac) to see how things are is the ultra-convenient sync functionality that keeps my bookmarks and whatnot up-to-date between my office computer and my home computer.
To be fair, Silverlight runs pretty well on Mac OS X, too. When I used to work for a company that only used MS technologies, it was nice being able to test our app on my Mac laptop without firing up a VM.
PROTIP: Encrypt anything "interesting" before storing it in the Cloud, regardless of whose Cloud you're working with.
The folks at Dundas Data Visualization have a nice Silverlight-based digital dashboarding solution. (Full disclosure: I used to work for Dundas, but I didn't do any Silverlight stuff there.)
Netflix apparently uses it, and, um, some other video-streaming things. And there are demos.
I think MS is showing some ADHD with Silverlight; they seemed really gung-ho about it, and then sort of fizzled out when it didn't immediately kill Flash and take over the net. And they appear to have boned their partners again by convincing them it's the next big thing, and then not actually getting behind it.
The "official corporate browser" is slowly moving from IE6 to IE7 though, so I fail to see how IE9's rapid development affects anyone stuck using XP and other IT-approved antiques.
It's true, our news media is not allowed to lie and an attempt to allow that was recently overturned.
No Fox News North for us!
Our truth in advertising laws are more stringent.
At least, that's why the commercial radio stations mostly just play commercials, right?
When that happens on my system, it's usually the Firefox Plugin Process going stupid (usually due to some Flash content, oddly enough).
Use Activity Monitor to kill the Firefox Plugin Process that's gone rogue and you should be good. Note that this will disable whatever Flash bits were running in that particular instance of the Plugin Process... and nothing of value was lost. :-)
He needs a Stein as a running-mate.
Franken/Stein '12!
Apparently that was part of the problem.
Text messages are $0.50 each to send or receive in Canada. So very awesome having a three-way confusopoly controlling 95% of the market.
It's even worse when you learn that texts are max 160 bytes because that's the amount of space left in the packets your phone is sending to the tower anyway (see this article). They cost absolutely nothing in terms of bandwidth. 100% profit.
You could move to Canada, that's our only Netflix option here. And (AFAIK) the available library of movies is much more limited.
And you get to deal with ISPs that generally have ~60GB/month transfer limits (although you can still get unlimited over cable if you shop around).
So, uh, YMMV.
That's an excellent detail that I didn't know about.
Mac OS X's Mail.app does a great job of dealing with an Exchange server, at least in the Snow Leopard version (I never tried with earlier versions).
Note that Canadian artists have never gotten a dime from this levy. They're generally against this sort of crap, too.
Sorry, no links to back up my claims, but you have Google...
I miss the good old days when our Prime Ministers would personally beat protesters.
Seriously. Remember when we didn't have an enormous US-style federal deficit for 12 years?
Oh but they do have fiber services, just not to your home. The "Fibe" stuff is fiber to your neighbourhood, and if you're lucky you'll be close enough to their remote to actually get something like the speeds they're advertising.
Of course, they could sell you the 25MBit/sec tier and deliver 1MBit/sec speeds because it's all "up to".
As crap as Canada's wireless cartel are, they're still required to let you port your number from one carrier to another. In practice it takes a couple of hours, although they do warn you it could take a day or so.
Of course, here three year contracts are standard, and the three companies that own ~95% of the market offer essentially the same services/products at the same prices, so I don't think most people take advantage of this.
None of that money is going to pay the developers though; game development salaries are quite a bit lower (see the salary surveys posted on Gamasutra every year and compare to your non-gaming industry) because "everyone" wants a gaming job. That's the same reason why working conditions are so bad... the number of warm bodies willing to do the job is much, much higher than the number of jobs.
Yeah, I'm failing to see how this is limited to the game development industry.
Even better, most ISPs (at least in North America) advertise unlimited Internet.
They've redefined "unlimited" to mean "always connected", but still.
I'd like to see some truth in advertising law action that would force them to describe what they're actually selling:
I'd just like to see the majority of ISPs here be a little less dishonest. But I realize that's bad for business.