I picked up a Cybook Gen3 several months ago and have read 4 or 5 books on it. I'm quite happy with it, however it's really only good for reading books from start to finish. It absolutely sucks for reference material, heavily illustrated books, or any book you might just want to flip through.
Another bummer is that it (and most other existing readers) don't display most PDFs very well since they tend to be formatted for a larger screen. It's relatively simple to convert a mostly text pdf to a readable format (mobipocket has a nice, free converter for download) but forget scanned or complex pdfs with illustrations.
That said, it's a joy reading a novel on this thing and there is plenty of content to be had for free as well as for pay. I don't think I'll ever be caught somewhere with nothing to read again.
It really depends on the shop though. I don't suppose my policy would go over too well at a bank. As for problems that arise because of this, well... I get paid to solve them and not bitch about it.
I don't see too many technical issues that I can pin on non-standard software. Liability for piracy is a bigger concern, but my users are generally pretty good about that. Being able to purchase what they need to do their jobs without too much of a hassle helps. Having all your engineers run linux helps too as most of what they'll install is open source.
Those are more less the same specs I have. If you get a ~$200 video card (9600GT) and a 1280x1024 monitor, you'll still be able to play all the latest games at med-high quality. Works for me. Even Crysis plays well and looks good. A 9600GT is slight better than my card, the 384MB 8800 GTS.
...they patched it a bit and it got less stable...
I installed SP1 RTM on my 4 month old Vista box a few days ago and I've been getting two or three blue screen crashes per day ever since. This is on a work machine which basically runs Outlook, Firefox, and a bunch of command prompts, explorer windows, putty sessions, and remote desktop sessions. Nothing too fancy going on here except maybe Sidebar and Aero (which I've only turned back on since installing SP1... Aero does seem snappier when the machine is not bluescreening on me...) Ironically, the blue screens seem to coincide with Outlook activity though I can't be positive at this point.
I've got a Nforce motherboard and Quadro graphics so I'm going to assume, for the time being, that Nvidia's got some of those driver issues that are causing Microsoft to delay the release.
This does not bode well though... and I wasn't impressed to begin with.
I've got that ME feeling all over again.
Assuming this is a not a business trip, don't bring a laptop. If you do bring a laptop and it actually survives six months of travel in 3rd world countries and wilderness areas, you aren't traveling right and are missing some (much?) of the experience. Bring a notebook to write in. Bring a cheap camera (unless you are a professional photographer which is a whole other style of travel). And if you must have an electronic fix bring a DS or palm type device. If you find yourself looking for internet cafes every other day, you probably should have stayed home...
I read books for two months on a Handspring Visor in South East asia, and even it didn't survive that trip. It ran on 2 AAA batteries which lasted for a long time and which I could get anywhere. When it finally broke toward the end of the trip, I wasn't too sad. It was a Fry's refurb for which I paid $75. The one I replaced it with when I got back has lasted 6 or 7 years and has been around the world once or twice.
... and it still works. It was in standby mode at the time. I quickly pulled it out, removed the battery and game card, applied hot air from a hair dryer to it and then let it sit for an hour. No problem since!!!!
I also still have a working Gameboy and GBA but neither of them have suffered quite that much.
Yeah it could be done in theory but it's highly impractical/improbable. Let's not get our panties in a bunch.
According to the "5 best hacks of 2007" article of a few days ago, it's getting hard to find an open AP these days and even if you find one, most manufacturers are now shipping APs with admin access disabled on the WAN interface by default.
Then again, the same article said that running a packet sniffer on a open AP and grabbing cookies ("sidejacking") was one of the top 5 hacks. If our security professionals only figured this out in 2007, we've already been pwned.
The problem with network news is that the content is indirectly chosen by CORPORATE SPONSERS who only buy advertising if they think it will hit their demographic.
The most interesting point in the article was that some networks didn't run advertising during the 9/11 attacks because they COULDN'T SELL ANY, not out of any kind of respect for the victims.
Now perhaps you understand why our wars appear bloodless. They'd only be able to sell advertising to Pfizer if they covered it properly.
I don't see how we can ever expect to get consistently accurate news with decent breadth from ad supported media. There are occasional bright spots but the system that finances our TV news is capricious, biased, and panders to the lowest common denominator.
IMO, the BBC produces the best TV news product available in English so I'd prefer their imperfect system. At least news is the product on their news channels. (right wingers, have at it... and yeah, I do know there are ads on BBC America and BBC News Intl. )
I was actually shopping for an ebook reader online before I saw this hit Slashdot.
I'm looking for an e-ink reader that supports the most open & DRM's formats and/or has the best potential for being supported/upgraded/hacked to extend current capabilities. Truly usable PDF support for PDFs from random sources would also be a plus (esp. Google Book Search PDFs)
THe Sony hardware looks great but I don't trust them to broaden the number of formats supported
I'm leaning towards the Cybook Gen 3 but it's new and the company seems a bit overwhelmed. However, they've promised software upgrades with.chm and other formats so it may be worth the risk.
Then there also the Jinke Hanlin readers which might have good potential but seem to be hard to find. Anyone have one?
People will pay for convenience. I might pay for convenience but, after 4 years of getting my TV exclusively from USENET/Bittorrent with the commercials cut out, I sure as hell won't pay for commercials or even watch shows that contain them for free. I'd rather gouge my eyes out. It's product placement (at least until that becomes too obtrusive) or nothing.
As for paying for commercial free content, it had better be both REALLY good and REALLY convenient (and DRM free). Not sure how a bunch of disparate TV networks are going to pull that off. My family typically watches one or two shows from each of 5 or 6 networks. I know of only two 'places', if you can call them that, which have all of these shows available, commercial free, using a consistent interface. USENET or pick your torrent site.
I've yet to see a game or demo that looks and performs so much better under DX10 than DX9 that it makes the leap to Vista worth it. I believe I've tried them all, so far. I'm starting to doubt that DX10 will ever be a must have.
I've got Vista installed at work where I've been using it for a few months now, and at home, (on the SAME hardware, though different video card) where I occasionally boot to it to check out the latest DX10 stuff.
Interestingly, I've found Vista at work to be much more stable than Vista at home. All the usability tweaks are in on both machines but for some reason, I get major grief when fooling around with games & performance settings at home (blue screens, lock ups, software compatibility issues esp. w/older kids games) but only minor annoyances when using it at work for normal Office/Web/System Administration.
This same home hardware is 100% stable under XP.
Re:Anyone looking for depth in multiplayer combat.
on
Call of Duty 4 Review
·
· Score: 1
Yes, Quake Wars does look good and I liked the demo. I'm kinda bummed that so many good multi-player FPSes came out all at once. I can only handle one at a time and out of this crop, I think it will be COD4 that I keep on playing.
When I try to play more than one, I never get competitively good at any of them, but if I stick with one I can do pretty well. Had these games been staggered six months to a year apart, I probably would have bought all of them (QW:ET, TF2, Crysis, UT3 (soon), and maybe even SOF (also soon)) but as it is, that's a lot of cash and I'm only going end up playing one for the next year or so anyway.
the first title refreshed the already-tired World War II setting by added a gripping gameplay-based narrative, while the second was an important launch title for the Xbox 360. The first TWO titles were developed by Infinity ward for the PC and the the third title, for the Xbox 360 only was devoloped by someone else.
terrorists are the order of the day. This "you are fighting the terrorists in COD4" thing is starting to get annoying. I've seen it crop up in more than one review.
It's my impression that you are up against highly organized and well armed, fictional, middle eastern bloc army.
The sides are definitely equally matched which almost by definition would not be true if one side were terrorists a la Al Qaeda. I'm also not aware of any terrorist attacks taking place in the game (though I've admittedly not finished the single player campaign yet) unless you count the assassinations by the 'good' side, or the maryrdom perk which any side can use in multi-player. If you want to think you are fighting terrorists then fine but... it's not even a remotely realistic depiction of fighting terrorists, which IMHO would make a seriously disturbing & boring game.
Score: 3/5 I respectfully disagree. At least 4/5 if not better. Multi-player will give this game legs.
That's not what I mean. You can always attach a binary. But... you won't be able to do so in a way that the vast majority of people who want the binary will easily find it.
If the large binary providers go down, it will be back to the days of scattered binaries, ever changing group names, and, any time a group gets too big, your provider will drop it.
It will no longer (or won't become) be a distribution method for the masses.
It's not all that distributed where the binaries are concerned. Unless it's your primary business, you don't carry the binaries groups. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of USENET piracy could be disrupted by taking down less than a dozen USENET providers.
Bummer. But it was bound to happen. The binaries hosts have gotten a bit too blatant with their marketing and have made USENET binary downloads a far easier endeavor than it used to be. The critical mass of users which triggers copyright lawsuits has been reached.
If usenet.com goes down, the rest will swiftly follow.
Vista, out of the box, has other issues with copying files besides this one. Just Google "Vista slow file copy". Whether you experience these problems or not depends highly on your configuration and how and where you are copying files. I had to disable several Vista 'features' in order to reliably & quickly copy files over my network using Vista.
It boggles my mind that there can be so many issues with such a basic OS function.
"The IT Crowd" is cute & amusing but it's nowhere near hilarious as other UK comedies like "Coupling" or "The Green Room" I find "The IT Crowd" characters to be a bit over-caricatured for my taste and most of the humor is silly/low brow. On the other hand, they do have some good IT jokes now & again and it's probably the only show you'll see those on. IMHO, the best part of the show are all the IT references scattered around the set. They've definitely got true geeks on the staff.
And that guy over there has a laptop that could EASILY be a bomb, and that woman over there has a cell phone that could EASILY detonate something. And listen! That kid over there is holding some electronic device that is making funny bleeping noises. But wait! OMG!!! That baby right there has a bottle with actual liquid in it!!!! (and her mom's got a headscarf on... oh shit)
And HOLY CRAP!!!! They're all wearing SHOES for christ's sake!!!!! Take Cover!!!!!
You must be very frightened indeed, Mr NotaNoShitFucktard, at the airport these days.
Slashdot Mirror
I picked up a Cybook Gen3 several months ago and have read 4 or 5 books on it.
I'm quite happy with it, however it's really only good for reading books from start to finish. It absolutely sucks for reference material, heavily illustrated books, or any book you might just want to flip through.
Another bummer is that it (and most other existing readers) don't display most PDFs very well since they tend to be formatted for a larger screen. It's relatively simple to convert a mostly text pdf to a readable format (mobipocket has a nice, free converter for download) but forget scanned or complex pdfs with illustrations.
That said, it's a joy reading a novel on this thing and there is plenty of content to be had for free as well as for pay. I don't think I'll ever be caught somewhere with nothing to read again.
...ain't just a river in Egypt.
Because it's not like every /. reader doesn't already have about 5 gadget sites bookmarked.
Virtualization solves this problem. And, if they can get virtualized, graphically accelerated games to work, it could be a huge success.
I for one welcome a Windows OS that breaks with the past.
400 employees at peak.
It really depends on the shop though. I don't suppose my policy would go over too well at a bank.
As for problems that arise because of this, well... I get paid to solve them and not bitch about it.
I don't see too many technical issues that I can pin on non-standard software. Liability for piracy is a bigger concern, but my users are generally pretty good about that. Being able to purchase what they need to do their jobs without too much of a hassle helps. Having all your engineers run linux helps too as most of what they'll install is open source.
Those are more less the same specs I have. If you get a ~$200 video card (9600GT) and a 1280x1024 monitor, you'll still be able to play all the latest games at med-high quality. Works for me. Even Crysis plays well and looks good. A 9600GT is slight better than my card, the 384MB 8800 GTS.
...they patched it a bit and it got less stable...I installed SP1 RTM on my 4 month old Vista box a few days ago and I've been getting two or three blue screen crashes per day ever since. This is on a work machine which basically runs Outlook, Firefox, and a bunch of command prompts, explorer windows, putty sessions, and remote desktop sessions. Nothing too fancy going on here except maybe Sidebar and Aero (which I've only turned back on since installing SP1... Aero does seem snappier when the machine is not bluescreening on me...) Ironically, the blue screens seem to coincide with Outlook activity though I can't be positive at this point.
I've got a Nforce motherboard and Quadro graphics so I'm going to assume, for the time being, that Nvidia's got some of those driver issues that are causing Microsoft to delay the release.
This does not bode well though... and I wasn't impressed to begin with. I've got that ME feeling all over again.
Assuming this is a not a business trip, don't bring a laptop. If you do bring a laptop and it actually survives six months of travel in 3rd world countries and wilderness areas, you aren't traveling right and are missing some (much?) of the experience. Bring a notebook to write in. Bring a cheap camera (unless you are a professional photographer which is a whole other style of travel). And if you must have an electronic fix bring a DS or palm type device. If you find yourself looking for internet cafes every other day, you probably should have stayed home...
I read books for two months on a Handspring Visor in South East asia, and even it didn't survive that trip. It ran on 2 AAA batteries which lasted for a long time and which I could get anywhere. When it finally broke toward the end of the trip, I wasn't too sad. It was a Fry's refurb for which I paid $75. The one I replaced it with when I got back has lasted 6 or 7 years and has been around the world once or twice.
I also still have a working Gameboy and GBA but neither of them have suffered quite that much.
Yeah it could be done in theory but it's highly impractical/improbable.
Let's not get our panties in a bunch.
According to the "5 best hacks of 2007" article of a few days ago, it's getting hard to find an open AP these days and
even if you find one, most manufacturers are now shipping APs with admin access disabled on the WAN interface by default.
Then again, the same article said that running a packet sniffer on a open AP and grabbing cookies ("sidejacking") was one of the top 5 hacks. If our security professionals only figured this out in 2007, we've already been pwned.
The problem with network news is that the content is indirectly chosen by CORPORATE SPONSERS who only buy advertising if they think it will hit their demographic.
The most interesting point in the article was that some networks didn't run advertising during the 9/11 attacks because they COULDN'T SELL ANY, not out of any kind of respect for the victims.
Now perhaps you understand why our wars appear bloodless. They'd only be able to sell advertising to Pfizer if they covered it properly.
I don't see how we can ever expect to get consistently accurate news with decent breadth from ad supported media. There are occasional bright spots but the system that finances our TV news is capricious, biased, and panders to the lowest common denominator.
IMO, the BBC produces the best TV news product available in English so I'd prefer their imperfect system. At least news is the product on their news channels. (right wingers, have at it... and yeah, I do know there are ads on BBC America and BBC News Intl. )
(http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/27/038227)
MS is on a roll.
It boggles the mind how such basic OS functionality can be broken.
I was actually shopping for an ebook reader online before I saw this hit Slashdot.
.chm and other formats so it may be worth the risk.
I'm looking for an e-ink reader that supports the most open & DRM's formats and/or has the best potential for being supported/upgraded/hacked to extend current capabilities. Truly usable PDF support for PDFs from random sources would also be a plus (esp. Google Book Search PDFs)
THe Sony hardware looks great but I don't trust them to broaden the number of formats supported
I'm leaning towards the Cybook Gen 3 but it's new and the company seems a bit overwhelmed. However, they've promised software upgrades with
Then there also the Jinke Hanlin readers which might have good potential but seem to be hard to find. Anyone have one?
Nuff said.
As for paying for commercial free content, it had better be both REALLY good and REALLY convenient (and DRM free). Not sure how a bunch of disparate TV networks are going to pull that off. My family typically watches one or two shows from each of 5 or 6 networks. I know of only two 'places', if you can call them that, which have all of these shows available, commercial free, using a consistent interface. USENET or pick your torrent site.
I've yet to see a game or demo that looks and performs so much better under DX10 than DX9 that it makes the leap to Vista worth it. I believe I've tried them all, so far. I'm starting to doubt that DX10 will ever be a must have.
I've got Vista installed at work where I've been using it for a few months now, and at home, (on the SAME hardware, though different video card) where I occasionally boot to it to check out the latest DX10 stuff.
Interestingly, I've found Vista at work to be much more stable than Vista at home. All the usability tweaks are in on both machines but for some reason, I get major grief when fooling around with games & performance settings at home (blue screens, lock ups, software compatibility issues esp. w/older kids games) but only minor annoyances when using it at work for normal Office/Web/System Administration.
This same home hardware is 100% stable under XP.
Yes, Quake Wars does look good and I liked the demo. I'm kinda bummed that so many good multi-player FPSes came out all at once. I can only handle one at a time and out of this crop, I think it will be COD4 that I keep on playing.
When I try to play more than one, I never get competitively good at any of them, but if I stick with one I can do pretty well. Had these games been staggered six months to a year apart, I probably would have bought all of them (QW:ET, TF2, Crysis, UT3 (soon), and maybe even SOF (also soon)) but as it is, that's a lot of cash and I'm only going end up playing one for the next year or so anyway.
That's not what I mean. You can always attach a binary. But... you won't be able to do so in a way that the vast majority of people who want the binary will easily find it.
If the large binary providers go down, it will be back to the days of scattered binaries, ever changing group names, and, any time a group gets too big, your provider will drop it.
It will no longer (or won't become) be a distribution method for the masses.
It's not all that distributed where the binaries are concerned. Unless it's your primary business, you don't carry the binaries groups. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of USENET piracy could be disrupted by taking down less than a dozen USENET providers.
Bummer. But it was bound to happen. The binaries hosts have gotten a bit too blatant with their marketing and have made USENET binary downloads a far easier endeavor than it used to be. The critical mass of users which triggers copyright lawsuits has been reached.
If usenet.com goes down, the rest will swiftly follow.
Vista, out of the box, has other issues with copying files besides this one. Just Google "Vista slow file copy".
Whether you experience these problems or not depends highly on your configuration and how and where you are copying files.
I had to disable several Vista 'features' in order to reliably & quickly copy files over my network using Vista.
It boggles my mind that there can be so many issues with such a basic OS function.
'nuff said.
"The IT Crowd" is cute & amusing but it's nowhere near hilarious as other UK comedies like "Coupling" or "The Green Room" I find "The IT Crowd" characters to be a bit over-caricatured for my taste and most of the humor is silly/low brow. On the other hand, they do have some good IT jokes now & again and it's probably the only show you'll see those on. IMHO, the best part of the show are all the IT references scattered around the set. They've definitely got true geeks on the staff.
Not sure... Last month I thought it was sort of a remix using multiple songs. Something must have happened while I was on vacation.
And that guy over there has a laptop that could EASILY be a bomb, and that woman over there has a cell phone that could EASILY detonate something. And listen! That kid over there is holding some electronic device that is making funny bleeping noises. But wait! OMG!!! That baby right there has a bottle with actual liquid in it!!!! (and her mom's got a headscarf on... oh shit)
And HOLY CRAP!!!! They're all wearing SHOES for christ's sake!!!!! Take Cover!!!!!
You must be very frightened indeed, Mr NotaNoShitFucktard, at the airport these days.