I'm just waiting for an EULA to pull something like "By continuing to live after reading this statement, you agree to give corporation X full and total control of your life and/or posessions"
Already done (some people claim to value their immortal soul above any possessions).
Please name a few empires where this actually occurred.
The Roman Empire after about 200 AD. A number of Chinese empires, for example, the Han dynasty (it's so common in their history that it becomes part of the way that the mandate of Heaven is lost). And the Mughals of India. The loss of England's American colonies. The decline of the Spanish empire and the loss of its American territories. In modern times, the Ottoman empire in the 19th century. A number of communist attempts to take over countries (particularly, the failure to annex Chile into the sphere of influence). The current weakness of the less economically sound members of the EU looks to me to be another such decline.
Suddenly we're talking about empires, not societies. Do you seriously propose that the Communist attempt to build an "empire" failing was a bad thing? Or that empires are the way to go generally?
Empires are generally about exploitation, not mutual good.
When are we going to get the converse? If you don't use the service, you don't have to pay for the service?
You're aware that your sentiment is pre-stoneage? Yes, paleolithic societies (both Neanderthals and "modern" humans) took care of their elderly and injured on a community basis. I won't provide a "citation" as it's easily available via Google, and it will be a novel experience for you to actually gather some facts. Oh, and good luck with Romney.
This is probably a stupid thing to be discussing, but think about a bicycle. It takes a certain amount of energy input from you to get the thing going. Yet, it takes obviously less energy from you to make it stop. Magic of friction.
... but the battery on the device doesn't run down after three hours like it does with CM. There are trade-offs.
You might give SetCPU a try, for a couple of bucks it's great value. It gives me about triple the battery capacity. I am on an oldish phone, though (HTC Desire), newer Android versions might have this feature on stock FW. In any case it's a no-brainer to underclock when you don't use the phone.
Its like the whole adblocking deal, I block everyone EXCEPT those that say "We promise not to be obnoxious and put flashing sound blasting shitpile ads on our site so please support us by not blocking" so you know what? I don't block those sites. but the absolute second they DO show me some obnoxious flashing speaker blasting ad? Their asses are blocked and all the pleas in the world won't change it.
Well put. Also, let them know that you allow their ads, and why. I always drop them a short mail about it. I've received some amusing replies, for instance one response from a tech was basically "THANK YOU! You have no idea how much controversy this has created with marketing... I'll bring your email to our next meeting, that'll show those bastards!"
Since you utterly failed to address the actual content of my post, going off on a senseless and incoherent rant instead, I consider this discussion to be over. Have a nice life.
I mean we hear constant screams about MSFT having too much cruft and backwards compatibility holding things back...
The screams about backwards compatibility holding things back must be in your head? I don't hear them.
I doubt very seriously you'd get anything but word salad if you tried to open the latest LO ODF files on OO.o 1.0
Your point is asinine. Why would anyone run an antique version of a free software suite when the newest version is only a download (or a free mailed CD) away?
Software gets new and nifty features, no-one says that this is a bad thing. Proprietary software houses, however, essentially run an upgrade racket driven by incompatible new formats. Some are worse than MS, Adobe, for instance, offers no way to save in older formats and sneakily "upgrades" older files when opened in a newer version. CS4 even did this without the user having saved the document. My brother, who uses a Macbook, constantly mailed me docx-files with schedules for conversion when in university as his professor refused to save in an older format, and the tables used didn't show up in free suites. When confronted about this, the professor wasn't even aware that this could be an issue, and he told my brother that he "didn't have time" for pandering to students on off-brand devices. Nobody wins but Microsoft in such a situation.
For OSS this is never an issue as upgrades are free. The problem is that proprietary software upgrades will always incur significant costs. If you can't even admit that this is a serious advantage of open source, and one that can even be decisive for certain users, you are deluded. It dawns on me that you are likely a strong fanboy or even a paid shill, in which case you will admit to no arguments against your loyalties, and my post is wasted.
The fact that they even gave you a compatibility pack at all was more than the other guys, so maybe if you need it that bad you might want to just pick up a copy of something from this decade, yes?
"More than the other guys?" How on Earth can you say that with a straight face? The "other guys" give you their whole fucking product for free... Yup, astroturfing confirmed.
THANK YOU for reintroducing me to that site. Since stumbling across it a couple of years ago I've been looking for it on occasion (I haven't been able to find it through Google). The whole thing should be required reading for any budding science fiction author out there, that way they're at least aware of the principles they're breaking:)
Completely agree. Sometimes I get depressed with how much stock people put in money around here. Work hard to get enough to support yourself and your family, but above that do what makes you happy.
I rarely express philosophy, but here I feel that a quote from the Swedish poet Stig Johansson is fitting: "All those days that came and went, little did I know that they were my life". (Apologies to Mr. Johansson for a horrendous translation. It rings a lot better in a Scandinavian language)
Every business I've ever worked for has a "no counter offer" policy. Once you're willing to quit, your heart is likely no longer in it for the job you have currently.
Some of us are actually working for humans. I know that I am valuable to the company I currently work for, but everyone involved knows that I could get about 150-200% of my current wage if I switched jobs, because of abilities and experience (I've gotten real offers, this is not conjecture). I love my current work situation and am economically comfortable, that's why I stay there.
My boss recently approached me with a vague "are you happy here", and eventually I understood that she meant "we can't pay you much more, but we'll do everything we can to accommodate you in order to make you stay". So I frankly said that I'd like to keep the freedom to choose my tasks that I've always had, but also to have more power to bring them through (I'm an "IT guy" for a small publishing company under a larger IT organisation with a cumbersome bureaucracy, so that basically means "more root"). They complied against company policy. I should say that I am competent and responsible enough that it won't lead to a problem.
I'm very happy with my coworkers and I enjoy accomplishing things, so that greatly enhanced my job satisfaction. I'm considering other options, but it works for me (and the company) for me to be a cowboy, and few companies would grant "whatever-is-needed" access to a new hire. There is a very enticing offer as a dba consultant, though. Root all the way, no hurdles:)
"The primary use for an e-ink reader is to read novels."
Maybe for you. For me, the primary purpose of my tablet is reading stuff, mainly in PDF format. Some of my reading time with my iPad is indeed spent with novels. It's perfectly suitable for reading novels in PDF format. I suppose you have an off-brand tablet, because nothing actually beats the iPad for technical reference. That's too bad, but I'm sure you learned your lesson about off-brand tablets.
Ok, I saw this reply after addressing another of your replies to my post, where I tried to be nice. Off-brand tablets, seriously? Are you thirteen years old? Ok, I can play that game:)
I use an iPad supplied by my employer for the explicit purpose of QA of digital editions (I work at a publishing house, part of my job description is "ebook producer". I produce epub, pdf, mobi, indexed html, lrf, whatever is necessary). Yes, in my opinion the iPad is inferior to other tablets, but we need to assure that our books look nice on all major devices. I've actually tried it for reading a novel in the dark, and found that at its brightest setting it's very good as a night light for my E-Ink reader (the brightness on the iPad is fucking amazing).
Ebooks nowadays aren't released in pdf unless they're extremely reliant on the ancient "page layout" paradigm, or the customer explicitly wants a "perfect copy" of the paper version. PDF is very well suited for sending a file to the printing house for reproduction, and not much else. Publishers prefer flowable formats for digital books as they're not tying the customer to a specific screen size or reading device in order to make them readable. This is pretty much accepted in the community, check the forums at Mobileread for confirmation.
Ok, enough of this. It seems that you have an axe to grind, but please take it somewhere else. It's annoying to the adults trying to have a rational conversation.
I'm at the point in my life where I don't want to manage a shitload of different devices. If I want to spend money on a gadget, at this point it's likely to be another lens for one of my cameras, or another amateur radio or something. I have a computer and an iPad and that's all I need in that department.
I admire how you adressed *all* the points in my post. Good work dude:)
But seriously: the el-crapo zoom lens that came with our $550 camera is quite adequate for our needs, yet I fully appreciate the need for a better lens (or several) for people who are interested in photography.
You don't feel a need for a specialised reading device, but you can surely understand that others might enjoy them. If they don't fit your need, just don't buy one, your money is surely better spent towards a new lens. Let's just leave it at that, ok?:)
Well the measurement seems silly. "8 weeks" if you read only half an hour per day. I read for much longer than half an hour a day. More typical is 1-2 hours while waiting for something good to appear on the TV, and 8 hours straight on weekends. Most avid readers would be lucky to get one week rather than the marketing-speak of eight weeks.
I read about as much as you do, and my Sony reader started out needing a recharge about every other week. Now the capacity is down to about a week, but it's still a non-issue, as I'll just occasionally leave it plugged in for half an hour after updating its library. I have never been close to running out of juice.
That's one thing I love about the Kindle line, they always had incredible battery life. It's only major con is lack of native Epub support.
Format-shifting isn't really an issue with automatic deDRM in Calibre (google Apprentice Alf). I would actually recommend a Sony Reader because of epub support, mine is a two year old PRS-650, it's so damn good I haven't seen a need to upgrade to a newer model. The Kindle has online features, but I don't really have a use for them. Yeah, it's Sony, but I'll happily give them my money for a device which interferes so little with my reading. I haven't even "authorised" it, it works perfectly well.
Mine too. I own all the models but the touch has a problem in country life. Each time a fly lands on it, there's a page change, back or forward, depending on the landing zone. Sometimes the fly also looks-up a word in the dictionary.
At one time an ant highlighted the words "advocate leniency" on a page in my Sony reader. Maybe those insects have more communication skills than we give them credit for:)
So, it has a light, but does it do PDF annotation? Can you zoom and navigate and crop PDFs easily? No.
The primary use for an e-ink reader is to read novels. PDF is not a suitable format for that. Although the Sony reader has the features you ask for, for those of us who don't read children's books they are not necessary. Technical reference works is not really what it's designed for either, but it's quite adequate, and far better than the tablet I left at home.
Look, if you don't read novels e-ink is not for you. Get a tablet for your games, browsing, magazines and illustrated PDFs. We who *do* read novels are quite happy with our readers. BTW, I also have a tiny clip-on reading light which works perfectly well, but I almost never bring it because I don't need it.
For a visual representation of the mission, download Celestia and install the Dawn and Vesta addons. Make sure to enable "Orbits" and "Orbits/Labels" for planets, dwarf planets and spacecraft. If you select Vesta (Enter -> type Vesta -> Enter) its orbit will be visible as well. Use the time controls to view the whole mission:)
It looks like those are all short stories. Can anyone recommend some good novel length hard sci-fi from the past 10 years? books or authors....
Peter Hamilton, which AC recommends, is good. Check also out the Manifold series by Stephen Baxter. Speculative, hard SF which has not aged badly even if the books are somewhat more than ten years old. The same goes for the SF of Iain M. Banks, I can't really recommend his regular fiction.
I'm seconding this. I've bought many books from the Kindle store, automatically stripped DRM with Calibre and converted them to the superior epub format. Works fine with my Sony reader.
The issue of whether digital media is property in the traditional sense seems to still be in the air pretty much everywhere in the world.
Another interesting issue is terminology. "Buy" (or its Norwegian equivalent) has a very definite meaning in our laws. This differs significantly from what the purveyors understand by the term. Most purveyors of digital content use terms as "Buy", even if they mean license (which is a very different thing according to the same law).
The lawyers of Apple certainly know this, but they still use the term "Buy music". I have no idea whether you guys in the US have a similar "law of sales", but I look forward to the first lawsuit contending that term in Norway.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just waiting for an EULA to pull something like "By continuing to live after reading this statement, you agree to give corporation X full and total control of your life and/or posessions"
Already done (some people claim to value their immortal soul above any possessions).
Please name a few empires where this actually occurred.
The Roman Empire after about 200 AD. A number of Chinese empires, for example, the Han dynasty (it's so common in their history that it becomes part of the way that the mandate of Heaven is lost). And the Mughals of India. The loss of England's American colonies. The decline of the Spanish empire and the loss of its American territories.
In modern times, the Ottoman empire in the 19th century. A number of communist attempts to take over countries (particularly, the failure to annex Chile into the sphere of influence). The current weakness of the less economically sound members of the EU looks to me to be another such decline.
Suddenly we're talking about empires, not societies. Do you seriously propose that the Communist attempt to build an "empire" failing was a bad thing? Or that empires are the way to go generally?
Empires are generally about exploitation, not mutual good.
When are we going to get the converse? If you don't use the service, you don't have to pay for the service?
You're aware that your sentiment is pre-stoneage? Yes, paleolithic societies (both Neanderthals and "modern" humans) took care of their elderly and injured on a community basis. I won't provide a "citation" as it's easily available via Google, and it will be a novel experience for you to actually gather some facts. Oh, and good luck with Romney.
I guess you could say they're up the creek with a... Padd-le.... YEEAAAAAAAAAAAAH
Why would being up the creek with a Padd(y)-le be a bad thing? However, I heard they're fresh out of them. And, you forgot the glasses :)
This is probably a stupid thing to be discussing, but think about a bicycle. It takes a certain amount of energy input from you to get the thing going. Yet, it takes obviously less energy from you to make it stop. Magic of friction.
I hope you didn't think that through...
If you could choose any tech company to work for where would you go what tech would it be?
It would surprise me if he can't already do that :)
... but the battery on the device doesn't run down after three hours like it does with CM. There are trade-offs.
You might give SetCPU a try, for a couple of bucks it's great value. It gives me about triple the battery capacity. I am on an oldish phone, though (HTC Desire), newer Android versions might have this feature on stock FW. In any case it's a no-brainer to underclock when you don't use the phone.
Its like the whole adblocking deal, I block everyone EXCEPT those that say "We promise not to be obnoxious and put flashing sound blasting shitpile ads on our site so please support us by not blocking" so you know what? I don't block those sites. but the absolute second they DO show me some obnoxious flashing speaker blasting ad? Their asses are blocked and all the pleas in the world won't change it.
Well put. Also, let them know that you allow their ads, and why. I always drop them a short mail about it. I've received some amusing replies, for instance one response from a tech was basically "THANK YOU! You have no idea how much controversy this has created with marketing... I'll bring your email to our next meeting, that'll show those bastards!"
This video shows something similar http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QCJM9tqvvI
As does this one.
... wharrgarbl! ...
Since you utterly failed to address the actual content of my post, going off on a senseless and incoherent rant instead, I consider this discussion to be over. Have a nice life.
Dude, you are seriously confused.
I mean we hear constant screams about MSFT having too much cruft and backwards compatibility holding things back...
The screams about backwards compatibility holding things back must be in your head? I don't hear them.
I doubt very seriously you'd get anything but word salad if you tried to open the latest LO ODF files on OO.o 1.0
Your point is asinine. Why would anyone run an antique version of a free software suite when the newest version is only a download (or a free mailed CD) away?
Software gets new and nifty features, no-one says that this is a bad thing. Proprietary software houses, however, essentially run an upgrade racket driven by incompatible new formats. Some are worse than MS, Adobe, for instance, offers no way to save in older formats and sneakily "upgrades" older files when opened in a newer version. CS4 even did this without the user having saved the document. My brother, who uses a Macbook, constantly mailed me docx-files with schedules for conversion when in university as his professor refused to save in an older format, and the tables used didn't show up in free suites. When confronted about this, the professor wasn't even aware that this could be an issue, and he told my brother that he "didn't have time" for pandering to students on off-brand devices. Nobody wins but Microsoft in such a situation.
For OSS this is never an issue as upgrades are free. The problem is that proprietary software upgrades will always incur significant costs. If you can't even admit that this is a serious advantage of open source, and one that can even be decisive for certain users, you are deluded. It dawns on me that you are likely a strong fanboy or even a paid shill, in which case you will admit to no arguments against your loyalties, and my post is wasted.
The fact that they even gave you a compatibility pack at all was more than the other guys, so maybe if you need it that bad you might want to just pick up a copy of something from this decade, yes?
"More than the other guys?" How on Earth can you say that with a straight face? The "other guys" give you their whole fucking product for free... Yup, astroturfing confirmed.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php#id--Causality
THANK YOU for reintroducing me to that site. Since stumbling across it a couple of years ago I've been looking for it on occasion (I haven't been able to find it through Google). The whole thing should be required reading for any budding science fiction author out there, that way they're at least aware of the principles they're breaking :)
Hmmm. A better one might be: "All those days that came and went, little did I realise they were my life". That is the whole poem, by the way.
Completely agree. Sometimes I get depressed with how much stock people put in money around here. Work hard to get enough to support yourself and your family, but above that do what makes you happy.
I rarely express philosophy, but here I feel that a quote from the Swedish poet Stig Johansson is fitting: "All those days that came and went, little did I know that they were my life". (Apologies to Mr. Johansson for a horrendous translation. It rings a lot better in a Scandinavian language)
Every business I've ever worked for has a "no counter offer" policy. Once you're willing to quit, your heart is likely no longer in it for the job you have currently.
Some of us are actually working for humans. I know that I am valuable to the company I currently work for, but everyone involved knows that I could get about 150-200% of my current wage if I switched jobs, because of abilities and experience (I've gotten real offers, this is not conjecture). I love my current work situation and am economically comfortable, that's why I stay there.
My boss recently approached me with a vague "are you happy here", and eventually I understood that she meant "we can't pay you much more, but we'll do everything we can to accommodate you in order to make you stay". So I frankly said that I'd like to keep the freedom to choose my tasks that I've always had, but also to have more power to bring them through (I'm an "IT guy" for a small publishing company under a larger IT organisation with a cumbersome bureaucracy, so that basically means "more root"). They complied against company policy. I should say that I am competent and responsible enough that it won't lead to a problem.
I'm very happy with my coworkers and I enjoy accomplishing things, so that greatly enhanced my job satisfaction. I'm considering other options, but it works for me (and the company) for me to be a cowboy, and few companies would grant "whatever-is-needed" access to a new hire. There is a very enticing offer as a dba consultant, though. Root all the way, no hurdles :)
"The primary use for an e-ink reader is to read novels."
Maybe for you. For me, the primary purpose of my tablet is reading stuff, mainly in PDF format. Some of my reading time with my iPad is indeed spent with novels. It's perfectly suitable for reading novels in PDF format. I suppose you have an off-brand tablet, because nothing actually beats the iPad for technical reference. That's too bad, but I'm sure you learned your lesson about off-brand tablets.
Ok, I saw this reply after addressing another of your replies to my post, where I tried to be nice. Off-brand tablets, seriously? Are you thirteen years old? Ok, I can play that game :)
I use an iPad supplied by my employer for the explicit purpose of QA of digital editions (I work at a publishing house, part of my job description is "ebook producer". I produce epub, pdf, mobi, indexed html, lrf, whatever is necessary). Yes, in my opinion the iPad is inferior to other tablets, but we need to assure that our books look nice on all major devices. I've actually tried it for reading a novel in the dark, and found that at its brightest setting it's very good as a night light for my E-Ink reader (the brightness on the iPad is fucking amazing).
Ebooks nowadays aren't released in pdf unless they're extremely reliant on the ancient "page layout" paradigm, or the customer explicitly wants a "perfect copy" of the paper version. PDF is very well suited for sending a file to the printing house for reproduction, and not much else. Publishers prefer flowable formats for digital books as they're not tying the customer to a specific screen size or reading device in order to make them readable. This is pretty much accepted in the community, check the forums at Mobileread for confirmation.
Ok, enough of this. It seems that you have an axe to grind, but please take it somewhere else. It's annoying to the adults trying to have a rational conversation.
I'm at the point in my life where I don't want to manage a shitload of different devices. If I want to spend money on a gadget, at this point it's likely to be another lens for one of my cameras, or another amateur radio or something. I have a computer and an iPad and that's all I need in that department.
I admire how you adressed *all* the points in my post. Good work dude :)
But seriously: the el-crapo zoom lens that came with our $550 camera is quite adequate for our needs, yet I fully appreciate the need for a better lens (or several) for people who are interested in photography.
You don't feel a need for a specialised reading device, but you can surely understand that others might enjoy them. If they don't fit your need, just don't buy one, your money is surely better spent towards a new lens. Let's just leave it at that, ok? :)
Well the measurement seems silly. "8 weeks" if you read only half an hour per day. I read for much longer than half an hour a day. More typical is 1-2 hours while waiting for something good to appear on the TV, and 8 hours straight on weekends. Most avid readers would be lucky to get one week rather than the marketing-speak of eight weeks.
I read about as much as you do, and my Sony reader started out needing a recharge about every other week. Now the capacity is down to about a week, but it's still a non-issue, as I'll just occasionally leave it plugged in for half an hour after updating its library. I have never been close to running out of juice.
That's one thing I love about the Kindle line, they always had incredible battery life. It's only major con is lack of native Epub support.
Format-shifting isn't really an issue with automatic deDRM in Calibre (google Apprentice Alf). I would actually recommend a Sony Reader because of epub support, mine is a two year old PRS-650, it's so damn good I haven't seen a need to upgrade to a newer model. The Kindle has online features, but I don't really have a use for them. Yeah, it's Sony, but I'll happily give them my money for a device which interferes so little with my reading. I haven't even "authorised" it, it works perfectly well.
"My kindle has all of that."
Mine too. I own all the models but the touch has a problem in country life.
Each time a fly lands on it, there's a page change, back or forward, depending on the landing zone.
Sometimes the fly also looks-up a word in the dictionary.
At one time an ant highlighted the words "advocate leniency" on a page in my Sony reader. Maybe those insects have more communication skills than we give them credit for :)
So, it has a light, but does it do PDF annotation? Can you zoom and navigate and crop PDFs easily? No.
The primary use for an e-ink reader is to read novels. PDF is not a suitable format for that. Although the Sony reader has the features you ask for, for those of us who don't read children's books they are not necessary. Technical reference works is not really what it's designed for either, but it's quite adequate, and far better than the tablet I left at home.
Look, if you don't read novels e-ink is not for you. Get a tablet for your games, browsing, magazines and illustrated PDFs. We who *do* read novels are quite happy with our readers. BTW, I also have a tiny clip-on reading light which works perfectly well, but I almost never bring it because I don't need it.
For a visual representation of the mission, download Celestia and install the Dawn and Vesta addons. Make sure to enable "Orbits" and "Orbits/Labels" for planets, dwarf planets and spacecraft. If you select Vesta (Enter -> type Vesta -> Enter) its orbit will be visible as well. Use the time controls to view the whole mission :)
It looks like those are all short stories. Can anyone recommend some good novel length hard sci-fi from the past 10 years? books or authors....
Peter Hamilton, which AC recommends, is good. Check also out the Manifold series by Stephen Baxter. Speculative, hard SF which has not aged badly even if the books are somewhat more than ten years old. The same goes for the SF of Iain M. Banks, I can't really recommend his regular fiction.
I'm seconding this. I've bought many books from the Kindle store, automatically stripped DRM with Calibre and converted them to the superior epub format. Works fine with my Sony reader.
The issue of whether digital media is property in the traditional sense seems to still be in the air pretty much everywhere in the world.
Another interesting issue is terminology. "Buy" (or its Norwegian equivalent) has a very definite meaning in our laws. This differs significantly from what the purveyors understand by the term. Most purveyors of digital content use terms as "Buy", even if they mean license (which is a very different thing according to the same law).
The lawyers of Apple certainly know this, but they still use the term "Buy music". I have no idea whether you guys in the US have a similar "law of sales", but I look forward to the first lawsuit contending that term in Norway.