You do realize that unlocked phones means we'd pay European style (higher) prices on the hardware. I personally don't think that's a bad deal, but just saying' it'd likely mean the end of "free phones" and heavily subsidized (cheap) phones.
Not necessarily. I got a $692 Android phone for $460 just for paying my provider in 12 monthly installments. These installments are included in my monthly bill, but they are not tied to any specific plan. The phone is not locked, so if I want to switch providers (I'm actually very happy with my current one, so I probably won't) I could just pay my remaining installments in full and leave. I don't have to pay additional fees unless I leave within three months of purchase (in which case there is a fee of about $40), and I won't have to reimburse them for the discount I got in any case.
The provider's advantage is probably that very few people actually switch when having that payment plan, but if you want to leave there's nothing they can do. They get the money you owe them for the phone, but that's it. That's what you get for living in a country with reasonably strong consumer protection laws:)
I honestly though this was common knowledge already. Maybe I'm a little slow.
Yes, I distinctly remember a scene from a documentary which portrayed a fly escaping being swatted by a rolled-up newspaper -- in super-slow-motion, to indicate that this was actually how the fly perceived the incident. I watched it in the early nineties.
It might have been the "Time" episode of a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersense">the series Supersense , although I'm not entirely sure. It was a brilliant series in any case.
Wine-on-Mint is probably more compatible with XP apps than Win8 is anyway.
This is currently modded troll, but on a related note, WINE is by far the easiest way of running oldish games (Windoes 95-98 era and onwards) in my experience. The compatibility modes of Windows 7, XP and even 2k has so many quirks as to be useless, if they manage to run them at all. WINE frequently Just Works.
I've been running multiple partitions/drives on Windows for years and haven't encountered a sizeable app that I'd want to put on a different drive that wouldn't let me.
Same here. I've also found that for gaming Steam Mover makes it very easy to shuffle my current games onto the small SSD. It works for any directory, not just Steam games. Windows doesn't know the difference, but some games benefit greatly from living on the SSD. It would likely fool any stupid software that insists on living on C: as well:)
Yes, sure you are right: didn't use one because I never felt the need for an SSD while dev-ing. Certainly, the fact I'm not required to use Visual Studio or the like helps.
In addition to better performance on some IO-heavy tasks, what makes even a cheap SSD stand out is close to zero access time. Everything is more responsive, large programs launch in literally 1/10 of the time. The performance difference is slightly less noticeable in Linux, but it's still a huge boost. The system is simply more pleasant to use. As drkstr1 says, it's obvious that you've never tried one:)
Every carpenter knows that it's worth it to invest in quality tools, I'm surprised that a developer who presumably does serious dev work would skimp on a crucial part like the system drive. You could probably get by with only 2GB of RAM as well, but why on Earth would you want to do that?
A musician I know who also does a significant amount of studio work asked me if I could help him setting up a Linux computer for mastering. He preferred using a Mac, but would like to save some money going the Linux route when getting a new computer. I advised him to fork out for the Mac instead, it would not be smart for him to reduce the productivity and enjoyment of a significant portion of his livelihood.
Odd. I was always told phone rings on cell phones are phony, just an artifice.
I don't think so; I get a slightly different tone if I call abroad (from Norway), both from cell and landline phones. This also comes into effect if I'm redirected to outsourced customer service when calling a Norwegian support number. Also, a bad connection is affecting the "ringing" signal I hear in my cell, meaning that it's at the very least generated at the tower, if not on the receiving central.
Similar to me. I run a 750w even though I don't need all the power, but it's the added features and quality I want. I'll gladly pay an extra $30 if it means less of a chance of it frying my entire build.
Yup. Six years ago or or so you had to pay a substantial premium to get a 600+ W PSU, now it's much less expensive. I've also read that a larger PSU has more efficient cooling, by running a large one at less than capacity you'll likely get less noise. I currently have an oldish 500W of a high-quality brand in my modest gaming rig, when I'll replace it on next rebuild (mainly because I want a modular one) the new one with be at least a 700W of a similar quality.
Design is not about how it looks. It's about how it works. And Calibre is a bag of features without any overarching design. For sure it's ugly and that's a bad thing. But it's not the reason for me criticising it's UI design.
My troll alarm is ringing its bells off... Oh well.
What do you mean by "overarching design", and how is lack of it a hindrance to you? Please be specific, don't just spout vague criticism. In fact, from your posts on this story you seem very similar to a guy who posted a few times on the forum with extremely vague (but very vocal) complaints about the "bad UX". When asked repeatedly by exasperated forum members, he was not able to communicate what, exactly, his problem with the GUI was. Obviously he didn't have any constructive suggestions either.
I'm still not sure what you want here. The GUI does exactly what I need it to, and it obviously works well for most people, as there are not a lot of complaints about its usability on the forum. Remember that even if you personally are not able to use the software, literally millions of others are getting great value from it daily, many of whom are definitely not techies or even well versed with computers. Maybe it's not the software that is the problem here.
This is not intended facetiously, "simple" (and not so simple) questions crop up all the time from the millions of calibre users, and there are a lot of helpful people to answer them.
You're arguing my case for me.
Uh, what? Is great community support, including for inexperienced users, a minus? Most questions are about relatively complex topics like composing regexes and templates, not "how do I transfer books to my Kindle".
I think you lack an understanding of what average means.
As do you. It is entirely possible to have the majority of a population on either side of the average (mean) value. I, for instance, have more than the average number of arms, along with the vast majority of humans. Distributions need not be symmetrical, or evenly divided around average.
I agree that the GP's distribution sounds unlikely, but it has nothing to do with what average means.
Just installed Calibre so I'll see how it works in regards to the number of files I have (380k+).
I think that might be quite taxing for calibre, in particular the import process *will* take a good many hours. I just tested importing 3930 books (novel length), it took about half an hour, so it seems that you look at at least two days of unsupervised imports. Then again, doing *anything* with 380k files is bound to take time:)
Look at partitioning your library into several libraries if you have logical ways of dividing your collection. calibre also supports something called virtual libraries which I haven't used myself, but it might speed up handling a very large library. As mentioned there are huge performance improvements in the last versions of calibre, but you will surely benefit from an SSD disk and a largish amount of ram in any case.
I hope you have reasonably good metadata, either in the files themselves or in your naming structure, or you will probably face insurmountable problems tidying up your collection afterwards (this is not particular to calibre - GIGO applies here as everywhere else). Reading metadata from path info will probably be faster, as calibre won't have to parse the file on import. Check out the "Control the adding of books" in the Add books dropdown menu, in particular the regular expressions for parsing paths and file names, in that case disable file parsing. Do a few test runs on small subsets to make sure that calibre catches at least author and title correctly. Do your imports in batches (you can use the tag on import feature to connect a book to a particular batch), verify that metadata is sensible as you go along. Some things, like correcting different variations of author names, can be done efficiently after import (if your library is at all usable).
I (and likely others) would very much like to hear about your experiences, feel free to make a thread on the calibre subforum of mobileread. Note that such a large library might seem suspicious to some users, as pirating is frowned upon. In any case, the devs are tuning the performance of the new and more efficient db code (one of the new features in the 1.0 release), and your library will be a good test subject:)
Some people think that's an excuse for having an appalling UI. "Hey, it might be a pile of shit, but you can choose the details of which bits of shit are displayed."
OK, we get it, you hate the look and feel of calibre. On the other hand I hate the recent trend of giving everything a Web 2.0 look and removing easy access to as much functionality as possible. Let me know if you find some ebook management software which has half the functionality of calibre, half the stability, *and* a beautiful interface, while maintaining usability. I won't hold my breath.
I don't really get what in particular you complain about; if it is "waaaaah ugly" then I frankly can't be bothered to scrounge up a lot of sympathy, if there are tasks you really can't figure out how to do after trying for a few minutes feel free to ask over at the calibre forums. This is not intended facetiously, "simple" (and not so simple) questions crop up all the time from the millions of calibre users, and there are a lot of helpful people to answer them. It is very likely that your particular use case is already covered by calibre.
Furthermore, while the GUI is not beautiful I find it very effective. I'm definitely a "function over form" guy, and calibre is nothing short of brilliant when it comes to ease of doing complicated stuff. calibre is a tool which aims to cater to both power users and casual ones, and few of them seem to have significant difficulties with the GUI. There are a lot of users with little to no technical experience who benefit daily from calibre when managing their book collections.
On a side note: offering "simple" and "advanced" interface options has been brought up several times on the calibre forums, but has been rejected for two main reasons: partly because no-one seems to agree on which subset of the functionality merits inclusion in the simple interface, and partly because maintaining two interfaces adds additional complexity to the development process which no-one wants to take on the responsibility for.
This is fairly common for large multivolume ebooks to come in this format, a DVD with an index file and hundreds or thousands of pdfs. Springer does it for example.
That is not an "ebook", it's a library comprising thousands of ebooks. You wouldn't call the whole children section of your local library "a book containing thousands of books", would you?
Unless your goal is to confuse the issue (indeed it seems so when reviewing your post), it's generally useful to employ the same terminology everyone else uses.
Yes, but you can tell it to size the pdf pages exactly to the size of your device's screen. So then the pdf fits perfectly onto the device, and there is no need to alter the flow of the text due to the width of the device.
Yes, that'll work for your particular current device, and if you're happy with it, fine. I'll note that polishing an epub is really easy with only basic knowledge of CSS, though. Sigil is basically an IDE for epubs, and with it you can reformat an epub in minutes, most epubs only require slight changes to CSS. With an "official" plugin you can launch Sigil directly from calibre.
The epub is then usable as-is on most devices, and it is a very good source format if you want a fixed page format like PDF, or other flowing formats like K8 for Kindle. If anyone's interested I can describe a few "sensible default" modifications to particular CSS classes.
Odd, I'm the first to comment that he wrote a story about exactly this. I'm not sure he originated the idea or was inspired by a scientific article but it seemed noteworthy.
You./ers do _know_ who I'm talking about or am I the only one here not in his teens?
First thing I thought of as well. It's the story "Reason", found in I, Robot, btw.
This is the only sensible system I've ever seen proposed and it's the one that's almost universally reviled by the majority of the those who'd have to implement it.
In Norway we have such a system (sans the "forgiving" of loans part - apart from the student loan not being inheritable you have to pay up eventually). It does work very well. Oh, and there is no tuition for government educational institutions, which are generally the best in the country.
Meanwhile, unless I'm mistaken, kids in Europe go to college for free.
Yes, we do, you can get high-quality education including university without paying a tuition. What's more, in Norway anyone can get a subsidised student loan from the government at very reasonable terms to help pay the rent and buy textbooks during your education. This effectively means that anyone, no matter how poor their family is, has the financial means to get an education all the way up to PhD level if they so wish. It's a huge boon for our society, and one that we take so much for granted that it's very strange for us to hear that some places you have to pay ridiculous amounts of money to even attend university.
There are private institutions, and for some areas (like marketing or business administration) you have to have attended them to be accepted in your professional community afterwards. For most professional areas, however, the state institutions are either equally good or the only alternative (no private institution offers education in literature, for instance).
I know the article mentions the US and I can't comment on that. But in many other countries, the minimum time to give notice is much longer and increases with the time you've worked there. [...] Employers might walk you off the premises when you give notice (or if they lay you off), but that's relatively rare (as it is expensive for the employer to pay for the remaining time).
Yeah, in Norway thre months bilaterally is the standard if you're not in a six month "trial", where you generally can quit or be fired on one month's notice. For a management position it's different, but they generally have a severance clause which amounts to the same security.
As for the "escorted out by security" as a matter of course, I don't get it when the employee himself is quitting. I mean, if they were disgruntled they've had all the time in the world to sabotage things, but their remaining time could be valuable for knowledge transfer. If you get fired I understand the rationale behind it.
It's a poor man's Solatube. However, in a hail-prevalent area like mine, I would go to the expense of a Solatube than plastic bottles.
Since you're probably not a poor man living in a shanty town, you have likely gone to the expense of electric lighting. This trick is not intended for you.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that unlocked phones means we'd pay European style (higher) prices on the hardware. I personally don't think that's a bad deal, but just saying' it'd likely mean the end of "free phones" and heavily subsidized (cheap) phones.
Not necessarily. I got a $692 Android phone for $460 just for paying my provider in 12 monthly installments. These installments are included in my monthly bill, but they are not tied to any specific plan. The phone is not locked, so if I want to switch providers (I'm actually very happy with my current one, so I probably won't) I could just pay my remaining installments in full and leave. I don't have to pay additional fees unless I leave within three months of purchase (in which case there is a fee of about $40), and I won't have to reimburse them for the discount I got in any case.
The provider's advantage is probably that very few people actually switch when having that payment plan, but if you want to leave there's nothing they can do. They get the money you owe them for the phone, but that's it. That's what you get for living in a country with reasonably strong consumer protection laws :)
Found it! :)
(The documentary referenced in my sibling post, that is. It's from 1988.)
The fly-swatting scene is in the second-to-last episode on that page, from about 20:30.
I honestly though this was common knowledge already. Maybe I'm a little slow.
Yes, I distinctly remember a scene from a documentary which portrayed a fly escaping being swatted by a rolled-up newspaper -- in super-slow-motion, to indicate that this was actually how the fly perceived the incident. I watched it in the early nineties.
It might have been the "Time" episode of a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersense">the series Supersense , although I'm not entirely sure. It was a brilliant series in any case.
Wine-on-Mint is probably more compatible with XP apps than Win8 is anyway.
This is currently modded troll, but on a related note, WINE is by far the easiest way of running oldish games (Windoes 95-98 era and onwards) in my experience. The compatibility modes of Windows 7, XP and even 2k has so many quirks as to be useless, if they manage to run them at all. WINE frequently Just Works.
I've been running multiple partitions/drives on Windows for years and haven't encountered a sizeable app that I'd want to put on a different drive that wouldn't let me.
Same here. I've also found that for gaming Steam Mover makes it very easy to shuffle my current games onto the small SSD. It works for any directory, not just Steam games. Windows doesn't know the difference, but some games benefit greatly from living on the SSD. It would likely fool any stupid software that insists on living on C: as well :)
Yes, sure you are right: didn't use one because I never felt the need for an SSD while dev-ing. Certainly, the fact I'm not required to use Visual Studio or the like helps.
In addition to better performance on some IO-heavy tasks, what makes even a cheap SSD stand out is close to zero access time. Everything is more responsive, large programs launch in literally 1/10 of the time. The performance difference is slightly less noticeable in Linux, but it's still a huge boost. The system is simply more pleasant to use. As drkstr1 says, it's obvious that you've never tried one :)
Every carpenter knows that it's worth it to invest in quality tools, I'm surprised that a developer who presumably does serious dev work would skimp on a crucial part like the system drive. You could probably get by with only 2GB of RAM as well, but why on Earth would you want to do that?
A musician I know who also does a significant amount of studio work asked me if I could help him setting up a Linux computer for mastering. He preferred using a Mac, but would like to save some money going the Linux route when getting a new computer. I advised him to fork out for the Mac instead, it would not be smart for him to reduce the productivity and enjoyment of a significant portion of his livelihood.
In your sig, the term is "intents and purposes", not "intensive purposes".
This has been your Pedantry Of The Day(TM)!
I think this entitles you to a big lump of Tungsten-hydroxy-osmium-hydride!
Odd. I was always told phone rings on cell phones are phony, just an artifice.
I don't think so; I get a slightly different tone if I call abroad (from Norway), both from cell and landline phones. This also comes into effect if I'm redirected to outsourced customer service when calling a Norwegian support number. Also, a bad connection is affecting the "ringing" signal I hear in my cell, meaning that it's at the very least generated at the tower, if not on the receiving central.
One thing I really wish they'd add to the kindle reader (they had it in the WebOS beta version, but that never left beta) is categories for books.
Check out calibre for library management and sideloading of e-books. It can do categories, and export them to the Kindle.
Similar to me. I run a 750w even though I don't need all the power, but it's the added features and quality I want. I'll gladly pay an extra $30 if it means less of a chance of it frying my entire build.
Yup. Six years ago or or so you had to pay a substantial premium to get a 600+ W PSU, now it's much less expensive. I've also read that a larger PSU has more efficient cooling, by running a large one at less than capacity you'll likely get less noise. I currently have an oldish 500W of a high-quality brand in my modest gaming rig, when I'll replace it on next rebuild (mainly because I want a modular one) the new one with be at least a 700W of a similar quality.
Sorry I'm not going to be specific.
Wow, what a surprice. Have a nice day :)
Design is not about how it looks. It's about how it works. And Calibre is a bag of features without any overarching design. For sure it's ugly and that's a bad thing. But it's not the reason for me criticising it's UI design.
My troll alarm is ringing its bells off... Oh well.
What do you mean by "overarching design", and how is lack of it a hindrance to you? Please be specific, don't just spout vague criticism. In fact, from your posts on this story you seem very similar to a guy who posted a few times on the forum with extremely vague (but very vocal) complaints about the "bad UX". When asked repeatedly by exasperated forum members, he was not able to communicate what, exactly, his problem with the GUI was. Obviously he didn't have any constructive suggestions either.
I'm still not sure what you want here. The GUI does exactly what I need it to, and it obviously works well for most people, as there are not a lot of complaints about its usability on the forum. Remember that even if you personally are not able to use the software, literally millions of others are getting great value from it daily, many of whom are definitely not techies or even well versed with computers. Maybe it's not the software that is the problem here.
This is not intended facetiously, "simple" (and not so simple) questions crop up all the time from the millions of calibre users, and there are a lot of helpful people to answer them.
You're arguing my case for me.
Uh, what? Is great community support, including for inexperienced users, a minus? Most questions are about relatively complex topics like composing regexes and templates, not "how do I transfer books to my Kindle".
I think you lack an understanding of what average means.
As do you. It is entirely possible to have the majority of a population on either side of the average (mean) value. I, for instance, have more than the average number of arms, along with the vast majority of humans. Distributions need not be symmetrical, or evenly divided around average.
I agree that the GP's distribution sounds unlikely, but it has nothing to do with what average means.
Just installed Calibre so I'll see how it works in regards to the number of files I have (380k+).
I think that might be quite taxing for calibre, in particular the import process *will* take a good many hours. I just tested importing 3930 books (novel length), it took about half an hour, so it seems that you look at at least two days of unsupervised imports. Then again, doing *anything* with 380k files is bound to take time :)
Look at partitioning your library into several libraries if you have logical ways of dividing your collection. calibre also supports something called virtual libraries which I haven't used myself, but it might speed up handling a very large library. As mentioned there are huge performance improvements in the last versions of calibre, but you will surely benefit from an SSD disk and a largish amount of ram in any case.
I hope you have reasonably good metadata, either in the files themselves or in your naming structure, or you will probably face insurmountable problems tidying up your collection afterwards (this is not particular to calibre - GIGO applies here as everywhere else). Reading metadata from path info will probably be faster, as calibre won't have to parse the file on import. Check out the "Control the adding of books" in the Add books dropdown menu, in particular the regular expressions for parsing paths and file names, in that case disable file parsing. Do a few test runs on small subsets to make sure that calibre catches at least author and title correctly. Do your imports in batches (you can use the tag on import feature to connect a book to a particular batch), verify that metadata is sensible as you go along. Some things, like correcting different variations of author names, can be done efficiently after import (if your library is at all usable).
I (and likely others) would very much like to hear about your experiences, feel free to make a thread on the calibre subforum of mobileread. Note that such a large library might seem suspicious to some users, as pirating is frowned upon. In any case, the devs are tuning the performance of the new and more efficient db code (one of the new features in the 1.0 release), and your library will be a good test subject :)
Calibre is extremely configurable
Some people think that's an excuse for having an appalling UI. "Hey, it might be a pile of shit, but you can choose the details of which bits of shit are displayed."
OK, we get it, you hate the look and feel of calibre. On the other hand I hate the recent trend of giving everything a Web 2.0 look and removing easy access to as much functionality as possible. Let me know if you find some ebook management software which has half the functionality of calibre, half the stability, *and* a beautiful interface, while maintaining usability. I won't hold my breath.
I don't really get what in particular you complain about; if it is "waaaaah ugly" then I frankly can't be bothered to scrounge up a lot of sympathy, if there are tasks you really can't figure out how to do after trying for a few minutes feel free to ask over at the calibre forums. This is not intended facetiously, "simple" (and not so simple) questions crop up all the time from the millions of calibre users, and there are a lot of helpful people to answer them. It is very likely that your particular use case is already covered by calibre.
Furthermore, while the GUI is not beautiful I find it very effective. I'm definitely a "function over form" guy, and calibre is nothing short of brilliant when it comes to ease of doing complicated stuff. calibre is a tool which aims to cater to both power users and casual ones, and few of them seem to have significant difficulties with the GUI. There are a lot of users with little to no technical experience who benefit daily from calibre when managing their book collections.
On a side note: offering "simple" and "advanced" interface options has been brought up several times on the calibre forums, but has been rejected for two main reasons: partly because no-one seems to agree on which subset of the functionality merits inclusion in the simple interface, and partly because maintaining two interfaces adds additional complexity to the development process which no-one wants to take on the responsibility for.
This is fairly common for large multivolume ebooks to come in this format, a DVD with an index file and hundreds or thousands of pdfs. Springer does it for example.
That is not an "ebook", it's a library comprising thousands of ebooks. You wouldn't call the whole children section of your local library "a book containing thousands of books", would you?
Unless your goal is to confuse the issue (indeed it seems so when reviewing your post), it's generally useful to employ the same terminology everyone else uses.
Yes, but you can tell it to size the pdf pages exactly to the size of your device's screen. So then the pdf fits perfectly onto the device, and there is no need to alter the flow of the text due to the width of the device.
Yes, that'll work for your particular current device, and if you're happy with it, fine. I'll note that polishing an epub is really easy with only basic knowledge of CSS, though. Sigil is basically an IDE for epubs, and with it you can reformat an epub in minutes, most epubs only require slight changes to CSS. With an "official" plugin you can launch Sigil directly from calibre.
The epub is then usable as-is on most devices, and it is a very good source format if you want a fixed page format like PDF, or other flowing formats like K8 for Kindle. If anyone's interested I can describe a few "sensible default" modifications to particular CSS classes.
Isaac Asimov
Odd, I'm the first to comment that he wrote a story about exactly this. I'm not sure he originated the idea or was inspired by a scientific article but it seemed noteworthy.
You ./ers do _know_ who I'm talking about or am I the only one here not in his teens?
First thing I thought of as well. It's the story "Reason", found in I, Robot , btw.
Are you aware that this has long been dismissed as propaganda? Have a read here:
Actually, I think he is :)
Yes, but you have to do it entirely from the touch screen, using only colored blocks.
Luckily you don't have to learn a new language, as they can implement one you already know.
This is the only sensible system I've ever seen proposed and it's the one that's almost universally reviled by the majority of the those who'd have to implement it.
In Norway we have such a system (sans the "forgiving" of loans part - apart from the student loan not being inheritable you have to pay up eventually). It does work very well. Oh, and there is no tuition for government educational institutions, which are generally the best in the country.
Meanwhile, unless I'm mistaken, kids in Europe go to college for free.
Yes, we do, you can get high-quality education including university without paying a tuition. What's more, in Norway anyone can get a subsidised student loan from the government at very reasonable terms to help pay the rent and buy textbooks during your education. This effectively means that anyone, no matter how poor their family is, has the financial means to get an education all the way up to PhD level if they so wish. It's a huge boon for our society, and one that we take so much for granted that it's very strange for us to hear that some places you have to pay ridiculous amounts of money to even attend university.
There are private institutions, and for some areas (like marketing or business administration) you have to have attended them to be accepted in your professional community afterwards. For most professional areas, however, the state institutions are either equally good or the only alternative (no private institution offers education in literature, for instance).
I like the commercials where they say cigarettes have urea which is found in cat pee.
Cat pee also contains dihydrogen monoxide. Pretty noxious substance.
I know the article mentions the US and I can't comment on that.
But in many other countries, the minimum time to give notice is much longer and increases with the time you've worked there.
[...]
Employers might walk you off the premises when you give notice (or if they lay you off), but that's relatively rare (as it is expensive for the employer to pay for the remaining time).
Yeah, in Norway thre months bilaterally is the standard if you're not in a six month "trial", where you generally can quit or be fired on one month's notice. For a management position it's different, but they generally have a severance clause which amounts to the same security.
As for the "escorted out by security" as a matter of course, I don't get it when the employee himself is quitting. I mean, if they were disgruntled they've had all the time in the world to sabotage things, but their remaining time could be valuable for knowledge transfer. If you get fired I understand the rationale behind it.
It's a poor man's Solatube. However, in a hail-prevalent area like mine, I would go to the expense of a Solatube than plastic bottles.
Since you're probably not a poor man living in a shanty town, you have likely gone to the expense of electric lighting. This trick is not intended for you.