The "try before you buy" excuse... Pure bullshit. Honestly, it's difficult to take people that say these things seriously.
Being someone who has done his fair share of pirating, I have another theory about this.
I, and other people I know who pirate games (Xbox360, wii, etc) will actually download and install/burn EVERY piece of software that comes out. I have friends who have binders and binders of games that they never play. Frequently, we play even less of the game than would be available on the demo.
Now, this correlates with the article in that it's only been a week since they released the title and they're having an 80% piracy rate. This is because these people are downloading and installing every single game that's coming out, playing it a bit, then moving on to the next game. Assuming that piracy was unavailable, I doubt that they'd have even tried this game.
I think the guy is jumping the gun on his conclusions and should wait a month or two and post and update on his piracy findings. I'm certain that the numbers piracy rate will drop.
If anything, it shows that you can work in a highly regulated field that moves a LOT of money around at a LOT of locations with HIGH security.
I agree 100%.
Much like working in the porn industry (on the tech side, I mean), they [generally] use the latest and greatest of technologies and practices for security. The gambling industry was one of the first to utilize large deployments of quantum random number generators among other, similar technologies.
Personally, I think that when it comes to quality of experience, I think banks, porn and gambling companies are at the bleeding edge of tech and the exposure to their technologies will make you a better developer.
I'll take "when hell freezes over" in place of "once in a blue moon" any day of the week.
I agree completely, although I have seen systems breached because of mismanaged keypairs, misconfigured applications, and mismanaged permissions. Even without password logins, an insecure PHP script could potentially obliterate that layer of security.
I've gotten into the habit of chmod'ing my keypairs to 600 (and chmod'ing the.ssh directory they live in as 700) ever since a php script was exploited to fetch the keys on a friend's server. I know Redhat/CentOS is smart enough to not allow that, but it's still a real threat especially on shared boxes. You've also got to be careful about the authorized_keys2 file.
I'm a huge fan of SELinux although I find that it requires the sysadmin to be SERIOUSLY on his toes when configuring everything. You really need to know what you're doing or things will randomly break and you'll be left scratching your head.
I went to an Amazon's AWS talk in NYC a couple months ago where they brought some start-ups in to talk about their projects, the cloud and how the cloud helped them build their applications faster and better. During the opening talk, the speaker showed some use-cases, one including the New York Stock Exchange and how, at the closing bell, they provision over 3000 EC2 instances to crunch numbers overnight to be ready for the next morning.
A guy from a startup that I was talking to before we were seated was talking about how his company keeps between 5 and 10 instances up all the time for their application (dynamically bringing them up and down to scale with demand) and how they frequently had 4 and 5 sets of these servers running on the side for testing (20-40 instances at a time). He was talking about the metrics they were using to keep track of their use and how it was flawed due to the fact that they had hundreds of instances a day going up and down all the time.
Just because 50,000 instances are started per day doesn't mean that those 50,000 instances are running for any period of time. I frequently bring up an instance, tweak some things, create an image, then bring it down... or bring up an instance to test something for 20 minutes, then bring it down. EC2 has really benefitted my QA/Testing/Experimentation in that I really have an unlimited pool of resources to play with. It's a much more robust system than I have at home with VMWare... vmware was a gamechanger for me since before that, I had 2 physical servers at home and stacks of 40GB and 60GB HDs with multliple versions of OSs on them.
Of course AWS isn't for everyone. EC2 can be expensive for what they offer and the biggest advantage to AWS's services are that they are on-demand and work really well with applications that need to scale up AND down in real-time. If you've got an application that doesn't require to-the-minute scaling responses, it's less expensive to get a physical dedicated server with Xen on it and create your own virtual infrastructure... although if you don't have the skills or time to learn the tools, then AWS offers a much better learning curve.
My first reaction to this news is that MS is using this as a tactic to get people to upgrade to Win7. From what I understand, Win7 runs pretty well on netbooks; or maybe that's just what MS wants us to think. heh.
I'm incredibly curious, but I don't think I'm about to replace my S10's (Lenovo Netbook) Ubuntu OS with Win7.
you shouldn't need to type the http://./ that should be assumed. You don't type 'ftp://' in front of your ftp addresses in an FTP client, you shouldn't need to actually type it for a webbrowser. I can understand why it's displayed since the browser supports multiple protocols (http/https/rss)
I got annoyed at IE because it always used to redirect to livesearch when I typed in an IP (for my router) unless I put the http:/// in the front.
Domain hijacking is a huge deal for me. Primarily, when I'm on an internet connection that's hijacking the domain, if I type 'amazon', firefox first checks if I have an amazon in my searchdomain (ie: amazon.example.com), and if not, it tries adding a.com, then a www. and a.com... if the ISP is hijacking it, I get an answer to 'amazon' with the hijacked page. This means that I have to type the.com every time.
with a browser doing the same thing, I could be trying to connect to my primary server (wolverine) and if I mistype the webaddress, it redirects me to bing, changing my URL bar to the bing URL which means that when I've typed 'wolverine/some/really/long/path?with=variables' I have to go type that whole thing over again to correct it rather than just fixing it in the addressbar.
so, hijacking the DNS is a BITCH and is totally annoying all the time.
Ok, you're the next level up from me, then. I've got about 100 books, about 10-20 of which I use for reference regularly and about 50 that I haven't touched in 5+ years.
I feel that this problem is the same that plagues the music industry. My best example is the fact that I've got MP3s that I encoded from my own CDs back around 1999/2000. the CDs are now lost or damaged beyond repair (cannot be reliably ripped), the mp3s have missing tags, are encoded low quality and/or have become damaged themselves. I really wish record companies would give special deals on back-catalog content. Shit that's old enough that everyone who would buy it has bought it at least once already. The best example of that is Metallica. Even though I've purchased all their old stuff at least once in the past (tape, CD, vinyl), I'd buy the back catalog in a heartbeat if it was offered for cheap (say, $40 for everything up to the Black Album).
Same goes for O'Reilly. I would drop $50 to get PDF versions of all the books I already own (I dunno if I'd pay much more than that). Either that or make the Kindle compatible with Safari.
I think most problems have been solved when it comes to ebooks/ereaders... the last big one is for people with enormous libraries that they'd like to replace on the cheap.
Just think of how much easier it'll be if you have to move if you didn't have 2000+ books? I had a hell of a time with my small collection as it was, I don't even wanna picture your troubles.
erm, oh yeah... the internet has dark corners. dark corners indeed.
All future book purchases, I'm buying the PDF if it's available. I do occasionally re-buy older books when new editions come out.
I've purchased at least 2 versions of the O'Reilly MySQL, Javascript, and Python books. I've purchased 2 versions of the Pragmatic Agile Development with Rails book, too. So now, no more taking up extra space, no more waiting for books to ship and no more wishing I took the book(s) with me.
It cannot zoom, except to turn the device into landscape mode, which provides a small magnification. Fortunately, the software does automatically eliminate margins, making the screen about the right size for most documents. What's worse is that all of the annotation features available for ebooks and other documents do not work with PDFs; no highlighting, no note-taking, etc. I think it supports bookmarking, but that's it.
Yeah, those are my only issues with it so far (I've had it for almost 3 weeks).
I haven't had a need to zoom on any PDF yet, but the feature would be welcome. It supports bookmarks, but all you can do is 'dog-ear' the page. You can't leave a note about the bookmark.
hopefully they'll remedy this with an update in the near future.
Disclaimer: I own a KindleDX and am incredibly happy with it.
you have a lot of good points, but there are some things that you fail to recognize:
For one, the size and weight of books. For a casual reader, the KindleDX is overkill. It's large, expensive and the benefits don't outweigh the hassles (recharging, fragility, etc). For those of us that have large libraries of tech books, the KindleDX allows us to store our entire bookshelf on a single device that takes up less room and weighs significantly less than a single book.
This brings me to my second point: The Kindles (an ebook readers in general) have better displays for reading large quantities of text. It's easier on the eyes than a laptop. Also, for those of us that use mass transit to commute and don't always have a seat, a laptop is not an option. Have you ever tried to stand up in a crowded subway and use a laptop? Even sitting down and using the laptop is a pain. Laptop battery life is also significantly worse than the Kindle's--my kindle hasn't needed to be charged a single time since I got it nearly 3 weeks ago. It also beats out the laptop because you can travel light with it; you don't need to carry a laptop bag. All you need is the device, and since it doesn't require frequent charging, you don't even need to bring the charger (USB cable) with it.
Third point: When using ebooks for reference (or following a tutorial in the book) while you're doing work on the laptop, it's nice to have a separate device. This was one reason why I stuck to buying physical books rather than purchasing PDFs exclusively.
So, while $700 (KindleDX + tax + shipping + 2 year warranty + sleeve) is quite a steep price to pay, for those of us that will use it a lot, it's worth the price. If I wasn't in such need for the solution, I would have held off a year or so and waited for it to come down in price or for a cheaper solution to be released.
My coworker picked up the Sony PRS-700 a couple months ago and he's mostly very satisfied. It was around $375 + tax, but has a significantly smaller screen. Although it's got a touchscreen, the touchiness is kinda flakey and it's got some weird glare because of the touch surface. Also, PDF support in the thing is mediocre--the zoom sucks and it really needs a larger screen.
I was going to hold out for the PlasticLogic (http://www.plasticlogic.com/) but I was hoping for something that I could get real books on, too. Since I really liked the Kindle (my dad picked one up last year) and the features that come with it (cellular websurfing/wikipedia/wireless book delivery and books that you can buy FROM the device), I opted for the DX.
Like I said, the DX isn't for everyone. It's pretty big and it's expensive, but I feel that I'm definitely getting my money's worth.
"Accenture"? You mean Andersen Consulting? The people that you'd have to be a complete idiot to do business with after the Enron disaster?
I'm can't say that I'm familiar with what involvement they had with Enron, but I've had a half-dozen friends who have worked at Accenture and from what I know of them, they do pretty good work usually.
The key point is that MS was involved with development. Several people I've talked to about this article have said ".NET is NOT ready for enterprise applications of this scale with those requirements." If that's such a well-known fact, you'd have thought that MS would have thrown a red flag up and pressured to have a different tech used for the project.
Maybe this was just a learning experiment for MS (like the first xbox and first couple zunes) and they could afford to lose such a high-profile customer. But that just proves that no matter how big you are, MS doesn't really care about you. Why make the best when good enough sells better?
You say it's not Windows' fault and I agree--it wasn't an OS problem (per se), but rather an application issue. In actuality, it's Microsoft's fault; the application was developed in joint by Accenture AND Microsoft. With the requirements not being met that it be a high-performance, real-time application and the fact that they were unable to deliver even with MS being involved made them lose faith in the company and their products (.NET, Windows Server, SQL server).
I'd say that if MS wasn't involved in the development of the app that it's possible that they would scrap the app rather than the OS/framework, but if I was in that position, I'd do the same thing.
It's possible that they also look at the chicago stock exchange and the NYSE and the fact that their apps are running on Linux and have decided to move to a proven, successful system.
Most print companies like Xerox have their own proprietary Document management [wikipedia.org] tools you can buy
Document management software is great, but when you have enormous numbers of documents (100s of thousands like in the summary), it becomes necessary to have a content management system in place. Something that's intelligent enough to break the documents up into pieces and allow searches, but something more robust than full-text search.
We've been using this software called MarkLogic Server (http://marklogic.com). It's an XML database and has a content processing framework for document ingestion. So, basically, assuming that documents are structured similarly, they can be converted into XML so they can be queried with custom weights being applied to content in different portions of the document. The software has built-in Word support so it'll automatically convert.doc files with proper formatting as well as the ability to add custom handlers for other formats including plaintext.
We're currently managing a couple million documents and generating dynamic documents on the fly for some processes. Since on-the-fly documents may take time to generate, we have a system in place that saves the result in the database which can also be queried at a later date. It's all really cool.
Of course, there's a bit of a learning curve to writing your own software for it since it uses XQuery, but it's not much harder to learn than SQL, and so far, it seems to be far more powerful.
Disclaimer: I'm not a shill nor am I being paid in any way by MarkLogic... I'm just seriously blown away by what their technology has enabled us to do.
I totally understand why they do it... however what upsets me is that they treat new customers (who potentially could be really crappy customers) better than customers that have been with them for years. There's no points for loyalty with AT&T anymore; that seems to have gone out the window around the same time they originally merged with Cingular. I've got stories, but this isn't the place for that.
Luckily I haven't purchased new hardware from AT&T in about 2 years. My first gen iPhone was given to me through work (from the boss when he upgraded to his 3G), so I qualified for reduced pricing.
Since ESXi became free, I've installed it on several servers at work. The problem is that its hardware requirements are pretty specific. It won't install on just any PC. It would be nice if I could install it on some of the older servers we have kicking around (DL-140s) or some decommissioned desktops, but it just doesn't support those pieces of hardware.
The primary reason that Server's disk I/O performance is so horrid is that your VM's disk(s) is being stored as a file on the host OS's filesystem. That causes extra layers of system calls to access files in the guest OS. Between talking to the virtual disk that has to get translated to physical disk, plus the guest OS's filesystem, which appears to the guest as a contiguous physical disk, may become fragmented on the host OS; double fragmentation can occur which causes SERIOUS performance penalties. ESX has a specialized vmfs that it uses to store your images which is designed for VM performance.
Personally, I would recommend Xen over ESX if you don't have the proper hardware and/or don't want to pay licensing fees. Although it's got a higher learning curve, it's easier to automate (especially since ESXi got rid of CLI support) and there are a plethora of free tools and documentation around. Being that ESX isn't free, it's harder to find support in forums other than VMWare's own site.
Also, VMWare Server's performance in general leaves a lot to be desired. I would *never* use it for production systems. I've had it installed on machines with 6x15K SaS drives (this is before ESXi) and 8 cores and it would start to choke after about 4 or 5 VMs. Plus VMWare Server doesn't handle multi-core VMs very well. Incredible performance issues arise and you're better off creating your application to scale out to multiple single-core VMs rather than make them dual-core. Server also doesn't handle memory nearly as well as the Type1 hypervisors that Xen and ESX use.
Up to now, every "cloud" solution has been completely different, meaning that once you invest in getting one to work, you lose much of that investment if try moving to another.... Open source would change all that.
I've actually been hearing about a couple of startups (I don't have their names handy) that are creating integration software for different virtualization and cloud computing platforms. The example they gave me was how we could tie our VMWare infrastructure (ESX and VMWare Server installs) to future growth using amazon's EC2 all from a single control application. Their software could even allow us to deploy our ESX images to EC2 and vice versa. It seemed really interesting although they don't yet have a working demo from what I understand. They're also planning on supporting Eucalyptus and other cloud-based virtualization services.
About the open source stuff... I think I must be missing something, but what exactly would be the point of open sourcing EC2? What would they opensource? Their client tools all use openly published APIs for communicating with AWS and their imaging tools seem pretty straight forward. I believe the way they work is published, too. What am I missing? What would the advantage be to opensource their backend tools that we never see anyway?
you're right, actually. But you can't name the bookmarks like on the 700; so if you have a bunch of bookmarks, then you can't tell the difference between them... of course it's the same functionality as dog-earing the book.
I dunno. After playing with sony's offering I just didn't have the feeling that I HAD to buy one. The Kindle, I want and I don't know why. It just feels awesome, but until the DX model with bigger screen and PDF support, I couldn't justify the purchase.
I've used both the 505 and the 700, but I was referring to the 700 in the post. I only played with the 505 in the store, but my co-worker bought the 700.
I probably would have bought a 505, but it didn't have the ability to create bookmarks and the interface for clicking links on pages and whatnot was kinda clunky without touch.
The 700 could be much, much better, but the things that are holding it back are teh things that could potentially make it great.
My biggest issue with it is the screen. It's got an insane amount of glare because it's got a touchscreen covering. It's also got LED lighting, but it's not very good. The quality of the touchscreen leaves a lot to be desired, too. The hand gestures to turn the pages only pick up the gesture about half the time. My co-worker bought one and I almost did, too. I'm glad I held back and decided to borrow my co-worker's 700. Playing with it in the store made me want it really bad.
I'm curious what other ebook readers you're looking at. So far, I've used a Foxit eBook reader, Sony PRS-700, kindle, iPhone and various computers.
The Foxit totally sucks. It's got a nice formfactor, but it's slow and difficult to read PDFs without having the text get wrapped and lose all spacing (sometimeswordsgetjumbledtogetherlikethis).
The Sony reader is pretty good except that the glare totally sucks and when reading PDFs, it's only got pre-set zoom levels; no fit-to-width, so the text is constantly either too small or it's the right size, but wraps all over the place.
I was waiting for the PlasticLogic to come out (something like mid 2010, last I heard). It's a good size, so PDFs will render well and it seems fast and very sturdy.
I haven't had a chance to check out any ePub books, yet, but I've heard good things. The only problem is that Amazon has a HUGE selection of eBooks for the kindle and ePub doesn't have that many commercial books; at least, I was only able to find 1 book I wanted in ePub format and 2 or 3 in PDF format.
Considering that books from O'Reilly, Pragmatic Programmers and other tech publishers are available only in PDF (since the kindle format doesn't support fonts for code snippets), I feel like the new KindleDX is the perfect solution--not only does it allow me to buy the most widely available eBook format but it also allows me to read PDFs on an acceptably large screen.
I tried to hold off, but I HAD to preorder the KindleDX... I'm a little concerned that it's not gonna be as good as I hope, but I think it'll be a good purchase in the longrun. I really hope that amazon/publishers come to their senses and stop with this garbage of disabling TTS or other features.
When I first moved to NYC from New Jersey about 5 years ago, my friends were freaking out about the fact that I was paying about 20% more in rent. Once I did the math, I was able to show that I was saving significantly more money by not having a car between gas, maintenance, tolls, parking, insurance, etc. I get an unlimited metrocard for the same cost that I was spending on gas every month (this is in 2004, so I was spending about $60-70/month).
When I moved back to jerz, I opted to not get a car. I still worked in the city and would walk about a mile to the train station every day and take the train in... the monthly train pass was around $250, and I could avoid getting a metrocard since I could walk to work from the train station. Although the monthly cost of a car would probably be under $250, the up-front cost of the car just didn't make me want to get one.
Now that I'm living in NY again, I just take the subway everywhere. I really wish there was better public transportation outside of major metropolitan areas.
In today's Virtual world, physical access to the machine doesn't mean meatspace access. My company and several of my friend's companies are looking into virtualized desktops by using small desktop boxes and low-end PCs to connect to PCs in the datacenter over either RDP or other proprietary protocols.
With the proliferation of cloud-based applications, it's only a matter of time before someone offers a browser-based virtual desktop in the cloud. Once someone hacks into some server up there, they have physical access to the machines for all intents and purposes.
This is a very interesting threat from a virtual infrastructure security standpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
The "try before you buy" excuse ... Pure bullshit. Honestly, it's difficult to take people that say these things seriously.
Being someone who has done his fair share of pirating, I have another theory about this.
I, and other people I know who pirate games (Xbox360, wii, etc) will actually download and install/burn EVERY piece of software that comes out. I have friends who have binders and binders of games that they never play. Frequently, we play even less of the game than would be available on the demo.
Now, this correlates with the article in that it's only been a week since they released the title and they're having an 80% piracy rate. This is because these people are downloading and installing every single game that's coming out, playing it a bit, then moving on to the next game. Assuming that piracy was unavailable, I doubt that they'd have even tried this game.
I think the guy is jumping the gun on his conclusions and should wait a month or two and post and update on his piracy findings. I'm certain that the numbers piracy rate will drop.
New York - Central Park
I actually just saw one of these guys today at Rockefeller Center:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/spike666/4017224220/
If anything, it shows that you can work in a highly regulated field that moves a LOT of money around at a LOT of locations with HIGH security.
I agree 100%.
Much like working in the porn industry (on the tech side, I mean), they [generally] use the latest and greatest of technologies and practices for security. The gambling industry was one of the first to utilize large deployments of quantum random number generators among other, similar technologies.
Personally, I think that when it comes to quality of experience, I think banks, porn and gambling companies are at the bleeding edge of tech and the exposure to their technologies will make you a better developer.
I'll take "when hell freezes over" in place of "once in a blue moon" any day of the week.
I agree completely, although I have seen systems breached because of mismanaged keypairs, misconfigured applications, and mismanaged permissions. Even without password logins, an insecure PHP script could potentially obliterate that layer of security.
I've gotten into the habit of chmod'ing my keypairs to 600 (and chmod'ing the .ssh directory they live in as 700) ever since a php script was exploited to fetch the keys on a friend's server. I know Redhat/CentOS is smart enough to not allow that, but it's still a real threat especially on shared boxes. You've also got to be careful about the authorized_keys2 file.
I'm a huge fan of SELinux although I find that it requires the sysadmin to be SERIOUSLY on his toes when configuring everything. You really need to know what you're doing or things will randomly break and you'll be left scratching your head.
I went to an Amazon's AWS talk in NYC a couple months ago where they brought some start-ups in to talk about their projects, the cloud and how the cloud helped them build their applications faster and better. During the opening talk, the speaker showed some use-cases, one including the New York Stock Exchange and how, at the closing bell, they provision over 3000 EC2 instances to crunch numbers overnight to be ready for the next morning.
A guy from a startup that I was talking to before we were seated was talking about how his company keeps between 5 and 10 instances up all the time for their application (dynamically bringing them up and down to scale with demand) and how they frequently had 4 and 5 sets of these servers running on the side for testing (20-40 instances at a time). He was talking about the metrics they were using to keep track of their use and how it was flawed due to the fact that they had hundreds of instances a day going up and down all the time.
Just because 50,000 instances are started per day doesn't mean that those 50,000 instances are running for any period of time. I frequently bring up an instance, tweak some things, create an image, then bring it down... or bring up an instance to test something for 20 minutes, then bring it down. EC2 has really benefitted my QA/Testing/Experimentation in that I really have an unlimited pool of resources to play with. It's a much more robust system than I have at home with VMWare... vmware was a gamechanger for me since before that, I had 2 physical servers at home and stacks of 40GB and 60GB HDs with multliple versions of OSs on them.
Of course AWS isn't for everyone. EC2 can be expensive for what they offer and the biggest advantage to AWS's services are that they are on-demand and work really well with applications that need to scale up AND down in real-time. If you've got an application that doesn't require to-the-minute scaling responses, it's less expensive to get a physical dedicated server with Xen on it and create your own virtual infrastructure... although if you don't have the skills or time to learn the tools, then AWS offers a much better learning curve.
My first reaction to this news is that MS is using this as a tactic to get people to upgrade to Win7. From what I understand, Win7 runs pretty well on netbooks; or maybe that's just what MS wants us to think. heh.
I'm incredibly curious, but I don't think I'm about to replace my S10's (Lenovo Netbook) Ubuntu OS with Win7.
you shouldn't need to type the http://./ that should be assumed. You don't type 'ftp://' in front of your ftp addresses in an FTP client, you shouldn't need to actually type it for a webbrowser. I can understand why it's displayed since the browser supports multiple protocols (http/https/rss)
I got annoyed at IE because it always used to redirect to livesearch when I typed in an IP (for my router) unless I put the http:/// in the front.
I'm annoyed at browser behavior far too often.
Domain hijacking is a huge deal for me. Primarily, when I'm on an internet connection that's hijacking the domain, if I type 'amazon', firefox first checks if I have an amazon in my searchdomain (ie: amazon.example.com), and if not, it tries adding a .com, then a www. and a .com... if the ISP is hijacking it, I get an answer to 'amazon' with the hijacked page. This means that I have to type the .com every time.
with a browser doing the same thing, I could be trying to connect to my primary server (wolverine) and if I mistype the webaddress, it redirects me to bing, changing my URL bar to the bing URL which means that when I've typed 'wolverine/some/really/long/path?with=variables' I have to go type that whole thing over again to correct it rather than just fixing it in the addressbar.
so, hijacking the DNS is a BITCH and is totally annoying all the time.
Who needs a reference guide for PHP 1.0 anymore?
yeah, right now you're saying that, but in 15 years, that shit will be awesome to show off.
I've still got the first edition of The C Programming Language (in addition to the second edition).
Ok, you're the next level up from me, then. I've got about 100 books, about 10-20 of which I use for reference regularly and about 50 that I haven't touched in 5+ years.
I feel that this problem is the same that plagues the music industry. My best example is the fact that I've got MP3s that I encoded from my own CDs back around 1999/2000. the CDs are now lost or damaged beyond repair (cannot be reliably ripped), the mp3s have missing tags, are encoded low quality and/or have become damaged themselves. I really wish record companies would give special deals on back-catalog content. Shit that's old enough that everyone who would buy it has bought it at least once already. The best example of that is Metallica. Even though I've purchased all their old stuff at least once in the past (tape, CD, vinyl), I'd buy the back catalog in a heartbeat if it was offered for cheap (say, $40 for everything up to the Black Album).
Same goes for O'Reilly. I would drop $50 to get PDF versions of all the books I already own (I dunno if I'd pay much more than that). Either that or make the Kindle compatible with Safari.
I think most problems have been solved when it comes to ebooks/ereaders... the last big one is for people with enormous libraries that they'd like to replace on the cheap.
Just think of how much easier it'll be if you have to move if you didn't have 2000+ books? I had a hell of a time with my small collection as it was, I don't even wanna picture your troubles.
erm, oh yeah... the internet has dark corners. dark corners indeed.
All future book purchases, I'm buying the PDF if it's available. I do occasionally re-buy older books when new editions come out.
I've purchased at least 2 versions of the O'Reilly MySQL, Javascript, and Python books. I've purchased 2 versions of the Pragmatic Agile Development with Rails book, too. So now, no more taking up extra space, no more waiting for books to ship and no more wishing I took the book(s) with me.
It cannot zoom, except to turn the device into landscape mode, which provides a small magnification. Fortunately, the software does automatically eliminate margins, making the screen about the right size for most documents. What's worse is that all of the annotation features available for ebooks and other documents do not work with PDFs; no highlighting, no note-taking, etc. I think it supports bookmarking, but that's it.
Yeah, those are my only issues with it so far (I've had it for almost 3 weeks).
I haven't had a need to zoom on any PDF yet, but the feature would be welcome. It supports bookmarks, but all you can do is 'dog-ear' the page. You can't leave a note about the bookmark.
hopefully they'll remedy this with an update in the near future.
Disclaimer: I own a KindleDX and am incredibly happy with it.
you have a lot of good points, but there are some things that you fail to recognize:
For one, the size and weight of books. For a casual reader, the KindleDX is overkill. It's large, expensive and the benefits don't outweigh the hassles (recharging, fragility, etc). For those of us that have large libraries of tech books, the KindleDX allows us to store our entire bookshelf on a single device that takes up less room and weighs significantly less than a single book.
This brings me to my second point: The Kindles (an ebook readers in general) have better displays for reading large quantities of text. It's easier on the eyes than a laptop. Also, for those of us that use mass transit to commute and don't always have a seat, a laptop is not an option. Have you ever tried to stand up in a crowded subway and use a laptop? Even sitting down and using the laptop is a pain. Laptop battery life is also significantly worse than the Kindle's--my kindle hasn't needed to be charged a single time since I got it nearly 3 weeks ago. It also beats out the laptop because you can travel light with it; you don't need to carry a laptop bag. All you need is the device, and since it doesn't require frequent charging, you don't even need to bring the charger (USB cable) with it.
Third point: When using ebooks for reference (or following a tutorial in the book) while you're doing work on the laptop, it's nice to have a separate device. This was one reason why I stuck to buying physical books rather than purchasing PDFs exclusively.
So, while $700 (KindleDX + tax + shipping + 2 year warranty + sleeve) is quite a steep price to pay, for those of us that will use it a lot, it's worth the price. If I wasn't in such need for the solution, I would have held off a year or so and waited for it to come down in price or for a cheaper solution to be released.
My coworker picked up the Sony PRS-700 a couple months ago and he's mostly very satisfied. It was around $375 + tax, but has a significantly smaller screen. Although it's got a touchscreen, the touchiness is kinda flakey and it's got some weird glare because of the touch surface. Also, PDF support in the thing is mediocre--the zoom sucks and it really needs a larger screen.
I was going to hold out for the PlasticLogic (http://www.plasticlogic.com/) but I was hoping for something that I could get real books on, too. Since I really liked the Kindle (my dad picked one up last year) and the features that come with it (cellular websurfing/wikipedia/wireless book delivery and books that you can buy FROM the device), I opted for the DX.
Like I said, the DX isn't for everyone. It's pretty big and it's expensive, but I feel that I'm definitely getting my money's worth.
"Accenture"? You mean Andersen Consulting? The people that you'd have to be a complete idiot to do business with after the Enron disaster?
I'm can't say that I'm familiar with what involvement they had with Enron, but I've had a half-dozen friends who have worked at Accenture and from what I know of them, they do pretty good work usually.
The key point is that MS was involved with development. Several people I've talked to about this article have said ".NET is NOT ready for enterprise applications of this scale with those requirements." If that's such a well-known fact, you'd have thought that MS would have thrown a red flag up and pressured to have a different tech used for the project.
Maybe this was just a learning experiment for MS (like the first xbox and first couple zunes) and they could afford to lose such a high-profile customer. But that just proves that no matter how big you are, MS doesn't really care about you. Why make the best when good enough sells better?
It's not Windows vs Linux.
You say it's not Windows' fault and I agree--it wasn't an OS problem (per se), but rather an application issue. In actuality, it's Microsoft's fault; the application was developed in joint by Accenture AND Microsoft. With the requirements not being met that it be a high-performance, real-time application and the fact that they were unable to deliver even with MS being involved made them lose faith in the company and their products (.NET, Windows Server, SQL server).
I'd say that if MS wasn't involved in the development of the app that it's possible that they would scrap the app rather than the OS/framework, but if I was in that position, I'd do the same thing.
It's possible that they also look at the chicago stock exchange and the NYSE and the fact that their apps are running on Linux and have decided to move to a proven, successful system.
Most print companies like Xerox have their own proprietary Document management [wikipedia.org] tools you can buy
Document management software is great, but when you have enormous numbers of documents (100s of thousands like in the summary), it becomes necessary to have a content management system in place. Something that's intelligent enough to break the documents up into pieces and allow searches, but something more robust than full-text search.
We've been using this software called MarkLogic Server (http://marklogic.com). It's an XML database and has a content processing framework for document ingestion. So, basically, assuming that documents are structured similarly, they can be converted into XML so they can be queried with custom weights being applied to content in different portions of the document. The software has built-in Word support so it'll automatically convert .doc files with proper formatting as well as the ability to add custom handlers for other formats including plaintext.
We're currently managing a couple million documents and generating dynamic documents on the fly for some processes. Since on-the-fly documents may take time to generate, we have a system in place that saves the result in the database which can also be queried at a later date. It's all really cool.
Of course, there's a bit of a learning curve to writing your own software for it since it uses XQuery, but it's not much harder to learn than SQL, and so far, it seems to be far more powerful.
Disclaimer: I'm not a shill nor am I being paid in any way by MarkLogic... I'm just seriously blown away by what their technology has enabled us to do.
I totally understand why they do it... however what upsets me is that they treat new customers (who potentially could be really crappy customers) better than customers that have been with them for years. There's no points for loyalty with AT&T anymore; that seems to have gone out the window around the same time they originally merged with Cingular. I've got stories, but this isn't the place for that.
Luckily I haven't purchased new hardware from AT&T in about 2 years. My first gen iPhone was given to me through work (from the boss when he upgraded to his 3G), so I qualified for reduced pricing.
Use ESXi. Its free.
Since ESXi became free, I've installed it on several servers at work. The problem is that its hardware requirements are pretty specific. It won't install on just any PC. It would be nice if I could install it on some of the older servers we have kicking around (DL-140s) or some decommissioned desktops, but it just doesn't support those pieces of hardware.
The primary reason that Server's disk I/O performance is so horrid is that your VM's disk(s) is being stored as a file on the host OS's filesystem. That causes extra layers of system calls to access files in the guest OS. Between talking to the virtual disk that has to get translated to physical disk, plus the guest OS's filesystem, which appears to the guest as a contiguous physical disk, may become fragmented on the host OS; double fragmentation can occur which causes SERIOUS performance penalties. ESX has a specialized vmfs that it uses to store your images which is designed for VM performance.
Personally, I would recommend Xen over ESX if you don't have the proper hardware and/or don't want to pay licensing fees. Although it's got a higher learning curve, it's easier to automate (especially since ESXi got rid of CLI support) and there are a plethora of free tools and documentation around. Being that ESX isn't free, it's harder to find support in forums other than VMWare's own site.
Also, VMWare Server's performance in general leaves a lot to be desired. I would *never* use it for production systems. I've had it installed on machines with 6x15K SaS drives (this is before ESXi) and 8 cores and it would start to choke after about 4 or 5 VMs. Plus VMWare Server doesn't handle multi-core VMs very well. Incredible performance issues arise and you're better off creating your application to scale out to multiple single-core VMs rather than make them dual-core. Server also doesn't handle memory nearly as well as the Type1 hypervisors that Xen and ESX use.
Up to now, every "cloud" solution has been completely different, meaning that once you invest in getting one to work, you lose much of that investment if try moving to another. ... Open source would change all that.
I've actually been hearing about a couple of startups (I don't have their names handy) that are creating integration software for different virtualization and cloud computing platforms. The example they gave me was how we could tie our VMWare infrastructure (ESX and VMWare Server installs) to future growth using amazon's EC2 all from a single control application. Their software could even allow us to deploy our ESX images to EC2 and vice versa. It seemed really interesting although they don't yet have a working demo from what I understand. They're also planning on supporting Eucalyptus and other cloud-based virtualization services.
About the open source stuff... I think I must be missing something, but what exactly would be the point of open sourcing EC2? What would they opensource? Their client tools all use openly published APIs for communicating with AWS and their imaging tools seem pretty straight forward. I believe the way they work is published, too. What am I missing? What would the advantage be to opensource their backend tools that we never see anyway?
you're right, actually. But you can't name the bookmarks like on the 700; so if you have a bunch of bookmarks, then you can't tell the difference between them... of course it's the same functionality as dog-earing the book.
I dunno. After playing with sony's offering I just didn't have the feeling that I HAD to buy one. The Kindle, I want and I don't know why. It just feels awesome, but until the DX model with bigger screen and PDF support, I couldn't justify the purchase.
I've used both the 505 and the 700, but I was referring to the 700 in the post. I only played with the 505 in the store, but my co-worker bought the 700.
I probably would have bought a 505, but it didn't have the ability to create bookmarks and the interface for clicking links on pages and whatnot was kinda clunky without touch.
The 700 could be much, much better, but the things that are holding it back are teh things that could potentially make it great.
My biggest issue with it is the screen. It's got an insane amount of glare because it's got a touchscreen covering. It's also got LED lighting, but it's not very good. The quality of the touchscreen leaves a lot to be desired, too. The hand gestures to turn the pages only pick up the gesture about half the time. My co-worker bought one and I almost did, too. I'm glad I held back and decided to borrow my co-worker's 700. Playing with it in the store made me want it really bad.
I'm curious what other ebook readers you're looking at. So far, I've used a Foxit eBook reader, Sony PRS-700, kindle, iPhone and various computers.
The Foxit totally sucks. It's got a nice formfactor, but it's slow and difficult to read PDFs without having the text get wrapped and lose all spacing (sometimeswordsgetjumbledtogetherlikethis).
The Sony reader is pretty good except that the glare totally sucks and when reading PDFs, it's only got pre-set zoom levels; no fit-to-width, so the text is constantly either too small or it's the right size, but wraps all over the place.
I was waiting for the PlasticLogic to come out (something like mid 2010, last I heard). It's a good size, so PDFs will render well and it seems fast and very sturdy.
I haven't had a chance to check out any ePub books, yet, but I've heard good things. The only problem is that Amazon has a HUGE selection of eBooks for the kindle and ePub doesn't have that many commercial books; at least, I was only able to find 1 book I wanted in ePub format and 2 or 3 in PDF format.
Considering that books from O'Reilly, Pragmatic Programmers and other tech publishers are available only in PDF (since the kindle format doesn't support fonts for code snippets), I feel like the new KindleDX is the perfect solution--not only does it allow me to buy the most widely available eBook format but it also allows me to read PDFs on an acceptably large screen.
I tried to hold off, but I HAD to preorder the KindleDX... I'm a little concerned that it's not gonna be as good as I hope, but I think it'll be a good purchase in the longrun. I really hope that amazon/publishers come to their senses and stop with this garbage of disabling TTS or other features.
When I first moved to NYC from New Jersey about 5 years ago, my friends were freaking out about the fact that I was paying about 20% more in rent. Once I did the math, I was able to show that I was saving significantly more money by not having a car between gas, maintenance, tolls, parking, insurance, etc. I get an unlimited metrocard for the same cost that I was spending on gas every month (this is in 2004, so I was spending about $60-70/month).
When I moved back to jerz, I opted to not get a car. I still worked in the city and would walk about a mile to the train station every day and take the train in... the monthly train pass was around $250, and I could avoid getting a metrocard since I could walk to work from the train station. Although the monthly cost of a car would probably be under $250, the up-front cost of the car just didn't make me want to get one.
Now that I'm living in NY again, I just take the subway everywhere. I really wish there was better public transportation outside of major metropolitan areas.
In today's Virtual world, physical access to the machine doesn't mean meatspace access. My company and several of my friend's companies are looking into virtualized desktops by using small desktop boxes and low-end PCs to connect to PCs in the datacenter over either RDP or other proprietary protocols.
With the proliferation of cloud-based applications, it's only a matter of time before someone offers a browser-based virtual desktop in the cloud. Once someone hacks into some server up there, they have physical access to the machines for all intents and purposes.
This is a very interesting threat from a virtual infrastructure security standpoint.