I'm not a big fan of the Paperwhite for the same reason I wouldn't like the Glowlight. No physical buttons. Well, that and the glowy part. I only bought the Gen3 Kindle because it was the last e-reader on the planet that still had physical buttons. Then they got rid of those.
This is too expensive (but not that much more expensive than my PocketBook 360 back in the day) but if my existing Kindles ever die or get broken (I broke a screen on one a month or so back) then I might consider it, just on the strength of the physical buttons.
I brought my entire e-book collection over from the Sony to the PocketBook to the Kindle. It would be no problem for Calibre and me to switch to a different device. *My* format is epub. I don't care what format my devices use, as long as I can convert them over. It's just a display format, but my primary storage is under my control.
I store music as FLAC. Do I care that my car only plays MP3? Not in the least. There's a script for that.
Or rather, my Calibre-equiped PC and my Kindle together have epub support.
I only ever buy non-DRM epubs. I edit them using Calibre to eliminate the right-justified margins and then convert them to Amazon's format. I've never actually gotten an ebook from Amazon, all my books are side-loaded.
This looks like a reboot of the PocketBook 360. In my opinion, the PB360 was the best e-reader ever built, other than the screen. It had the crappy screen that was the best available at the time -- the newer Kindles have much better screens. The 360 had a built in accelerometer that would automatically flip the orientation, or you could lock it into whichever orientation you wanted. It was the most *natural* feeling reading experience -- the buttons were right where you wanted them.
Now, if only they'd copy the (open source) software that the 360 had. It had much better book organization features. If you wanted to put your books into your own folder structure, it would show them to you in the way you wanted.
Qualcomm had a color reflective display that was supposedly fairly vivid, called Mirasol. They were positioning it for e-readers, but then it seemed to vanish. It wasn't e-ink, it was supposedly based on the same sort of principle that gives a butterfly's wings color -- diffraction or something similar. They also claimed that it didn't have the slow refresh issues that e-ink has -- you could apparently do video with it. Their prototypes were fairly expensive, but it might have been worth it.
For wireless connections, Network Manager seems to work fairly well.
But in my experience, it's nothing but trouble for wired connections. Why is that?
I have no idea. But I have discovered that if I want my workstations to reliably connect to the wired network, I have to rip out all vestiges of NM and configure the "old fashioned" config files. Before I started doing that I could count on at least one computer in a lab refusing to connect to the network until it was rebooted. Maybe several times. And it was non-deterministic -- it wasn't the same computer every time.
Sure, it works most of the time. But that 3 or 4 percent chance that it would give up was enough to give me fits.
Back in the VHS days, I can remember *not* spending $90 for some titles. I looked at the price and said, no thanks. Having the entire cast and crew show up to my house to play it for me live wouldn't have been worth that.
I've purchased 5 or 6 Kindles over the years, primarily as a result of loss or breakage. I got a couple of spares when they eliminated the last design with buttons.
In all that time, after having read several hundred books on those devices, I have never yet bought an e-book from Amazon. I still buy a ton of p-books from them, but I get my e-books elsewhere and use Calibre to convert and transfer them.
My Kindles are not allowed to know my wifi password. Along with my smart-tv.
That's why they do it. The official line is "Don't replace the kernel unless you have a reason to."
Kernels update automatically as part of the graphical process. The kernel replacement procedure above is to change kernel versions. I've currently go 3.16.0-38 installed. As long as I don't do anything, any updates to 3.16.0-38 will automatically be installed.
If I want a newer version of the kernel I can bring up the kernel upgrade dialog mentioned above and scroll down through all the available kernels. I note that 3.19.0-33 has a check mark in the "recommended" column. Versions up to 4.2.0-30 are in the list, but only certain ones have the "recommended" status.
Seems user-friendly enough to me. Enough detail to help someone who wants to upgrade, hidden enough to discourage someone who really shouldn't, and automatic enough to keep the current version safely up to date.
The point here is it doesn't matter at all whose phone it is, or whether they have permission to break into this phone. It doesn't matter what's on this phone, or how important it is to get that information.
It has nothing to do with *this* phone. Whatever they do will be to all iPhones. They are being requested to design a backdoor for iPhones. After they do that, it will exist.
Maybe. My mother is coming up on 83, and anything involving a touchscreen is not an option for her. She has trouble seeing changes that pop up and then go away -- TV's with onscreen displays are also a challenge for the same reason.
I don't know that Ubuntu would be better -- some of the same issues. Switching her from XP to Win7 was a challenge. If I'd started her out on Mint at the beginning, before we got her XP I'd say we'd have had an easier go at it, but Mint wasn't even around then and even Ubuntu was pretty raw (Breezy, I think.) Mint as it is now? Sure, I'd go for that. But I'm not going to try to convert her at this point.
I use the YRO feed as input to a class I'm teaching, since it parallels much of the subject matter of the class. I go over interesting tidbits with the class to inject a bit of "current events" into our discussions.
Even before Dice took over, I'd scratch my head over some of the completely unrelated articles that made their way into the feed, and some obviously pertinent ones that got left out. Under Dice it got worse, to the point that I ended up writing a filter to block things that obviously didn't belong and add in some were left out but should have been there.
While *I* am interested in MIT's ARC reactor, what *possible* relationship does it have with "Your Rights Online"?
When the new management took over, I was hoping I could retire that filter. No such luck -- the "irrelevancy" score is now approaching 50%, and since the choice of what to block and what to add is all manual, it's become a real pain in the butt to maintain.
On the other hand, I'm glad I have the filter, because the raw feed would be unusable.
If the bootloader is locked but is designed to be unlocked because the manufacturer and/or Google has provided a key, that's not the same as a phone that has a locked bootloader and someone had to use a security exploit to break it. The article you linked to on the Nexus 6 shows you how to get to the unlock mechanism built in to the phone. No reverse engineering needed.
Or more to the point, what everybody seems to be OMGing about is a stupid issue.
If *anybody* sent classified material via email, that's a big deal. Email is a fucking postcard. It doesn't matter in the least whether it was on a private server or a server in the heart of the NSA. Unless the parties involved used good encryption to send the message, the crime is in using email in the first place.
And if they did use good encryption, then the choice of server is a relatively minor issue again.
So if you want to be outraged, be outraged that *anybody* in government is using email. Who gives a shit if it was on a private server or not?
Back in the dotcom days, I had a developer that wanted to clean his home directory up. He suspected that the dotfiles were corrupt, so he figured the best thing to do was get rid of them all and start over.
He issued the command (from his home directory): rm -rfa.*
I have no idea why he was doing that as root. When the command that he expected to take a fraction of a second didn't come back immediately he realized something was wrong and hit Ctl-C, but it had already done quite a bit of damage.
We had backups -- he lost less than a week of work. But that was still a lot.
2013 Fusion here. I have to agree that Ford's *interface* design is fairly intuitive. I'm a bit less impressed with its implementation -- too much doesn't work reliably, and I'm *really* unimpressed with the fact that the system had to remove features with each new iteration of the software, just in order to improve stability. The clock changes when you change time zones, based on the GPS, but it *doesn't* support daylight savings time? Really? (It used to...)
I was glad to hear that the next version of software will *not* be Microsoft/Flash based, but I think they're tossing the baby out with the bathwater by changing the interface radically (and going "flat.") I'd blame its stability problems on the platform, the interface was good.
In any case, it won't matter much to me -- I expect to keep the car another 8 or 9 years. I'm sure the software landscape will have changed radically in that time, but my current hardware isn't going to support anything more than what it has now.
Sigil is abandonware, unfortunately. You can still get it to install, but that might not last forever. I'm not aware of a version that's in any repository, but you can find packages for various distros. Building it from source is a bit of a bear, so I'd recommend a binary package.
For repairing bad epubs, the ebook editor that is now built into Calibre is better than Sigil was. On the other hand, Sigil allows you to create a new ebook fairly easily, whereas the Calibre editor is explicitly not designed for that. I've used Sigil to take HTML formatted files and create pretty decently formatted ebooks.
They had plenty of *capacity* for commenting -- depending on your budget for punch cards. You could use most of 80 columns for each line of comment (and a card for each line.) I seem to remember putting a "C" in the first column for a comment with FORTRAN, don't remember what the convention in Pascal was.
But it was cumbersome, and there probably wasn't much of a culture of commenting, so if you're dealing with that old code, you might not find many comments.
I'm a little disturbed by their use of the term "customers". It's a bad sign that they consider patent applicants to be customers. It implies that it's their job to grant patents--denying a patent would not be serving their customers.
Yeah, I know, this isn't new. It's been their attitude for years, but I hate having our noses rubbed in it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a big fan of the Paperwhite for the same reason I wouldn't like the Glowlight. No physical buttons. Well, that and the glowy part. I only bought the Gen3 Kindle because it was the last e-reader on the planet that still had physical buttons. Then they got rid of those.
This is too expensive (but not that much more expensive than my PocketBook 360 back in the day) but if my existing Kindles ever die or get broken (I broke a screen on one a month or so back) then I might consider it, just on the strength of the physical buttons.
I brought my entire e-book collection over from the Sony to the PocketBook to the Kindle. It would be no problem for Calibre and me to switch to a different device. *My* format is epub. I don't care what format my devices use, as long as I can convert them over. It's just a display format, but my primary storage is under my control.
I store music as FLAC. Do I care that my car only plays MP3? Not in the least. There's a script for that.
My Kindle has epub support.
Or rather, my Calibre-equiped PC and my Kindle together have epub support.
I only ever buy non-DRM epubs. I edit them using Calibre to eliminate the right-justified margins and then convert them to Amazon's format. I've never actually gotten an ebook from Amazon, all my books are side-loaded.
This looks like a reboot of the PocketBook 360. In my opinion, the PB360 was the best e-reader ever built, other than the screen. It had the crappy screen that was the best available at the time -- the newer Kindles have much better screens. The 360 had a built in accelerometer that would automatically flip the orientation, or you could lock it into whichever orientation you wanted. It was the most *natural* feeling reading experience -- the buttons were right where you wanted them.
Now, if only they'd copy the (open source) software that the 360 had. It had much better book organization features. If you wanted to put your books into your own folder structure, it would show them to you in the way you wanted.
Qualcomm had a color reflective display that was supposedly fairly vivid, called Mirasol. They were positioning it for e-readers, but then it seemed to vanish. It wasn't e-ink, it was supposedly based on the same sort of principle that gives a butterfly's wings color -- diffraction or something similar. They also claimed that it didn't have the slow refresh issues that e-ink has -- you could apparently do video with it. Their prototypes were fairly expensive, but it might have been worth it.
In any case, nothing ever seemed to come of it.
I don't think "still" is the word you mean. "Again" comes closer. As I recall, they just started that back up again.
To be fair, the government did shake their fingers at Sony. That's got to count for something, right?
For wireless connections, Network Manager seems to work fairly well.
But in my experience, it's nothing but trouble for wired connections. Why is that?
I have no idea. But I have discovered that if I want my workstations to reliably connect to the wired network, I have to rip out all vestiges of NM and configure the "old fashioned" config files. Before I started doing that I could count on at least one computer in a lab refusing to connect to the network until it was rebooted. Maybe several times. And it was non-deterministic -- it wasn't the same computer every time.
Sure, it works most of the time. But that 3 or 4 percent chance that it would give up was enough to give me fits.
Yes.
Back in the VHS days, I can remember *not* spending $90 for some titles. I looked at the price and said, no thanks. Having the entire cast and crew show up to my house to play it for me live wouldn't have been worth that.
I've purchased 5 or 6 Kindles over the years, primarily as a result of loss or breakage. I got a couple of spares when they eliminated the last design with buttons.
In all that time, after having read several hundred books on those devices, I have never yet bought an e-book from Amazon. I still buy a ton of p-books from them, but I get my e-books elsewhere and use Calibre to convert and transfer them.
My Kindles are not allowed to know my wifi password. Along with my smart-tv.
That's why they do it. The official line is "Don't replace the kernel unless you have a reason to."
Kernels update automatically as part of the graphical process. The kernel replacement procedure above is to change kernel versions. I've currently go 3.16.0-38 installed. As long as I don't do anything, any updates to 3.16.0-38 will automatically be installed.
If I want a newer version of the kernel I can bring up the kernel upgrade dialog mentioned above and scroll down through all the available kernels. I note that 3.19.0-33 has a check mark in the "recommended" column. Versions up to 4.2.0-30 are in the list, but only certain ones have the "recommended" status.
Seems user-friendly enough to me. Enough detail to help someone who wants to upgrade, hidden enough to discourage someone who really shouldn't, and automatic enough to keep the current version safely up to date.
The point here is it doesn't matter at all whose phone it is, or whether they have permission to break into this phone. It doesn't matter what's on this phone, or how important it is to get that information.
It has nothing to do with *this* phone. Whatever they do will be to all iPhones. They are being requested to design a backdoor for iPhones. After they do that, it will exist.
You're not doing anything wrong. You *are* doing something illegal.
Same as I do when I rip my DVDs to the media server using HandBrake.
Maybe. My mother is coming up on 83, and anything involving a touchscreen is not an option for her. She has trouble seeing changes that pop up and then go away -- TV's with onscreen displays are also a challenge for the same reason.
I don't know that Ubuntu would be better -- some of the same issues. Switching her from XP to Win7 was a challenge. If I'd started her out on Mint at the beginning, before we got her XP I'd say we'd have had an easier go at it, but Mint wasn't even around then and even Ubuntu was pretty raw (Breezy, I think.) Mint as it is now? Sure, I'd go for that. But I'm not going to try to convert her at this point.
I use the YRO feed as input to a class I'm teaching, since it parallels much of the subject matter of the class. I go over interesting tidbits with the class to inject a bit of "current events" into our discussions.
Even before Dice took over, I'd scratch my head over some of the completely unrelated articles that made their way into the feed, and some obviously pertinent ones that got left out. Under Dice it got worse, to the point that I ended up writing a filter to block things that obviously didn't belong and add in some were left out but should have been there.
While *I* am interested in MIT's ARC reactor, what *possible* relationship does it have with "Your Rights Online"?
When the new management took over, I was hoping I could retire that filter. No such luck -- the "irrelevancy" score is now approaching 50%, and since the choice of what to block and what to add is all manual, it's become a real pain in the butt to maintain.
On the other hand, I'm glad I have the filter, because the raw feed would be unusable.
If the bootloader is locked but is designed to be unlocked because the manufacturer and/or Google has provided a key, that's not the same as a phone that has a locked bootloader and someone had to use a security exploit to break it. The article you linked to on the Nexus 6 shows you how to get to the unlock mechanism built in to the phone. No reverse engineering needed.
I didn't read the rest of your links.
Much ado about nothing.
Or more to the point, what everybody seems to be OMGing about is a stupid issue.
If *anybody* sent classified material via email, that's a big deal. Email is a fucking postcard. It doesn't matter in the least whether it was on a private server or a server in the heart of the NSA. Unless the parties involved used good encryption to send the message, the crime is in using email in the first place.
And if they did use good encryption, then the choice of server is a relatively minor issue again.
So if you want to be outraged, be outraged that *anybody* in government is using email. Who gives a shit if it was on a private server or not?
Back in the dotcom days, I had a developer that wanted to clean his home directory up. He suspected that the dotfiles were corrupt, so he figured the best thing to do was get rid of them all and start over.
He issued the command (from his home directory): .*
rm -rfa
I have no idea why he was doing that as root. When the command that he expected to take a fraction of a second didn't come back immediately he realized something was wrong and hit Ctl-C, but it had already done quite a bit of damage.
We had backups -- he lost less than a week of work. But that was still a lot.
This is good news. I always liked Sigil, and was disappointed when it seemed it was going away.
Huh. I learned something today. Thanks for the link.
It's 95 years for corporate authors. Individual authors are life plus 70. If the author died in 2004, then the copyright will expire in 2074.
Yes, it's too long, and it's silly.
2013 Fusion here. I have to agree that Ford's *interface* design is fairly intuitive. I'm a bit less impressed with its implementation -- too much doesn't work reliably, and I'm *really* unimpressed with the fact that the system had to remove features with each new iteration of the software, just in order to improve stability. The clock changes when you change time zones, based on the GPS, but it *doesn't* support daylight savings time? Really? (It used to...)
I was glad to hear that the next version of software will *not* be Microsoft/Flash based, but I think they're tossing the baby out with the bathwater by changing the interface radically (and going "flat.") I'd blame its stability problems on the platform, the interface was good.
In any case, it won't matter much to me -- I expect to keep the car another 8 or 9 years. I'm sure the software landscape will have changed radically in that time, but my current hardware isn't going to support anything more than what it has now.
My car's speed database maxes out at 74, but most western states have speeds of 75 on the freeway. And some have posted speed limits of 80 or 85.
Sigil is abandonware, unfortunately. You can still get it to install, but that might not last forever. I'm not aware of a version that's in any repository, but you can find packages for various distros. Building it from source is a bit of a bear, so I'd recommend a binary package.
For repairing bad epubs, the ebook editor that is now built into Calibre is better than Sigil was. On the other hand, Sigil allows you to create a new ebook fairly easily, whereas the Calibre editor is explicitly not designed for that. I've used Sigil to take HTML formatted files and create pretty decently formatted ebooks.
They had plenty of *capacity* for commenting -- depending on your budget for punch cards. You could use most of 80 columns for each line of comment (and a card for each line.) I seem to remember putting a "C" in the first column for a comment with FORTRAN, don't remember what the convention in Pascal was.
But it was cumbersome, and there probably wasn't much of a culture of commenting, so if you're dealing with that old code, you might not find many comments.
I'm a little disturbed by their use of the term "customers". It's a bad sign that they consider patent applicants to be customers. It implies that it's their job to grant patents--denying a patent would not be serving their customers.
Yeah, I know, this isn't new. It's been their attitude for years, but I hate having our noses rubbed in it.