It'll also read DRM'd adobe digital editions stuff, but that DRM is trivial to crack. I buy the books, strip the DRM, then load them by USB.
Indeed. The ability to strip the DRM (often making the content more readable) is a killer. Most of us are happy enough to not be asswipes and pay for the content, while the restrictions of DRM vs. hard-copy alternatives are rightly perceived as excessive.
I don't normally get to use the machine, but my wife's Sony PRS650 reader has a touch-screen gesture interface similar to a normal page-turn of a paper book, and the refresh time is negligible.
p.s. I presume you paid $20,000+ for that many works. You wouldn't illegally download them; nay, that thought would be presumptuous of me.
That's an interesting point.
At a rough estimate, I believe I have at least 10,000 dead-tree books sitting on shelves. I've never counted them, and I've got better things to do with my time.
At least half of these books are nothing special as far as quality of paper or bindings are concerned (there is still something evocative about the texture and odour of a well-crafted book), so would be ideal candidates for storage on a flash drive as an e-book if it were practicable. And as an added bonus, I wouldn't have had to worry about reinforcing my floors...
I plan to continue buying my books in dead tree format but if ebooks become too popular that may either cease to be an option or become very expensive.
A year ago, I would have been in agreement with you, but now I'm a bit envious of my wife's new Sony reader. But if reader technology had been up to coping with my molecular biology and biochemistry texts when I was doing my undergrad degree (they still son't seem to be up to the task, maybe with the possible exception of the iPad) I would have snapped one up in preference to carrying around those huge, expensive tomes.
Apparently the whole, "just because we can" is enough.
There's a lot to be said for the types of e-book reader (I guess probably the majority) where you control what's on it, not the book vendor. I haven't yet abandoned my analogue dead-tree texts, but I have recently bought a Sony PRS650 for my wife. OK, it's a comparatively expensive toy, but my considerations were quality of build and interface, and variety of book formats accepted. So there's no need to use Amazon if we don't want to, and certainly no way for them to yank purchases away after sale.
The good thing about the 1984 issue is that Project Gutenberg's Australian servers are not constrained by the US copyright trolls that assumed ownership of the text. So download away...
While I'm not happy about Amazon taking the role of thought police, ultimately I guess it's their shop, so they can sell whatever they want. However, once the goods are sold, there is absolutely no moral justification for snatching them back. If a shopkeeper at a bricks-and-mortar store were to do that, he would have to be tired of living.
I know it's customary to bag Stallman on Slashdot, and indeed there have been instances where his zealotry becomes a bit wearisome.
However, in this case, he is 100% right. It seems obvious to me that giving control of your data to someone else is not a very intelligent thing to do if it has any value, but Google et al. have no particular reason to take your best interests into consideration.
Every now and then I get frustrated by my connection (ADSL2+ with a major Australian ISP), but when I actually take the trouble to check it out, I usually find I'm just being unreasonable.
My checking process, though, usually amounts to nothing more sophisticated than downloading a Linux ISO file (nice and big, allows plenty of time to crank up to maximum speed) from the command line directly out of my ISP's FTP mirror site in order to get the best possible result. I usually get an average of 15.7 Mib/s, which I suppose is more or less acceptable. I'm very unlikely to end up in the catchment of the proposed fibre-to-the-home network, so that's probably as good as it will get for the forseeable future.
So I guess my frustration arises partly from the way bandwidth is allocated through the pipes from Australia to the rest of the world. On the other hand, though, downloads from (say) kernel.org, Adobe or Apple tend to be quite fast, while others (Slashdot in particular) are glacially slow, so subjective experience seems to depend on the grunt of the originating servers.
A long ton or a short one? BTW, a long ton is fairly close to a metric tonne, but I have no idea what that amounts to in shit-tons.
And sometimes it isn't the computers...
on
When Computers Go Wrong
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
(See title.)
Any of us who have been in a sysprog or sysadmin role for a significant amount of time (by which I mean double-digit years) will often have at least one anecdote of some monumental cockup we've perpetrated.
My worst case in point is where I managed (IIRC after a long liquid lunch) to delete the:per directory (more or less equivalent to/dev on a *nix box) on a Data General mainframe machine running AOS/VS. While hundreds of users' processes disappeared off the system (which took about 90 minutes), I found it expedient to simply make my confession to the boss.
Fortunately, in this case, the escapade was more or less written up as "Shit Happens", which I thought was generous...
Tihs has nothing to to with the case in point. Messages delivered entirely in upper-case are widely perceived as "shouting" unnecessarily, and thus the practice is discouraged.
If you think about it, there's no logical reason for the existence of a caps-lock key at all. The absence of such a key does not impede proper capitalisation for those of us (like myself) who don't touch-type properly, while legitimate combinations for capitalised letters (usually 3 to 6 characters) are applied to acronyms easily manageble for most people.
[Incidentally, my keyboards have Caps-Lock disabled since the only occasions when I use the key are by accident.]
There is indeed a legitimate need for secrecy in some dealings with foreign nations. Where that crosses a line into territory where whistles need to be blown is an area hard to define, but it's a bit scary to imagine a situation where there is a body of people who feel it necessary to expose every unspoken thought, regardless of one's actions or best intentions.
Further complicating this issue is a de facto personality cult being built around Julian Assange. Given that he is facing criminal charges (on a totally unrelated and as yet unproven matter), the interests of Wikileaks would probably be better served if he were to step aside before he gets thrown into the slammer, and let others in the organisation get on with the job.
Why not just force the telcos to provide BETTER CELL service in the first place?
Telcos could do more, but it seems to me that sooner or later, especially in congested urban areas, just about everybody is going to be fighting for bandwidth over the cell networks. As phone usage approaches 100% of the population, in combination with usage of USB/PCMCIA wireless doodads, something is going to have to give, especially if/when the world moves on to IPV6.
Seems to me the sensible thing would be to get as much traffic as possible moving along optical or wired networks and out of the air.
Well, I guess it doesn't need to be WiFi. Any Government building probably (in most cases) already has some sort of halfway-decent broadband access. Internal phones could easily be connected to the outside world via wired VOIP. I don't see any requirement for anyone visiting the building (or in the vicinity) to be able to take a free ride on the Government's internet connection.
No, but the shopkeeper would deserve a headslap. My point is that putting more assets than immediately necessary in the hands of a relatively unknown party in a foreign country is in effect not dissimilar to putting temptation in the way of a common thief.
I'm not saying this analogy is bomb-proof. It's possible for someone to swipe the cash out of your hand while you're paying for a glass of beer, which I guess might be analogous to PayPal capriciously holding on to funds intended for a discrete ad hoc payment. However, I'm not aware of (and obviously have never experienced) such an abuse.
I would have thought this would be unnecessary, given that complainants against PayPal are not bound by any Official Secrets legislation, and are free to air their grievances to anyone who will listen. A quick Google search will find any number of such complaints. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, however, if one uses PayPal solely for its original stated purpose of transferring funds between individuals, there doesn't seem to be that much to complain about.)
I recall reading here that since Paypal isn't a bank, that they get to do lots of very questionable things with your money in the paypal account. Is it likely they did the same thing here?
I don't see how. They are, after all, refusing to accept Wikileaks supporters' money, so there is no means for financial gain. I suspect someone at PayPal might be thinking ahead to avoid civil or criminal lawsuits ("providing assistance to terrorists"?). I'm not saying this position is legally right or wrong, but I can understand why they might think Wilikeaks' business might present more trouble than it's worth.
Incidentally, I take issue with the claim in the summary that "most knowledgeable on-line users will have been refusing to use them [PayPal, that is] for years for a wide variety of abusive practices". Most of these cases appear to stem directly from many people's practice of treating PayPal as a bank, when its main purpose is to provide a convenient means for transferring funds. If I were a shopkeeper who left months' worth of takings sitting in the till, I would have nobody to blame but myself if someone came along and stole them. If you have funds worth keeping, it makes sense to put them somewhere where you can be reasonably confident of finding them again. I would never consider an unregulated website, hosted offshore, as such a repository. However, PayPal is a superb way of transferring funds from one individual to another.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll also read DRM'd adobe digital editions stuff, but that DRM is trivial to crack. I buy the books, strip the DRM, then load them by USB.
Indeed. The ability to strip the DRM (often making the content more readable) is a killer. Most of us are happy enough to not be asswipes and pay for the content, while the restrictions of DRM vs. hard-copy alternatives are rightly perceived as excessive.
I don't normally get to use the machine, but my wife's Sony PRS650 reader has a touch-screen gesture interface similar to a normal page-turn of a paper book, and the refresh time is negligible.
p.s. I presume you paid $20,000+ for that many works. You wouldn't illegally download them; nay, that thought would be presumptuous of me.
That's an interesting point.
At a rough estimate, I believe I have at least 10,000 dead-tree books sitting on shelves. I've never counted them, and I've got better things to do with my time.
At least half of these books are nothing special as far as quality of paper or bindings are concerned (there is still something evocative about the texture and odour of a well-crafted book), so would be ideal candidates for storage on a flash drive as an e-book if it were practicable. And as an added bonus, I wouldn't have had to worry about reinforcing my floors...
I plan to continue buying my books in dead tree format but if ebooks become too popular that may either cease to be an option or become very expensive.
A year ago, I would have been in agreement with you, but now I'm a bit envious of my wife's new Sony reader. But if reader technology had been up to coping with my molecular biology and biochemistry texts when I was doing my undergrad degree (they still son't seem to be up to the task, maybe with the possible exception of the iPad) I would have snapped one up in preference to carrying around those huge, expensive tomes.
I am reminded more of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932, IIRC) where Shakespeare's writings were banned by the World State...
Yeah, right. I would have thought that if God was so damn smart, he could have started with a better source of stem cells than that.
Nonsense. Everybody knows that God speaks 17th-century English. ;-)
Apparently the whole, "just because we can" is enough.
There's a lot to be said for the types of e-book reader (I guess probably the majority) where you control what's on it, not the book vendor. I haven't yet abandoned my analogue dead-tree texts, but I have recently bought a Sony PRS650 for my wife. OK, it's a comparatively expensive toy, but my considerations were quality of build and interface, and variety of book formats accepted. So there's no need to use Amazon if we don't want to, and certainly no way for them to yank purchases away after sale.
The good thing about the 1984 issue is that Project Gutenberg's Australian servers are not constrained by the US copyright trolls that assumed ownership of the text. So download away...
While I'm not happy about Amazon taking the role of thought police, ultimately I guess it's their shop, so they can sell whatever they want. However, once the goods are sold, there is absolutely no moral justification for snatching them back. If a shopkeeper at a bricks-and-mortar store were to do that, he would have to be tired of living.
I heard McDonalds burgers weren't very nice, but I didn't realise they gave you the clap...
I know it's customary to bag Stallman on Slashdot, and indeed there have been instances where his zealotry becomes a bit wearisome.
However, in this case, he is 100% right. It seems obvious to me that giving control of your data to someone else is not a very intelligent thing to do if it has any value, but Google et al. have no particular reason to take your best interests into consideration.
Every now and then I get frustrated by my connection (ADSL2+ with a major Australian ISP), but when I actually take the trouble to check it out, I usually find I'm just being unreasonable.
My checking process, though, usually amounts to nothing more sophisticated than downloading a Linux ISO file (nice and big, allows plenty of time to crank up to maximum speed) from the command line directly out of my ISP's FTP mirror site in order to get the best possible result. I usually get an average of 15.7 Mib/s, which I suppose is more or less acceptable. I'm very unlikely to end up in the catchment of the proposed fibre-to-the-home network, so that's probably as good as it will get for the forseeable future.
So I guess my frustration arises partly from the way bandwidth is allocated through the pipes from Australia to the rest of the world. On the other hand, though, downloads from (say) kernel.org, Adobe or Apple tend to be quite fast, while others (Slashdot in particular) are glacially slow, so subjective experience seems to depend on the grunt of the originating servers.
256K is not broadband, it's fraudband.
What's the mass of a ton(ne)?
A long ton or a short one? BTW, a long ton is fairly close to a metric tonne, but I have no idea what that amounts to in shit-tons.
(See title.)
:per directory (more or less equivalent to /dev on a *nix box) on a Data General mainframe machine running AOS/VS. While hundreds of users' processes disappeared off the system (which took about 90 minutes), I found it expedient to simply make my confession to the boss.
Any of us who have been in a sysprog or sysadmin role for a significant amount of time (by which I mean double-digit years) will often have at least one anecdote of some monumental cockup we've perpetrated.
My worst case in point is where I managed (IIRC after a long liquid lunch) to delete the
Fortunately, in this case, the escapade was more or less written up as "Shit Happens", which I thought was generous...
Tihs has nothing to to with the case in point. Messages delivered entirely in upper-case are widely perceived as "shouting" unnecessarily, and thus the practice is discouraged.
If you think about it, there's no logical reason for the existence of a caps-lock key at all. The absence of such a key does not impede proper capitalisation for those of us (like myself) who don't touch-type properly, while legitimate combinations for capitalised letters (usually 3 to 6 characters) are applied to acronyms easily manageble for most people.
[Incidentally, my keyboards have Caps-Lock disabled since the only occasions when I use the key are by accident.]
...so that when concientious cardholders log in to pay their bills, they can't.
That would only work to Mastercard's/Visa's advantage. They don't care why your payment is late, they just charge you interest and late payment fees.
Am I the only person here who totally ignores both Facebook and Wikileaks? Seems an obvious strategy for those who like to enjoy a "Life"(TM).
And if I tell the missus that yes, that dress does make her posterior seem enlarged, I'm not getting any.
True. Even if you let it be known that you happen to like big bottoms, the same applies. Such is life...
There is indeed a legitimate need for secrecy in some dealings with foreign nations. Where that crosses a line into territory where whistles need to be blown is an area hard to define, but it's a bit scary to imagine a situation where there is a body of people who feel it necessary to expose every unspoken thought, regardless of one's actions or best intentions.
Further complicating this issue is a de facto personality cult being built around Julian Assange. Given that he is facing criminal charges (on a totally unrelated and as yet unproven matter), the interests of Wikileaks would probably be better served if he were to step aside before he gets thrown into the slammer, and let others in the organisation get on with the job.
Why not just force the telcos to provide BETTER CELL service in the first place?
Telcos could do more, but it seems to me that sooner or later, especially in congested urban areas, just about everybody is going to be fighting for bandwidth over the cell networks. As phone usage approaches 100% of the population, in combination with usage of USB/PCMCIA wireless doodads, something is going to have to give, especially if/when the world moves on to IPV6.
Seems to me the sensible thing would be to get as much traffic as possible moving along optical or wired networks and out of the air.
Well, I guess it doesn't need to be WiFi. Any Government building probably (in most cases) already has some sort of halfway-decent broadband access. Internal phones could easily be connected to the outside world via wired VOIP. I don't see any requirement for anyone visiting the building (or in the vicinity) to be able to take a free ride on the Government's internet connection.
No, but the shopkeeper would deserve a headslap. My point is that putting more assets than immediately necessary in the hands of a relatively unknown party in a foreign country is in effect not dissimilar to putting temptation in the way of a common thief.
I'm not saying this analogy is bomb-proof. It's possible for someone to swipe the cash out of your hand while you're paying for a glass of beer, which I guess might be analogous to PayPal capriciously holding on to funds intended for a discrete ad hoc payment. However, I'm not aware of (and obviously have never experienced) such an abuse.
I would have thought this would be unnecessary, given that complainants against PayPal are not bound by any Official Secrets legislation, and are free to air their grievances to anyone who will listen. A quick Google search will find any number of such complaints. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, however, if one uses PayPal solely for its original stated purpose of transferring funds between individuals, there doesn't seem to be that much to complain about.)
I recall reading here that since Paypal isn't a bank, that they get to do lots of very questionable things with your money in the paypal account. Is it likely they did the same thing here?
I don't see how. They are, after all, refusing to accept Wikileaks supporters' money, so there is no means for financial gain. I suspect someone at PayPal might be thinking ahead to avoid civil or criminal lawsuits ("providing assistance to terrorists"?). I'm not saying this position is legally right or wrong, but I can understand why they might think Wilikeaks' business might present more trouble than it's worth.
Incidentally, I take issue with the claim in the summary that "most knowledgeable on-line users will have been refusing to use them [PayPal, that is] for years for a wide variety of abusive practices". Most of these cases appear to stem directly from many people's practice of treating PayPal as a bank, when its main purpose is to provide a convenient means for transferring funds. If I were a shopkeeper who left months' worth of takings sitting in the till, I would have nobody to blame but myself if someone came along and stole them. If you have funds worth keeping, it makes sense to put them somewhere where you can be reasonably confident of finding them again. I would never consider an unregulated website, hosted offshore, as such a repository. However, PayPal is a superb way of transferring funds from one individual to another.