The problem with PDF is layout, in that the page wants to be a certain size and shape and if your reader isn't that size and shape you're screwed.
Further, forcing a layout also tends to ignore one of the ebook's major benefits: resizing and reflowing text and fonts for better readability. Thus with the current Kindle EVERY ebook has the potential to be a "large-print" version.
No. Cramming dozens of narrow columns onto an ebook reader in hopes of duplicating newsprint is NOT the way to go. They'd be much better off redefining the medium and think more like a magazine. Summaries, TOCs, browsing by topics, "smart" keyword searches so people can always find articles of interest, and more.
Reinvent the future, don't duplicate the past simply for the sake of doing so.
"Just face it, most in games, music and tv is rubbish. It might just be worth to try once, but if the only choice was to pay for it, people wouldn't because it wouldn't be worth it."
Fine by me.
And your "logic" doesn't fly, by the way, as the MOST popular best-selling games, movies, and music are the items stolen the most. Just check the top downloads list on any site.
Just another rationalization for theft. Pirates are SUCH an insecure lot...
No, the funny part is that the users who torrented and installed pirated copies of iWork 09 and Photoshop CS4 got exactly what they deserved. Instant karma.
"Evolution" doesn't "care", one way or another. A species either propagates and survives... or it doesn't. Individual behaviors that are destructive to the group as a whole are usually weeded out pretty quickly, since if the group doesn't survive neither does the individual nor does his offspring. Conversely, behaviors that increase the probability of offspring being born and surviving to produce offspring of their own tend to be reinforced. The description of that process is termed "evolution".
And the "rules" for reproduction vary from species to species and even at times from group to group. Sometimes those rules require the male to prove that he's "worthy" to survive. Other times, all he needs to do is find a few eggs laid on the bottom of the river and fertilize them. If it works, it works.
They may not be able to kill an idea, but they CAN kill the platform.
IMHO, these kinds of "screw the man" applications only serve to tanish the image of the Android platform. And remember, you need a network on which to run an Android phone, and in the US that means Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile.
Corporate America at its finest. And if they decide that only hackers, ripoff artists, freeloaders, and other "troublemakers" are using Android, they'll drop it like a hot potato and never look back...
"...from an evolutionary standpoint, sharing your wife with the tribe makes no sense whatsoever, because you can't ever be sure that you have any offspring..."
Then again, from an evolutionary standpoint, it increases the chances that there WILL be offspring. You may do whatever to increase your chances of mating, but evolution is more concerned about the species as a whole.
Actually, it's not. If you have a UI thread that queues up actions to a single background "worker" thread, then you've got a responsive UI and you've arranged for the work to happen in order of execution.
You can extend this out for things like web browsers with a UI thread, a thread for each page/window, and additional threads that queue up resource requests and handle them.
"The best advice when it comes to writing threaded code is to use as little as possible."
Or hire someone who's read more than a single book on PHP and who knows what the hell they're doing.
If the operations is solely processor-bound that's one thing. But access any external resource like a disk drive or (worse) a network, and you have an entirely different story. Hell, typing a single character into a window can trigger word-wrapping, pagination, spelling correction, force a screen redraw, and more.
"If we had functioning markets that took all costs into account and didn't allow externalization, we'd never have developed a petroleum based economy."
Please. You make it sound like the first guy to develop an gasoline-powered automobile back in the turn of the 19th century actually knew all of those costs and externalizations and their cumulative effects. He didn't. He just wanted to get from point A to point B without stepping in horse manure.
They made their decisions based on the knowledge and technology and resources available to them at the time. We, on the other hand, have more knowledge and technology and resources available to us than they did.
If the AI is doing any kind of tree search/ranking algorithm to determine its best move, why not have it occassionally pick the 5th best move instead of the first?
"If they really had any degree of intelligence, they'd duck for cover and call in backup and you'd get pinned down pretty quick."
Precisely. Take a game like Castle Wofenstein for example. In the real world the first non-silenced shot fired inside the castle should have woken up the entire joint.
"Back in the day, that's what they used large-format film for."
And that's what you can use a 35mm FF digital camera, or even a 6x4.5 MF camera for today. Expecting super resolutions out of consumer point-and-shoots is unrealistic. You might as well expect to print a poster off a Kodak Disc.
As far as I;m concerned I'd rather have low-light performance good enough to take sharp pictures indoors under average lighting conditions... without using a flash.
Actually, I think a 6" screen would be about perfect. Large enough for notes, web pages, reading, tv shows and movies, games, and more. But small enough to be pocketable and also small enough to have really good battery life (I want at least 8 hours of games of movies.)
But if true, then why they have an entire subsite devoted to Open Source, with links to the source for Darwin and the Mach kernel, WebKit, Bonjour, and more???
Try selling a Windows Mobile application through Handango. They'll take 50-60%. Or try selling a DVD through WalMart. They'll take a whopping 70-80%.
Besides, the App Store is not just a store, but a sales AND marketing channel, with the potential to feature your application and drive hundreds, thousands, or even millions of customers to your door. It's worth the money.
And I bet that Apple's overhead _is_ that high in many cases. Buy a single $0.99 app and Apple gets 33 cents... of which most (if not all) goes to pay the bank's credit card processing fees.
You're missing the important point: Google isn't worried so much about DEVELOPERS ripping off paid applications as they are about unscrupulous USERS getting a developmental phone (or ROM) and suddenly gaining access to any and all protected applications.
So get a subsidized phone for $200, or for $200 more buy a "developers" phone that allows anyone to rip off all the applications and games they want?
"Now, take any part of the world.. why couldn't the people that are already there report it?"
They could... but how do you know they aren't lying?
News coming out of many countries may be government owned, sponsored, or controlled. Do you think the Chinese government or local new organizations would ever have reported Tiananmen Square? If not for an Associated Press journalist reporting on the true events, we might never have known, nor seen. Would a Chinese citizen today risk his life or liberty publishing the same kind of photo and news on the Chinese-controlled-and-monitored version of the internet?
At risk of invoking Godwin's Law, should we have simply trusted all news published by Nazi Germany? They were there, after all.
"... as free and DRM free downloads with embedded video advertising that is pause-able but not skip-able...."
If they're going to be "pause-able but not skip-able" then they're also going to have to be DRM'ed in some fashion. You couldn't enforce the rule otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with PDF is layout, in that the page wants to be a certain size and shape and if your reader isn't that size and shape you're screwed.
Further, forcing a layout also tends to ignore one of the ebook's major benefits: resizing and reflowing text and fonts for better readability. Thus with the current Kindle EVERY ebook has the potential to be a "large-print" version.
No. Cramming dozens of narrow columns onto an ebook reader in hopes of duplicating newsprint is NOT the way to go. They'd be much better off redefining the medium and think more like a magazine. Summaries, TOCs, browsing by topics, "smart" keyword searches so people can always find articles of interest, and more.
Reinvent the future, don't duplicate the past simply for the sake of doing so.
"You won't have any computer problems ever again after that."
If he does that then he won't have ANY problems ever again...
"Except they probably don't even realize it."
Yeah, all of those torrented software installers just magically appeared on their machine by accident.
"Just face it, most in games, music and tv is rubbish. It might just be worth to try once, but if the only choice was to pay for it, people wouldn't because it wouldn't be worth it."
Fine by me.
And your "logic" doesn't fly, by the way, as the MOST popular best-selling games, movies, and music are the items stolen the most. Just check the top downloads list on any site.
Just another rationalization for theft. Pirates are SUCH an insecure lot...
"WRT disasters, it's a different phenomenon... You need food and supplies, and if you don't get it first, someone else will."
Right. That's why all of those hungry people are smashing windows and making off with plasma TVs...
No, the funny part is that the users who torrented and installed pirated copies of iWork 09 and Photoshop CS4 got exactly what they deserved. Instant karma.
"Evolution" doesn't "care", one way or another. A species either propagates and survives... or it doesn't. Individual behaviors that are destructive to the group as a whole are usually weeded out pretty quickly, since if the group doesn't survive neither does the individual nor does his offspring. Conversely, behaviors that increase the probability of offspring being born and surviving to produce offspring of their own tend to be reinforced. The description of that process is termed "evolution".
And the "rules" for reproduction vary from species to species and even at times from group to group. Sometimes those rules require the male to prove that he's "worthy" to survive. Other times, all he needs to do is find a few eggs laid on the bottom of the river and fertilize them. If it works, it works.
They may not be able to kill an idea, but they CAN kill the platform.
IMHO, these kinds of "screw the man" applications only serve to tanish the image of the Android platform. And remember, you need a network on which to run an Android phone, and in the US that means Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile.
Corporate America at its finest. And if they decide that only hackers, ripoff artists, freeloaders, and other "troublemakers" are using Android, they'll drop it like a hot potato and never look back...
"...from an evolutionary standpoint, sharing your wife with the tribe makes no sense whatsoever, because you can't ever be sure that you have any offspring..."
Then again, from an evolutionary standpoint, it increases the chances that there WILL be offspring. You may do whatever to increase your chances of mating, but evolution is more concerned about the species as a whole.
"That's a recipe for disaster."
Actually, it's not. If you have a UI thread that queues up actions to a single background "worker" thread, then you've got a responsive UI and you've arranged for the work to happen in order of execution.
You can extend this out for things like web browsers with a UI thread, a thread for each page/window, and additional threads that queue up resource requests and handle them.
"The best advice when it comes to writing threaded code is to use as little as possible."
Or hire someone who's read more than a single book on PHP and who knows what the hell they're doing.
If the operations is solely processor-bound that's one thing. But access any external resource like a disk drive or (worse) a network, and you have an entirely different story. Hell, typing a single character into a window can trigger word-wrapping, pagination, spelling correction, force a screen redraw, and more.
"If we had functioning markets that took all costs into account and didn't allow externalization, we'd never have developed a petroleum based economy."
Please. You make it sound like the first guy to develop an gasoline-powered automobile back in the turn of the 19th century actually knew all of those costs and externalizations and their cumulative effects. He didn't. He just wanted to get from point A to point B without stepping in horse manure.
They made their decisions based on the knowledge and technology and resources available to them at the time. We, on the other hand, have more knowledge and technology and resources available to us than they did.
As such, we can now do better.
If the AI is doing any kind of tree search/ranking algorithm to determine its best move, why not have it occassionally pick the 5th best move instead of the first?
"If they really had any degree of intelligence, they'd duck for cover and call in backup and you'd get pinned down pretty quick."
Precisely. Take a game like Castle Wofenstein for example. In the real world the first non-silenced shot fired inside the castle should have woken up the entire joint.
"Back in the day, that's what they used large-format film for."
And that's what you can use a 35mm FF digital camera, or even a 6x4.5 MF camera for today. Expecting super resolutions out of consumer point-and-shoots is unrealistic. You might as well expect to print a poster off a Kodak Disc.
As far as I;m concerned I'd rather have low-light performance good enough to take sharp pictures indoors under average lighting conditions... without using a flash.
"My store manager was paid 63K..."
Put in the ten or fifteen years and take all the training need to become a store manager, and you might be worth something too.
Actually, I think a 6" screen would be about perfect. Large enough for notes, web pages, reading, tv shows and movies, games, and more. But small enough to be pocketable and also small enough to have really good battery life (I want at least 8 hours of games of movies.)
Not even one line??? Golly.
But if true, then why they have an entire subsite devoted to Open Source, with links to the source for Darwin and the Mach kernel, WebKit, Bonjour, and more???
http://developer.apple.com/opensource/index.html
Either you don't know what you're talking about or... you don't know what you're talking about.
If I were you I'd open my eyes.... (grin)
So how is the patron asking the question he wants her to answer? Sign language?
Try selling a Windows Mobile application through Handango. They'll take 50-60%. Or try selling a DVD through WalMart. They'll take a whopping 70-80%.
Besides, the App Store is not just a store, but a sales AND marketing channel, with the potential to feature your application and drive hundreds, thousands, or even millions of customers to your door. It's worth the money.
And I bet that Apple's overhead _is_ that high in many cases. Buy a single $0.99 app and Apple gets 33 cents... of which most (if not all) goes to pay the bank's credit card processing fees.
Use the Touch with Google's free search app, and you can SPEAK your search term into the system. Works extremely well.
"... core i7 based system ..."
Sorry, but the Pro is using server-class Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors, not i7's.
You're missing the important point: Google isn't worried so much about DEVELOPERS ripping off paid applications as they are about unscrupulous USERS getting a developmental phone (or ROM) and suddenly gaining access to any and all protected applications.
So get a subsidized phone for $200, or for $200 more buy a "developers" phone that allows anyone to rip off all the applications and games they want?
Hmmm.....
"Now, take any part of the world.. why couldn't the people that are already there report it?"
They could... but how do you know they aren't lying?
News coming out of many countries may be government owned, sponsored, or controlled. Do you think the Chinese government or local new organizations would ever have reported Tiananmen Square? If not for an Associated Press journalist reporting on the true events, we might never have known, nor seen. Would a Chinese citizen today risk his life or liberty publishing the same kind of photo and news on the Chinese-controlled-and-monitored version of the internet?
At risk of invoking Godwin's Law, should we have simply trusted all news published by Nazi Germany? They were there, after all.
How about Stalin? Or Bush?
"... as free and DRM free downloads with embedded video advertising that is pause-able but not skip-able...."
If they're going to be "pause-able but not skip-able" then they're also going to have to be DRM'ed in some fashion. You couldn't enforce the rule otherwise.