Actually, people should be in awe - and if you're Amazon you should be shitting your pants. One of the big debates lately in the publishing industry has been in regards to a unified format. Allowing PDF's in the iBooks part of iTunes basically makes that a moot point. Brilliant on Apple's part, and a death knell for traditional publishing.
Um, PDF is not a format for ebook reading. PDFs are designed to display a predefined page layout regardless of the media used to view them; ebook formats are designed to flow text within different media sizes and allow people to change font sizes. At best, with a PDF on the iPhone, you're going to be reflowing the text and ending up with something no better than mobipocket or EPUB; at worst, the reflow won't work and you'll be scrolling around the page with your finger to read the damn thing.
Don't get me wrong -- I'd love to have better PDF support on the iPhone, just not for book reading. And that's probably why iBooks is using EPUB as its book format, incidentally.
The Eee Tablet has 2450dpi input sensitivity, which sounds about right for a Wacom-based device, not a 2450dpi screen, which would rival even the best laser printers available. Expect the resolution to be a relatively pedestrian 1024x768 or similar.
*laughs*... ok, that does sound slightly more believable! Still, a monochrome (or greyscale) screen, at that price, is likely to have a pretty high resolution -- much more than 1024x768. Why would you go monochrome at all, if you weren't going to push the resolution boundaries?
After all, even an iPhone has 160-odd dpi, and that's colour -- if R, G and B were separate monochrome pixels, that's a 480 dpi screen without creating any new tech.
EEE Pad? Not even Linux based? **yawn**.... another "me too". Nothing innovative here. There have been many MS-Windows tablets for many years. There is no reason to think this is anything different.
Well, for starters there's the 2,450dpi monochrome digital notepad. Targeted at students, with a price point of $200-$300, it also comes with a camera. The concept, apparently, is of students capturing images of lecture slides and then annotating them on the device.
Although my mind baulks a little at the idea of everyone in a lecture theatre raising their Eee Tablets in synchrony every time the slide changes, the device seems rather interesting and innovative to me. And a 2,450dpi screen -- something which you can really digitally sketch on -- sounds pretty awesome likewise.
But then, I'm guessing you were too busy yawning to RTFA...
That joke is getting a bit old, with Apple selling 4-button mice with every iMac for 5 years now.
Nah. It's still good for many of us:) And besides, Apple can't quite get away from the one-button meme -- even with their multiple button mice, they try and hide the different buttons under one big button. (Something which I would have thought was the single worst interface design decision ever, incidentally...)
Anyway, I'm not sure what's the big deal about being able to read a small portion of the iPhone drive in Ubuntu -- you still can't access any application data or any of the databases that store your contacts/notes/whatevers. It does mean someone can copy your music... but that's surely a good thing! And access to part of the file system isn't exactly unusual -- even without Ubuntu, you should be able to see the iPhone's DCIM photo folder when you plug the device into a computer.
One last note, for the truly paranoid: how do you know scroogle isn't a front, run by google?
Well, Scroogle.org is owned by Daniel Brandt, the same person who runs http://www.google-watch.org/. If that's a front, then it's a freaking strange and un-self-serving front, and I would have to award Google the inaugural "Shoot Myself in the Foot Before Someone Else Does it for Me" prize...:)
I don't hear many people complaining about not being able to write novels on their Playstations.
Sure, but almost everyone already has a notebook that can surf the web just fine -- in fact, a lot better than an iPad. The iPad isn't adding new functionality, like a Playstation; it's replacing what you already have, but giving you less.
If you have the money to spend $500+ on a fancy web-surfing device for your lounge room, then that's great. Maybe you don't like to write long emails, or chat to people. Maybe you have no need of a keyboard. But it seems an unnecessary extravagance to me.
The New Yorker review of the Kindle ended with him reading everything on his iPhone because the Kindle was so difficult to read at night/during the day/because of the lower contrast. He complains a little that the iPhone screen is too small. The article really reads now like a call for the iPad.
Hmmm... not necessarily. I agree that eInk contrast is very poor at the moment, that the iPhone/iPod touch screen is nicer to read on and that the screen of those devices is a little too small. I considered buying an eInk device a year ago for travel reading and went with an ipod touch instead.
However, you won't find me buying an ipad. And why? Because just as the iPhone screen is too small, the iPad screen is too big and too heavy. At nearly A4 size (242x189mm) and weighing 700g, it's just too cumbersome to carry around like a book. Compare that to eInk devices like the Kindle (203x134mm, 290g) or the Cybook Gen3 (188x118mm, 174g) and it looks a super-sized, super-cumbersome behemoth. And one of the interesting things that's happening in the eInk market right now is that the once-standard 6-inch screens (used, for example, in the Kindle and the Cybook Gen3) are being replaced by 5-inch screens -- which presumably means that small, light and portable is considered important by customers.
Now, imagine if Apple actually had some smarts and created a device with a 6-inch screen (Kindle sized) and a slide-out landscape keyboard, all in a shiny Apple form-factor and weighing 200-300g. Coupled with a USB port, a file manager and Office software it'd be a netbook killer -- the perfect ebook reader and the perfect travelling computer. Great for writing emails on the go; great for reading books; light and small enough to take with you almost everywhere; powerful and functional enough to edit documents and spreadsheets for work, or create a presentation. I'd buy one of those in a flash. I reckon most people would.
It's quite possible that Apple's marketing juggernaut can convince people to buy iPads anyway. But I think it was a great opportunity wasted by Apple.
I have a script that logs me on to my home network...but that sucks and means I can't recommend Ubuntu to anyone who wants to put Linux on an old computer.
Well, you can recommend it to anyone not using a hidden SSID, at least...:)
This is basic stuff; I'm surprised given Ubuntu's track record that it's not perfect by now.
I agree that both NetworkManager and Wicd are poorly implemented. If you google for NetworkManager not automatically logging into hidden SSIDs you'll see bug reports dating back years! And whilst I can understand a small developer not giving a massive priority to this sort of thing (not many people use hidden SSIDs, after all) Ubuntu has had the time and resources to easily fix this... and instead plays around with making pretty icons and changing the position of the window manager buttons.
But it's not going to stop me using Linux, and it apparently isn't going to stop you either. Does it really matter if the grandmas of this world use Windows instead?
Having read books on my computer screen, the only advantage is that it scrolls relatively smoothly. Otherwise, my eyes felt like they'd been sucked out Gollumn-style after 4 hours of reading.
I know what you mean, but it's nicer reading on an iPod Touch than reading on a computer screen. And eInk isn't quite there for me -- the lack of contrast is just too sucky right now (dirty newsprint... yuck!)
But the iPad isn't the answer, and eInk screens will surely keep improving. Actually, the iPad reminds me of Palm's Foleo, except that Palm finally saw sense and pulled the plug before the release date...
I have no computers that iTunes will run on, and of course, Apple encrypts communications to and from the device so no open-source software can connect to it either.
Yep, iTunes sucks big time. But it will work quite happily running in a VirtualBox virtual machine -- that's the only way I use my iPod Touch. And if you don't happen to have a copy of Windows to install, TinyXP might be something to search for...:) You can share your music folder (or podcast folder in this case) with the virtual machine, so it's pretty straightforward.
What annoys me far more than dodgy iTunes, though, is the lack of available memory on the iPod Touch -- meaning that even jailbroken and with backgrounder, you can never get multi-tasking happening. That and those pathetic slidey-zoomy time-wasting transitions really drive me nuts. Oh, and the fact that despite being a powerful computer, it won't let me save a frikken playlist without iTunes holding its hand...
NYTimes recently had an article on penmanship. Cursive deserves to die -- it often results in illegible scrawl. I'd explain why, but the article does it so much better.
I think the idea that the article you cite misses is that cursive is fast. If you want to write beautifully legible cursive, you can slow it down; if you want to write quickly, you can speed it up with a minimum of loss of comprehension. Try writing quickly in that italics script they suggest!... it'd drive anyone nuts.
I'd also point out that they use a horribly misformed example of cursive (with a particularly bad word, "believe") next to their perfectly formed italic script example. This is neither a fair, open or sensible comparison (which probably explains why the article in question is published in a newspaper rather than a peer-reviewed journal.) I've never seen anyone write cursive even remotely as ugly as that one example! (and if kids are really writing like that, then that suggests not that cursive is inherrently bad, but more that they're not being taught cursive properly. Cursive doesn't have to, and certainly shouldn't, look like that...)
Developing good handwriting skills is calligraphy, not cursive.
I think that statement says a lot about the current state of your handwriting...:) I know a few (older) people who naturally write in copperplate cursive (a la the dec of independence), and it's just beautiful to read.
But developing good handwriting skills is a natural part of being able to communicate with others, something which should be every child's right.
Cursive writing is no more a requirement to literacy than knowing how to operate a printing press.
Now, "any form of writing at all" is important. But curisive?
The advantage of cursive, surely, is its speed. Being able to take hand-written notes is still important in many disciplines (the sciences, for example) and if kids can't take notes efficiently, accurately and still maintain legibility to others then they'll fall behind. (I couldn't do my job, for example, if I couldn't keep a legible, detailed, handwritten lab book.)
Even outside of the workplace, it's often faster to take a note by hand on a piece of scrap paper than to fire up a PDA or phone and cumbersomely tap out a note that way. If you remove a kid's ability to write cursively, then you just slow them down.
And besides, what are emo kids going to do if they can't send a pretty hand-written love sonnet to their sweetheart??
Your password may be long and complicated, but examine closely at your "security questions." If the client has been lubing your junk, odds are that she knows your dog's name is Archibald and your favorite color is mauve.
"Forgot my password" indeed.
Huh, but gmail allows you to set your own security question. Mine is, "What is the specific string of alpha-numeric characters used to answer this question?"
I'm pretty sure no random junk-luber is going to guess that one any time soon....
Tabs on the side take *a lot* of space, for both that text goes horizontally and because monitors also have more space horizontally.
Er... that's the point. Tabs on the side maximise the vertical space available for webpages (which generally have a fixed horizontal width and are longer than they are wide) and at the same time use some of the wasted horizontal monitor space for tabs.
The fact that you can get a hierarchical layout of tabs with tabs on the side (such that child tabs are indented, and trees are collapsible) is just a bonus:)
It doesn't compare to a real printed page or e-ink. And I read outside all the time, like nearly every single day. "Non-optimal" doesn't cut it, sorry.
Unfortunately, e-ink doesn't compare to a real printed page either. It's a lot better than an LCD screen in bright sunlight, definitely, but the contrast ratio is so incredibly poor at the moment. I really wanted to like the e-ink displays, but when it came down to it I just couldn't buy one. Way too much like smudged, dirty newsprint for my liking!
Hopefully the nextgen e-ink screens (post-Viziplex) will be better...
There are people out there who actually read novels on an iphone sized screen?
Yep. I backpacked through Europe for seven weeks recently, and my iPod touch (using Stanza) was my library. I'd considered buying a dedicated e-ink device, but I found the dirty-newsprint and slow refresh of those displays deal-breakers; an iPhone screen has the same resolution, more shades of grey, and in landscape mode is nearly as wide as an e-ink in portrait. It was also considerably more pocketable, and the backlight worked great when I wanted to read in a dorm room late at night. I found it all worked incredibly well, and didn't experience any discomfort reading multiple novels on my trip. (In fact, the worst part was stripping the DRM from Amazon's ebooks before I left, so that I could read them on Stanza rather than on Amazon's shockingly bad Kindle app...)
Obviously, though, YMMV. For some people the font size on an iPhone screen will be too small, whereas for others like myself it's fine. That said, if e-ink readers get more screen contrast and become a lot cheaper, I'd definitely buy one -- I'd rather have a 6" solution than a 3.5" solution, as the bishop said. But I don't think the e-ink technology or the price point is there, yet, and for me the iPhone seems the best compromise.
When you have to look up documentation to figure out how to draw a straight line in the Gimp, and that documentation is somewhat condescending, you might start to think that the Gimp isn't actually that good for simple tasks.
Strange... drawing a straight line in the Gimp is a pretty straightforward (pardon the pun) thing to do, all you need is the paint tool of your choice and the shift key. Even if you can't figure it out intuitively, the interface tells you down the bottom when a paint tool is selected "(try Shift for a straight line, Ctrl to pick a color)". Why is this so difficult to grasp? Personally, if we're trading individual anecdotes here, I tried paint.net and struggled; in comparison, the Gimp did everything paint.net could do and more. But I think the real surprise about paint.net being included in a list of open-source software is that it's not open-source in the first place...
Anyway, if you want to draw straight lines, a vector graphics program like Inkscape is probably going to be more your scene. And that's the glaring omission in the list for me: Inkscape is a brilliant vector graphics implementation and I would have thought it easily deserved a mention.
In fact, nerds should be paying for software more than anyone, because we appreciate the effort involved in its production.
Uh, no... real nerds use OSS, and code to contribute back to the community. They like giving stuff they've created away for free. (You did realise you were posting to/., didn't you?)
So to use your analogy, we should all be creating open-source movies. Probably couldn't be much worse than "Wolverine", I'm guessing, if we did...
iPhones can run multiple apps, but the public SDK does not allow developers to write apps that run in the background. Apple can certainly write apps that run in the background, though. The music service, for one. The phone service, etc. Additionally, developers for jailbroken phones can run applications in the background because they're not constrained by the official SDK.
Safari is another app that runs in the background. I've never really been sure why (unless it's to allow you to view the last page you were reading offline...)
Lacking background capabilities isn't really an issue provided that applications save their state and that they launch rapidly (or in other words, the launcher software becomes a virtual task manager).
Not exactly. With Ubquity you get instant feedback during typing, so you don't have to wait for the page to load with all the bells and whistles, you see only the relevant part of it.
What possible feedback could you need whilst typing in an address or a search term? If anything, this seems a waste of bandwidth, bringing up false hits while you type and then requiring you to load the correct page again when you've found it.
I really hope this isn't the best Firefox can offer for its future. Whilst the development of an OSS project is a personal thing, it seems a pity more time can't be spent removing the bloat that's accumulated over the years, rather than constantly adding in more... (anyone else remember when Phoenix 0.1 first came out, with the grand aim of being Mozilla stripped bare?)
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Actually, people should be in awe - and if you're Amazon you should be shitting your pants. One of the big debates lately in the publishing industry has been in regards to a unified format. Allowing PDF's in the iBooks part of iTunes basically makes that a moot point. Brilliant on Apple's part, and a death knell for traditional publishing.
Um, PDF is not a format for ebook reading. PDFs are designed to display a predefined page layout regardless of the media used to view them; ebook formats are designed to flow text within different media sizes and allow people to change font sizes. At best, with a PDF on the iPhone, you're going to be reflowing the text and ending up with something no better than mobipocket or EPUB; at worst, the reflow won't work and you'll be scrolling around the page with your finger to read the damn thing.
Don't get me wrong -- I'd love to have better PDF support on the iPhone, just not for book reading. And that's probably why iBooks is using EPUB as its book format, incidentally.
The Eee Tablet has 2450dpi input sensitivity, which sounds about right for a Wacom-based device, not a 2450dpi screen, which would rival even the best laser printers available. Expect the resolution to be a relatively pedestrian 1024x768 or similar.
*laughs* ... ok, that does sound slightly more believable! Still, a monochrome (or greyscale) screen, at that price, is likely to have a pretty high resolution -- much more than 1024x768. Why would you go monochrome at all, if you weren't going to push the resolution boundaries?
After all, even an iPhone has 160-odd dpi, and that's colour -- if R, G and B were separate monochrome pixels, that's a 480 dpi screen without creating any new tech.
EEE Pad? Not even Linux based? **yawn**.... another "me too". Nothing innovative here. There have been many MS-Windows tablets for many years. There is no reason to think this is anything different.
Well, for starters there's the 2,450dpi monochrome digital notepad. Targeted at students, with a price point of $200-$300, it also comes with a camera. The concept, apparently, is of students capturing images of lecture slides and then annotating them on the device.
Although my mind baulks a little at the idea of everyone in a lecture theatre raising their Eee Tablets in synchrony every time the slide changes, the device seems rather interesting and innovative to me. And a 2,450dpi screen -- something which you can really digitally sketch on -- sounds pretty awesome likewise.
But then, I'm guessing you were too busy yawning to RTFA ...
That joke is getting a bit old, with Apple selling 4-button mice with every iMac for 5 years now.
Nah. It's still good for many of us :) And besides, Apple can't quite get away from the one-button meme -- even with their multiple button mice, they try and hide the different buttons under one big button. (Something which I would have thought was the single worst interface design decision ever, incidentally ...)
Anyway, I'm not sure what's the big deal about being able to read a small portion of the iPhone drive in Ubuntu -- you still can't access any application data or any of the databases that store your contacts/notes/whatevers. It does mean someone can copy your music ... but that's surely a good thing! And access to part of the file system isn't exactly unusual -- even without Ubuntu, you should be able to see the iPhone's DCIM photo folder when you plug the device into a computer.
One last note, for the truly paranoid: how do you know scroogle isn't a front, run by google?
Well, Scroogle.org is owned by Daniel Brandt, the same person who runs http://www.google-watch.org/. If that's a front, then it's a freaking strange and un-self-serving front, and I would have to award Google the inaugural "Shoot Myself in the Foot Before Someone Else Does it for Me" prize ... :)
I don't hear many people complaining about not being able to write novels on their Playstations.
Sure, but almost everyone already has a notebook that can surf the web just fine -- in fact, a lot better than an iPad. The iPad isn't adding new functionality, like a Playstation; it's replacing what you already have, but giving you less.
If you have the money to spend $500+ on a fancy web-surfing device for your lounge room, then that's great. Maybe you don't like to write long emails, or chat to people. Maybe you have no need of a keyboard. But it seems an unnecessary extravagance to me.
all because Steve has a chip on his shoulder.
Actually, that chip is inside his head, but close. Resistance is futile ...
The New Yorker review of the Kindle ended with him reading everything on his iPhone because the Kindle was so difficult to read at night/during the day/because of the lower contrast. He complains a little that the iPhone screen is too small. The article really reads now like a call for the iPad.
Hmmm ... not necessarily. I agree that eInk contrast is very poor at the moment, that the iPhone/iPod touch screen is nicer to read on and that the screen of those devices is a little too small. I considered buying an eInk device a year ago for travel reading and went with an ipod touch instead.
However, you won't find me buying an ipad. And why? Because just as the iPhone screen is too small, the iPad screen is too big and too heavy. At nearly A4 size (242x189mm) and weighing 700g, it's just too cumbersome to carry around like a book. Compare that to eInk devices like the Kindle (203x134mm, 290g) or the Cybook Gen3 (188x118mm, 174g) and it looks a super-sized, super-cumbersome behemoth. And one of the interesting things that's happening in the eInk market right now is that the once-standard 6-inch screens (used, for example, in the Kindle and the Cybook Gen3) are being replaced by 5-inch screens -- which presumably means that small, light and portable is considered important by customers.
Now, imagine if Apple actually had some smarts and created a device with a 6-inch screen (Kindle sized) and a slide-out landscape keyboard, all in a shiny Apple form-factor and weighing 200-300g. Coupled with a USB port, a file manager and Office software it'd be a netbook killer -- the perfect ebook reader and the perfect travelling computer. Great for writing emails on the go; great for reading books; light and small enough to take with you almost everywhere; powerful and functional enough to edit documents and spreadsheets for work, or create a presentation. I'd buy one of those in a flash. I reckon most people would.
It's quite possible that Apple's marketing juggernaut can convince people to buy iPads anyway. But I think it was a great opportunity wasted by Apple.
I have a script that logs me on to my home network...but that sucks and means I can't recommend Ubuntu to anyone who wants to put Linux on an old computer.
Well, you can recommend it to anyone not using a hidden SSID, at least ... :)
This is basic stuff; I'm surprised given Ubuntu's track record that it's not perfect by now.
I agree that both NetworkManager and Wicd are poorly implemented. If you google for NetworkManager not automatically logging into hidden SSIDs you'll see bug reports dating back years! And whilst I can understand a small developer not giving a massive priority to this sort of thing (not many people use hidden SSIDs, after all) Ubuntu has had the time and resources to easily fix this ... and instead plays around with making pretty icons and changing the position of the window manager buttons.
But it's not going to stop me using Linux, and it apparently isn't going to stop you either. Does it really matter if the grandmas of this world use Windows instead?
Having read books on my computer screen, the only advantage is that it scrolls relatively smoothly. Otherwise, my eyes felt like they'd been sucked out Gollumn-style after 4 hours of reading.
I know what you mean, but it's nicer reading on an iPod Touch than reading on a computer screen. And eInk isn't quite there for me -- the lack of contrast is just too sucky right now (dirty newsprint ... yuck!)
But the iPad isn't the answer, and eInk screens will surely keep improving. Actually, the iPad reminds me of Palm's Foleo, except that Palm finally saw sense and pulled the plug before the release date ...
I have no computers that iTunes will run on, and of course, Apple encrypts communications to and from the device so no open-source software can connect to it either.
Yep, iTunes sucks big time. But it will work quite happily running in a VirtualBox virtual machine -- that's the only way I use my iPod Touch. And if you don't happen to have a copy of Windows to install, TinyXP might be something to search for ... :) You can share your music folder (or podcast folder in this case) with the virtual machine, so it's pretty straightforward.
What annoys me far more than dodgy iTunes, though, is the lack of available memory on the iPod Touch -- meaning that even jailbroken and with backgrounder, you can never get multi-tasking happening. That and those pathetic slidey-zoomy time-wasting transitions really drive me nuts. Oh, and the fact that despite being a powerful computer, it won't let me save a frikken playlist without iTunes holding its hand ...
NYTimes recently had an article on penmanship. Cursive deserves to die -- it often results in illegible scrawl. I'd explain why, but the article does it so much better.
I think the idea that the article you cite misses is that cursive is fast. If you want to write beautifully legible cursive, you can slow it down; if you want to write quickly, you can speed it up with a minimum of loss of comprehension. Try writing quickly in that italics script they suggest! ... it'd drive anyone nuts.
I'd also point out that they use a horribly misformed example of cursive (with a particularly bad word, "believe") next to their perfectly formed italic script example. This is neither a fair, open or sensible comparison (which probably explains why the article in question is published in a newspaper rather than a peer-reviewed journal.) I've never seen anyone write cursive even remotely as ugly as that one example! (and if kids are really writing like that, then that suggests not that cursive is inherrently bad, but more that they're not being taught cursive properly. Cursive doesn't have to, and certainly shouldn't, look like that ...)
Developing good handwriting skills is calligraphy, not cursive.
I think that statement says a lot about the current state of your handwriting ... :) I know a few (older) people who naturally write in copperplate cursive (a la the dec of independence), and it's just beautiful to read.
But developing good handwriting skills is a natural part of being able to communicate with others, something which should be every child's right.
Cursive writing is no more a requirement to literacy than knowing how to operate a printing press.
Now, "any form of writing at all" is important. But curisive?
The advantage of cursive, surely, is its speed. Being able to take hand-written notes is still important in many disciplines (the sciences, for example) and if kids can't take notes efficiently, accurately and still maintain legibility to others then they'll fall behind. (I couldn't do my job, for example, if I couldn't keep a legible, detailed, handwritten lab book.)
Even outside of the workplace, it's often faster to take a note by hand on a piece of scrap paper than to fire up a PDA or phone and cumbersomely tap out a note that way. If you remove a kid's ability to write cursively, then you just slow them down.
And besides, what are emo kids going to do if they can't send a pretty hand-written love sonnet to their sweetheart??
Your password may be long and complicated, but examine closely at your "security questions." If the client has been lubing your junk, odds are that she knows your dog's name is Archibald and your favorite color is mauve.
"Forgot my password" indeed.
Huh, but gmail allows you to set your own security question. Mine is, "What is the specific string of alpha-numeric characters used to answer this question?"
I'm pretty sure no random junk-luber is going to guess that one any time soon ....
Tabs on the side take *a lot* of space, for both that text goes horizontally and because monitors also have more space horizontally.
Er ... that's the point. Tabs on the side maximise the vertical space available for webpages (which generally have a fixed horizontal width and are longer than they are wide) and at the same time use some of the wasted horizontal monitor space for tabs.
The fact that you can get a hierarchical layout of tabs with tabs on the side (such that child tabs are indented, and trees are collapsible) is just a bonus :)
It doesn't compare to a real printed page or e-ink. And I read outside all the time, like nearly every single day. "Non-optimal" doesn't cut it, sorry.
Unfortunately, e-ink doesn't compare to a real printed page either. It's a lot better than an LCD screen in bright sunlight, definitely, but the contrast ratio is so incredibly poor at the moment. I really wanted to like the e-ink displays, but when it came down to it I just couldn't buy one. Way too much like smudged, dirty newsprint for my liking!
Hopefully the nextgen e-ink screens (post-Viziplex) will be better ...
Well, there's the iRex Illiad with an 8.1" diagonal screen ... but they're pretty expensive ...
There are people out there who actually read novels on an iphone sized screen?
Yep. I backpacked through Europe for seven weeks recently, and my iPod touch (using Stanza) was my library. I'd considered buying a dedicated e-ink device, but I found the dirty-newsprint and slow refresh of those displays deal-breakers; an iPhone screen has the same resolution, more shades of grey, and in landscape mode is nearly as wide as an e-ink in portrait. It was also considerably more pocketable, and the backlight worked great when I wanted to read in a dorm room late at night. I found it all worked incredibly well, and didn't experience any discomfort reading multiple novels on my trip. (In fact, the worst part was stripping the DRM from Amazon's ebooks before I left, so that I could read them on Stanza rather than on Amazon's shockingly bad Kindle app ...)
Obviously, though, YMMV. For some people the font size on an iPhone screen will be too small, whereas for others like myself it's fine. That said, if e-ink readers get more screen contrast and become a lot cheaper, I'd definitely buy one -- I'd rather have a 6" solution than a 3.5" solution, as the bishop said. But I don't think the e-ink technology or the price point is there, yet, and for me the iPhone seems the best compromise.
When you have to look up documentation to figure out how to draw a straight line in the Gimp, and that documentation is somewhat condescending, you might start to think that the Gimp isn't actually that good for simple tasks.
Strange ... drawing a straight line in the Gimp is a pretty straightforward (pardon the pun) thing to do, all you need is the paint tool of your choice and the shift key. Even if you can't figure it out intuitively, the interface tells you down the bottom when a paint tool is selected "(try Shift for a straight line, Ctrl to pick a color)". Why is this so difficult to grasp? Personally, if we're trading individual anecdotes here, I tried paint.net and struggled; in comparison, the Gimp did everything paint.net could do and more. But I think the real surprise about paint.net being included in a list of open-source software is that it's not open-source in the first place ...
Anyway, if you want to draw straight lines, a vector graphics program like Inkscape is probably going to be more your scene. And that's the glaring omission in the list for me: Inkscape is a brilliant vector graphics implementation and I would have thought it easily deserved a mention.
In fact, nerds should be paying for software more than anyone, because we appreciate the effort involved in its production.
Uh, no ... real nerds use OSS, and code to contribute back to the community. They like giving stuff they've created away for free. (You did realise you were posting to /., didn't you?)
So to use your analogy, we should all be creating open-source movies. Probably couldn't be much worse than "Wolverine", I'm guessing, if we did ...
Even better, it will only work on WIFI, and wifi is turned off while the screen is off.
Not after jailbreaking ...
iPhones can run multiple apps, but the public SDK does not allow developers to write apps that run in the background. Apple can certainly write apps that run in the background, though. The music service, for one. The phone service, etc. Additionally, developers for jailbroken phones can run applications in the background because they're not constrained by the official SDK.
Safari is another app that runs in the background. I've never really been sure why (unless it's to allow you to view the last page you were reading offline ...)
Lacking background capabilities isn't really an issue provided that applications save their state and that they launch rapidly (or in other words, the launcher software becomes a virtual task manager).
Not exactly. With Ubquity you get instant feedback during typing, so you don't have to wait for the page to load with all the bells and whistles, you see only the relevant part of it.
What possible feedback could you need whilst typing in an address or a search term? If anything, this seems a waste of bandwidth, bringing up false hits while you type and then requiring you to load the correct page again when you've found it.
I really hope this isn't the best Firefox can offer for its future. Whilst the development of an OSS project is a personal thing, it seems a pity more time can't be spent removing the bloat that's accumulated over the years, rather than constantly adding in more ... (anyone else remember when Phoenix 0.1 first came out, with the grand aim of being Mozilla stripped bare?)
Seriously. The new key to meeting cute geek chicks is a netbook?
Hey, at least it shows you're not compensating for anything ...