I was into reading ebooks on my PDA before it got popular.
Reading from smaller backlit screens is certainly not be for everyone, although I liked the form factor and the fact that I didn't need to rely on external light. For almost everyone else though, the new e-ink readers should fix most of the problems such as small screen size limited resolution by making the screen look just like paper.* If the devices aren't quite there yet, I think they will be soon enough, it's just a matter of making small improvements to the existing technology. Then there would be little preventing people from just grabbing some books off emule, unless the devices are completely locked down with unbreakable DRM to disallow anything not digitally signed.
I actually also wrote a short-ish essay on this topic for one of my classes years ago. It wasn't too detailed as it wasn't a business or economics analysis, but it clearly showed that getting a cheapo Palm device and then just warezing the books made sense financially if the reader could either tolerate the reading method or actually preferred it. As I recall, I also made some comparisons between book vs album prices and mp3 player vs PDAs, assuming a desktop PC with internet connection was a fixed cost. The conclusion, I think, was that pirating books is going to be viable on a larger scale in the near future assuming even more suitable devices appear at a reasonable price.
The only problem for now is that these e-ink devices are pretty expensive. While various PDAs were also not too cheap, they were very versatile, so for instance I used mine mainly to keep track of all tasks, assignments, meetings, and other organizational stuff, then play some Worms or Quake on it, then check my mail or browse the web. As far as I know, the Kindle just has a broken web browser and an mp3 player. I don't think this is going to be a long term problem though, the technology is still pretty young and therefore expensive.
*- Preemptively acknowledging the few nuts who would just love to rant here about how anything that doesn't feel like dead trees or involve physically turning the pages is unusable
So? It's just a few anecdotes, none of which even include the printer that I mentioned. Maybe HP does indeed suck nowadays, I don't know. But you should notice that in the same post he recommends some new Ricoh and Brother equipment, thereby invalidating (as far as it is possible to do with anecdotes) the claim that they don't make them like they used to.
Oh really? Do you have any evidence for that besides personal anecdotes and old people's rants?
> No one is suggesting going out and purchasing a 20 year-old laser printer for its original sticker price. That's why there's eBay. And pawn shops. And Craigslist. Etc.
Of course not, I wasn't suggesting that either. The point was that if you want a printer on which the manufacturer didn't try to cut costs, you can just pay more money (but still less than the old hardware cost) and get a brand new printer which will be better than the old piece of junk in every way. Like, oh I dunno, this LaserJet 9040.
Sometimes it makes sense to buy used hardware, obviously last year's printer for $10 is a better deal than a new one with minor changes for $100, so I'm not denying that. However, this is already getting too far from the original point, which was that for less money you can now buy better hardware than you could n years ago.
Some people are indeed stupid, though maybe it's just early dementia.
Oh fuck, is this the whole "they don't make them like they used to" thing again? The cheap laser printers you can get today might not have as much attention to quality as the magical NEC from 1993 or whenever, but that's the thing, they're cheap, and the NEC wasn't. How much was it back then?
LaserJets from mid 80s were apparently about $3500, and according to this magazine review, the Silentwriter 95 was $1749 back in 1992, so that's about $2500 in today's money. Go ahead and buy a monochrome laser printer for two and a half grand, I'll just get one for $150 which will last me most of a decade, if not more.
Anecdote time! The KonicaMinolta Page Pro I got 6 years ago for maybe $90 still works perfectly fine today. I can still get original KM toner if I wanted to, and the only thing that went wrong with it was a tiny piece of plastic which held up part of the paper tray. Now if I shake it, it wobbles a bit more than it should. This might be explained by the fact that I put all the shit that didn't fit on my desk on top of it though, but oh noes! Obviously it's not as good as the one from back when you were my age. And get off his lawn, you damn kids!
Having Wi-Fi and 3G/Edge turned on is the best way to murder any phone battery. My S730 may last two-three days normally, but if I turn on Wi-Fi in maximum performance mode as well as 3G (or even just Edge in my case), I can run down the battery in maybe 30 minutes. In fact, if I put my finger on the battery or the rear cover, I can feel it heat up due to the enormous power drawn by the WiFi/3G modules.
I have no idea how they actually got the number (RTFA and all that), but if I were to calculate something like this, the biggest part would be the person's cost. If the guy costs $100k/year to employ and then on 183 days he does no productive work because he's too busy jerking it, well there's your ~50k right there. The wasted bandwidth and equipment costs would be pretty minor compared to this, so maybe just add something for liability coverage.
As to your other point, they (or any random company) have little choice in this. Having huge hairy balls and dicks visible anywhere can be interpreted by some employees, their lawyers, and juries as creating a hostile environment. In the US this would probably get them sued out of some mega-bucks, in most EU countries reported to some agency which would then fine/"inspect" the shit out of them. Not that I'm against porn in the workplace or anywhere else, but getting sued every other week isn't civil disobedience and won't change anything.
In general, using the employer's resources for your own needs isn't a good idea. I don't think anybody would care if you used the phone to set up a date (great example), but if you took up calling your mom in another country for an hour every day this should be noticed and hopefully dealt with. This is just stealing the taxpayers/company's money. Whether or not this should be prosecuted depends of course on the cost of the activity, the resources available for this prosecution, and its opportunity cost, among other things.
> if you have any appreciation for aesthetics at all, buy the Toyota
That's probably the fist time something like this has been said, ever. The recent US Fords aren't too bad (except the "new" Focus), but when somebody really has an appreciation for aesthetics, they get an Alfa-Romeo or something else Italian which doesn't have a Fiat badge.
Re:And yet they do nothing to discourage the car
on
The Fresca Rebellion
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Cyclists are assholes everywhere. Why yes, Mr Fixed-gear bike riding douchebag, please go ahead and squeeze up to the light we're all waiting for, and then take off while the light is still red. This way, you'll be in the middle of the intersection when cars take off, making them unable to pass you. The only other thing about bikes that pisses me off about as much are the assholes slowly crawling up steep hills on narrow curvy country roads with lots of blind turns. Thanks for signaling for me to pass you, jackass, but I'm not going to risk a head-on collision just because you can't be bothered to pull over for a second and let me through.
Erm, enough with the ranting. Not all of them ride like that of course, and I have no problems with them hurting themselves while jumping off cliffs or stairs. Anyway, I don't think biking has much to do with obesity to be honest. I am in Europe, and nobody that I know rides their bike to work or school, and the hordes of bikers are nowhere to be seen during the morning rush hours. I suspect that more people ride recreationally than in the US, but still nowhere near enough to explain the differences in obesity.
Even if you look at Denmark, with the highest biking km/person/year in the EU, biking only accounts for around 12-13% of km traveled. This figure is somewhat smaller for the Netherlands, but then a bit lower is Germany at about 4%, while Spain is 0.4%. Yet, the Spanish are actually significantly thinner. Italians don't rely on their bikes as much as the Dutch, buth again they're the thinner ones.
I don't have any research on this, but I'd say walking affects the obesity rates much more than biking does. While walking accounts for even less distance traveled than biking, this is mainly because walking is fucking slow and you can't actually go further than a few blocks in a reasonable amount of time. At the same time, many more people walk than ride bikes, and I think this is what makes the difference. I don't know if the data supports this, but at a glance there doesn't seem to be much of a correlation, though maybe that's partially because the variation in walking is much lower between the countries (115 km range vs 915 for biking).
This being a USB flash drive explains most of it. They're just pretty slow, especially for writes. It feels weird that I have to explain this on slashdot, but there's a part of disk dedicated to storing the information about the files located on it, usually known as the file allocation table. This information would include the filenames, creation or modification dates, and most importantly, their physical location on the disk. For each file deleted, the system needs to check with that table for the information about the file, and mark it as deleted.
The system doesn't need to physically change the files themselves, which is why deleting a 10GB file takes as long as deleting a 10KB one. Still, when deleting a large number of files this overhead begins to add up to a significant amount of time. This also applies to creating, moving or copying files, so for example one 1GB file will be copied much faster than 1048576 1KB files, as the system needs to create a record for each of those, in addition to all other overhead.
> dont most of the phones take 15-20 mins to delete 800+ messages??
Not my WM6 phone. It's not instantaneous as one might want, but perfectly acceptable, I'd say. I just deleted about 600 messages from my inbox folder, and it took all of 25 seconds to do that. Unless their algorithm hits a brick wall within the next 200 messages, I don't see this task taking even a minute to complete.
Unless... you guys are talking about manually going through each message and deleting them one by one. In that case, yeah, even if takes just one second to check a message and delete it, dealing with 800 messages would take about 13 minutes, but then it's a PEBKAC situation.
MMS also works/ed on my SE T68i, which was a slight update of the T68 from what, 2001? I didn't send many messages, but from what I remember it was pretty easy to use and worked well.
As far as I can tell, MMS didn't catch on here was because they were ridiculously expensive. Vodafone, which I use, prices them at 65 cents per message, independently of the plan you have. Even if you're on the cheapest monthly plan, this works out to over 2 minutes of talk time per message, and gets more silly for more expensive plans. T-Mobile and O2 seem to have slightly more reasonable prices, but not by much.
I've used mainly two WM devices, an old PDA and a recent 6.1 smartphone. The touchscreen OS was clearly designed for the stylus, but I've never had much problems with using my fingers to scroll through a page or dismiss a dialog when absolutely necessary. And when using it with two hands, which is apparently how the various iphones are usually used nowadays, I prefer to use the stylus anyway.
The more recent smartphone version works just fine as a phone though, that is, the regular keypad is enough to comfortably interact with the system.
None of the standard WM versions are of course in any way sexy, but this also means there's no shit flying around the screen all the time when you're doing something trivial. The various custom interfaces like those from HTC, Sony Ericsson, or SPB seem to provide all the bling anyone might ever want.
The various apps are probably my favorite part about WM though. Since nobody's forced into a restrictive store, there are all kinds of apps from kamasutra to packet sniffers, to programming languages. Seeing all the excitement about the recent Wolfenstein 3d port was quite amusing too. Developing for the system is quite easy and fun well. So far I've only ran into one somewhat ugly issue when accessing the camera directly from a C# app, and that's only a problem because I have about zero experience with C++. All the other APIs I've used were pretty clean and easy to use, and as a result, I've quickly written about half a dozen apps which are actually useful without any previous WM/C# experience.
So what I'm saying is that WM definitely has some serious problems, but I'm willing to overlook them just so that I don't have to put up with anyone's (Apple, Google, and Palm, I'm looking at you) bullshit.
Really? You probably weren't reading very carefully that whole time.
IIRC you can transfer your books to any other Kindle associated with your account, so as long as the thieves can't buy anything with your stolen account, Amazon doesn't owe you anything else. Will bricking the Kindle magically make it reappear in your possession? I don't think so. Call the cops if it's been stolen and then get back with Amazon, or just suck it up if you fucked up and left it somewhere.
Ratified treaties do (or at least should) have the same weight as any national law, and in fact sometimes can take precedence over the existing national laws, even the constitution. A small tactical nuke ca be pretty useful for defending against large hardened targets or masses of soft targets, so one could argue that they are necessary to defend your ranch from the massive waves of pillaging Mongols. Somebody really should test this theory in court.
> what have you done lately that's bigger than you?
I was mostly joking so don't take that as a personal insult. But since you want this to be more serious, well for once I did not put myself in a position where I would be responsible for killing people on the whim of others, contribute to the growth of the military-industrial complex, or further proliferation of (nuclear) weapons. I'm quite proud of this.
Huh, I thought brain damage was a prerequisite for joining the military voluntarily. Did they relax or drop that requirement too once they started running out of manpower?
Possession of WMDs is probably regulated by international law/treaties, so this might limit Bill Gates' ambition of becoming a nuclear power. At least until he gets his own country and a seat in the Security Council, that is.
I'm not surprised that marketing is a very large percentage of their total expenses, but three times higher sounds suspicious. Maybe their marketing expenses grew three times faster than development costs? Or maybe they look at not just a single title... It's really impossible to tell only by that joke of an article.
Slashdot Mirror
I was into reading ebooks on my PDA before it got popular.
Reading from smaller backlit screens is certainly not be for everyone, although I liked the form factor and the fact that I didn't need to rely on external light. For almost everyone else though, the new e-ink readers should fix most of the problems such as small screen size limited resolution by making the screen look just like paper.* If the devices aren't quite there yet, I think they will be soon enough, it's just a matter of making small improvements to the existing technology. Then there would be little preventing people from just grabbing some books off emule, unless the devices are completely locked down with unbreakable DRM to disallow anything not digitally signed.
I actually also wrote a short-ish essay on this topic for one of my classes years ago. It wasn't too detailed as it wasn't a business or economics analysis, but it clearly showed that getting a cheapo Palm device and then just warezing the books made sense financially if the reader could either tolerate the reading method or actually preferred it. As I recall, I also made some comparisons between book vs album prices and mp3 player vs PDAs, assuming a desktop PC with internet connection was a fixed cost. The conclusion, I think, was that pirating books is going to be viable on a larger scale in the near future assuming even more suitable devices appear at a reasonable price.
The only problem for now is that these e-ink devices are pretty expensive. While various PDAs were also not too cheap, they were very versatile, so for instance I used mine mainly to keep track of all tasks, assignments, meetings, and other organizational stuff, then play some Worms or Quake on it, then check my mail or browse the web. As far as I know, the Kindle just has a broken web browser and an mp3 player. I don't think this is going to be a long term problem though, the technology is still pretty young and therefore expensive.
*- Preemptively acknowledging the few nuts who would just love to rant here about how anything that doesn't feel like dead trees or involve physically turning the pages is unusable
So? It's just a few anecdotes, none of which even include the printer that I mentioned. Maybe HP does indeed suck nowadays, I don't know. But you should notice that in the same post he recommends some new Ricoh and Brother equipment, thereby invalidating (as far as it is possible to do with anecdotes) the claim that they don't make them like they used to.
> Uh, yeah. Because they don't.
Oh really? Do you have any evidence for that besides personal anecdotes and old people's rants?
> No one is suggesting going out and purchasing a 20 year-old laser printer for its original sticker price. That's why there's eBay. And pawn shops. And Craigslist. Etc.
Of course not, I wasn't suggesting that either. The point was that if you want a printer on which the manufacturer didn't try to cut costs, you can just pay more money (but still less than the old hardware cost) and get a brand new printer which will be better than the old piece of junk in every way. Like, oh I dunno, this LaserJet 9040.
Sometimes it makes sense to buy used hardware, obviously last year's printer for $10 is a better deal than a new one with minor changes for $100, so I'm not denying that. However, this is already getting too far from the original point, which was that for less money you can now buy better hardware than you could n years ago.
Some people are indeed stupid, though maybe it's just early dementia.
Oh fuck, is this the whole "they don't make them like they used to" thing again? The cheap laser printers you can get today might not have as much attention to quality as the magical NEC from 1993 or whenever, but that's the thing, they're cheap, and the NEC wasn't. How much was it back then?
LaserJets from mid 80s were apparently about $3500, and according to this magazine review, the Silentwriter 95 was $1749 back in 1992, so that's about $2500 in today's money. Go ahead and buy a monochrome laser printer for two and a half grand, I'll just get one for $150 which will last me most of a decade, if not more.
Anecdote time! The KonicaMinolta Page Pro I got 6 years ago for maybe $90 still works perfectly fine today. I can still get original KM toner if I wanted to, and the only thing that went wrong with it was a tiny piece of plastic which held up part of the paper tray. Now if I shake it, it wobbles a bit more than it should. This might be explained by the fact that I put all the shit that didn't fit on my desk on top of it though, but oh noes! Obviously it's not as good as the one from back when you were my age. And get off his lawn, you damn kids!
Having Wi-Fi and 3G/Edge turned on is the best way to murder any phone battery. My S730 may last two-three days normally, but if I turn on Wi-Fi in maximum performance mode as well as 3G (or even just Edge in my case), I can run down the battery in maybe 30 minutes. In fact, if I put my finger on the battery or the rear cover, I can feel it heat up due to the enormous power drawn by the WiFi/3G modules.
I have no idea how they actually got the number (RTFA and all that), but if I were to calculate something like this, the biggest part would be the person's cost. If the guy costs $100k/year to employ and then on 183 days he does no productive work because he's too busy jerking it, well there's your ~50k right there. The wasted bandwidth and equipment costs would be pretty minor compared to this, so maybe just add something for liability coverage.
As to your other point, they (or any random company) have little choice in this. Having huge hairy balls and dicks visible anywhere can be interpreted by some employees, their lawyers, and juries as creating a hostile environment. In the US this would probably get them sued out of some mega-bucks, in most EU countries reported to some agency which would then fine/"inspect" the shit out of them. Not that I'm against porn in the workplace or anywhere else, but getting sued every other week isn't civil disobedience and won't change anything.
In general, using the employer's resources for your own needs isn't a good idea. I don't think anybody would care if you used the phone to set up a date (great example), but if you took up calling your mom in another country for an hour every day this should be noticed and hopefully dealt with. This is just stealing the taxpayers/company's money. Whether or not this should be prosecuted depends of course on the cost of the activity, the resources available for this prosecution, and its opportunity cost, among other things.
"Wankers", I think, would be much more appropriate in this case.
Do your rubber chickens have pulleys in the middle? If not I'm afraid your investment is junk and you just wasted your money.
Yes, they've successfully convinced me that my next car should be an Aston Martin. I'd say that's pretty useful.
> if you have any appreciation for aesthetics at all, buy the Toyota
That's probably the fist time something like this has been said, ever. The recent US Fords aren't too bad (except the "new" Focus), but when somebody really has an appreciation for aesthetics, they get an Alfa-Romeo or something else Italian which doesn't have a Fiat badge.
Cyclists are assholes everywhere. Why yes, Mr Fixed-gear bike riding douchebag, please go ahead and squeeze up to the light we're all waiting for, and then take off while the light is still red. This way, you'll be in the middle of the intersection when cars take off, making them unable to pass you. The only other thing about bikes that pisses me off about as much are the assholes slowly crawling up steep hills on narrow curvy country roads with lots of blind turns. Thanks for signaling for me to pass you, jackass, but I'm not going to risk a head-on collision just because you can't be bothered to pull over for a second and let me through.
Erm, enough with the ranting. Not all of them ride like that of course, and I have no problems with them hurting themselves while jumping off cliffs or stairs. Anyway, I don't think biking has much to do with obesity to be honest. I am in Europe, and nobody that I know rides their bike to work or school, and the hordes of bikers are nowhere to be seen during the morning rush hours. I suspect that more people ride recreationally than in the US, but still nowhere near enough to explain the differences in obesity.
Even if you look at Denmark, with the highest biking km/person/year in the EU, biking only accounts for around 12-13% of km traveled. This figure is somewhat smaller for the Netherlands, but then a bit lower is Germany at about 4%, while Spain is 0.4%. Yet, the Spanish are actually significantly thinner. Italians don't rely on their bikes as much as the Dutch, buth again they're the thinner ones.
I don't have any research on this, but I'd say walking affects the obesity rates much more than biking does. While walking accounts for even less distance traveled than biking, this is mainly because walking is fucking slow and you can't actually go further than a few blocks in a reasonable amount of time. At the same time, many more people walk than ride bikes, and I think this is what makes the difference. I don't know if the data supports this, but at a glance there doesn't seem to be much of a correlation, though maybe that's partially because the variation in walking is much lower between the countries (115 km range vs 915 for biking).
This being a USB flash drive explains most of it. They're just pretty slow, especially for writes. It feels weird that I have to explain this on slashdot, but there's a part of disk dedicated to storing the information about the files located on it, usually known as the file allocation table. This information would include the filenames, creation or modification dates, and most importantly, their physical location on the disk. For each file deleted, the system needs to check with that table for the information about the file, and mark it as deleted.
The system doesn't need to physically change the files themselves, which is why deleting a 10GB file takes as long as deleting a 10KB one. Still, when deleting a large number of files this overhead begins to add up to a significant amount of time. This also applies to creating, moving or copying files, so for example one 1GB file will be copied much faster than 1048576 1KB files, as the system needs to create a record for each of those, in addition to all other overhead.
> dont most of the phones take 15-20 mins to delete 800+ messages??
Not my WM6 phone. It's not instantaneous as one might want, but perfectly acceptable, I'd say. I just deleted about 600 messages from my inbox folder, and it took all of 25 seconds to do that. Unless their algorithm hits a brick wall within the next 200 messages, I don't see this task taking even a minute to complete.
Unless... you guys are talking about manually going through each message and deleting them one by one. In that case, yeah, even if takes just one second to check a message and delete it, dealing with 800 messages would take about 13 minutes, but then it's a PEBKAC situation.
MMS also works/ed on my SE T68i, which was a slight update of the T68 from what, 2001? I didn't send many messages, but from what I remember it was pretty easy to use and worked well.
As far as I can tell, MMS didn't catch on here was because they were ridiculously expensive. Vodafone, which I use, prices them at 65 cents per message, independently of the plan you have. Even if you're on the cheapest monthly plan, this works out to over 2 minutes of talk time per message, and gets more silly for more expensive plans. T-Mobile and O2 seem to have slightly more reasonable prices, but not by much.
I've used mainly two WM devices, an old PDA and a recent 6.1 smartphone. The touchscreen OS was clearly designed for the stylus, but I've never had much problems with using my fingers to scroll through a page or dismiss a dialog when absolutely necessary. And when using it with two hands, which is apparently how the various iphones are usually used nowadays, I prefer to use the stylus anyway.
The more recent smartphone version works just fine as a phone though, that is, the regular keypad is enough to comfortably interact with the system.
None of the standard WM versions are of course in any way sexy, but this also means there's no shit flying around the screen all the time when you're doing something trivial. The various custom interfaces like those from HTC, Sony Ericsson, or SPB seem to provide all the bling anyone might ever want.
The various apps are probably my favorite part about WM though. Since nobody's forced into a restrictive store, there are all kinds of apps from kamasutra to packet sniffers, to programming languages. Seeing all the excitement about the recent Wolfenstein 3d port was quite amusing too. Developing for the system is quite easy and fun well. So far I've only ran into one somewhat ugly issue when accessing the camera directly from a C# app, and that's only a problem because I have about zero experience with C++. All the other APIs I've used were pretty clean and easy to use, and as a result, I've quickly written about half a dozen apps which are actually useful without any previous WM/C# experience.
So what I'm saying is that WM definitely has some serious problems, but I'm willing to overlook them just so that I don't have to put up with anyone's (Apple, Google, and Palm, I'm looking at you) bullshit.
Or whether your last session originated from a Mac or not? And how about if you talk about, or have pictures of, Mazda Miatas in your profile?
Really? You probably weren't reading very carefully that whole time.
IIRC you can transfer your books to any other Kindle associated with your account, so as long as the thieves can't buy anything with your stolen account, Amazon doesn't owe you anything else. Will bricking the Kindle magically make it reappear in your possession? I don't think so. Call the cops if it's been stolen and then get back with Amazon, or just suck it up if you fucked up and left it somewhere.
It's subtle, but it's not very funny. I usually try to use something like Mike Litoris, if "real" name is required.
Ratified treaties do (or at least should) have the same weight as any national law, and in fact sometimes can take precedence over the existing national laws, even the constitution. A small tactical nuke ca be pretty useful for defending against large hardened targets or masses of soft targets, so one could argue that they are necessary to defend your ranch from the massive waves of pillaging Mongols. Somebody really should test this theory in court.
> what have you done lately that's bigger than you?
I was mostly joking so don't take that as a personal insult. But since you want this to be more serious, well for once I did not put myself in a position where I would be responsible for killing people on the whim of others, contribute to the growth of the military-industrial complex, or further proliferation of (nuclear) weapons. I'm quite proud of this.
Huh, I thought brain damage was a prerequisite for joining the military voluntarily. Did they relax or drop that requirement too once they started running out of manpower?
Possession of WMDs is probably regulated by international law/treaties, so this might limit Bill Gates' ambition of becoming a nuclear power. At least until he gets his own country and a seat in the Security Council, that is.
Hmm... so is he trying to build some sort of redneck technical there?
> Not when "it" involves a consumer product exploding, and "the customer" is a whole lot of customers.
Unless the product is a bomb or a missile, then everything's fine again.
I'm not surprised that marketing is a very large percentage of their total expenses, but three times higher sounds suspicious. Maybe their marketing expenses grew three times faster than development costs? Or maybe they look at not just a single title... It's really impossible to tell only by that joke of an article.