Q: Will I be charged wireless fees? Do I need any sort of contract? A: No. There is no charge for your nook's wireless features. You do not need a contract.
So free wifi AND 3G from ATT, apparently for life of the product.
But I have the B&N reader, as well as Stanza and Kindle reader on the iPhone, and believe me it is a reading platform of last resort. Stuck on a train/plane/hotel-room; fine.
Anywhere else, no thanks.
Too small, too little info per page (no possible way to skim a book on that tiny screen) and a battery life of a new york minute.
Yes, you CAN use your iPhone. There's an App for that, but jeeze, talk about a platform mismatch!
Re:The OS would only matter if the device is open
on
The Kindle Killer Arrives
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well wait till its been officially released and in the store before you ask for Linux on it.;-)
If history is any guide it might take a week and a half for someone to post a hack.
But even in the absence of that, the fact that it is Android DOES matter, because Android is growing rapidly, its open source, and has a lot of support from a lot of companies and individuals (and its basically Linux under the skin).
This means there is an upgrade path for the device. Its not a dead-end device, and OS upgrades will likely become available, both official (B&N), and unofficial.
It had always been quasi open-source, and free to use, and he sold it to Sun. Now when it is acquired by a company who's only purpose for buying Sun was to kill this product and eat its heart he gets religion?
For urban locations where stops are seldom more than a block or two apart this makes for lower infrastructure costs, as no over-street trolly cables are needed.
The ability to alter routes would also be fairly flexible because you could tie into the power grid anywhere you need to add a station.
But the amount of power you need to deliver in a short time means that the stations have to have either the ability to acquire and store a massive charge in the between-bus intervals, (their own ultra-capacitors) or the grid inter-tie would really have to be massive enough to dump that much power into the bus in a couple minutes, for as many buses as you need to send down the line in rush hour.
A shorted capacitor might be fearsome fireworks display.
The key being that the two were encoded with two totally different codecs.
Exactly. And as such they are not comparable.
This certainly does not say a thing about the ability of people to distinguish between a good encoding and a bad one when the only information provided was the bit rate.
At best TFA is a testament to AAC. Says nothing about human ability to distinguish.
You can encode a phone call, typically limited to a frequency response of between, roughly, 350Hz and 3,500Hz at 192kbps. Probably 16kbps would suffice.
I'm having a nightmare, and it would probably help to wake up (if I could just get it to compile first...).
Exactly!
It seems there is always that point in the nightmare where you realize:
"Wait, wait, wait... I DIDN'T flunk out of CS, and I DO have my degree, and this is MY OWN house and not my mom's basement, so..."
Software types are more analytical, (either as a result or as an cause of them being in their field). As such they see things that Joe Random doesn't even notice.
When the waitress says "If you need anything else, my name is Betty" Joe Random grunts and takes a bite of his meal. Programmer dude wonders what her name is if he doesn't need any thing else.
When the reporter says "For CNN, I'm Wolf Blitzer", programmer dude shouts at the TV demanding to know who the reporter is when he dons his lederhosen and cowboy hat and goes dancing.
Ouch, that hurts to think about, I'll stop now.
Computer types are so used to thinking about eventualities, undesirable consequences, dangling IF conditions, and protecting against them that they fall into doing so in personal life as well. A simple, carelessly worded question in normal conversation can render them speechless while the gears grind.
Actions or behavior without negative consequences may lead to new discovery, and therefore need not be avoided. Being a little weird may be a calculated strategy to see if those around them are hopelessly hidebound.
There is probably no scientific evidence relied upon unquestionably, that has such serious issues regarding accuracy as fingerprinting.
If we were dealing with finger prints most of these issues would not arise. However, when we deal with a set of numbers in a computer file that only have to match to a certain level of precision there are way too many points for error.
TFA lauds discusses 3D scanning and casts aspersions on pressing inked finger to card.
I consider 3D just another source of error.
After all, leaving a finger print involves pressure and leaves a 2D print. What would be a better comparison than another 2D print made with typical pressure?
Mapping a 3D image to a 2D latent print opens the door for, and requires yet another layer of unproven technology. Conviction by mathematicians is not the standard to which we adhere.
If John worked for the federal government or many state governments in ANY CAPACITY, they are on file.
Jane Q Public has a far lower chance of having fingerprints on file simply because far fewer Janes than Johns serve in the military.
As a college intern I worked for the Forest service. As soon as I had been there 90 days it was down to the cop-shop for printing. That put my life of crime on hold.
Perhaps DOE thinks this their private stimulus package.
Still, when all the screaming and whining is over and Microsoft has fired promoted the guilty at Danger, can it still be said that 32Million would have been too costly?
I think the complaint about the registry was more toward the fact that the registry is so critical, yet it is used by every random app for things it was never intended.
Some Apps stuff huge quantities crap in the registry. Things with sizes (32K!!!) no rational person would put in a critical database.
Why? Because the developers (and several popular authors) misinterpreted Microsoft's intent when they stated they were moving away from.ini files to a central registry.
I've even seem podcasts of early Vista development where Microsoft engineers, stated the registry is being used for things that simply do not belong there, and that Microsoft never told application developers that this was THE place to store all sorts of stuff.
Moving applications to new machines becomes nearly impossible with registry based storage. (Yeah, there are ways, but not once the registry is corrupted as it usually ends up being). Even an adequate backup is nearly impossible.
Say what you will about Vista, that ship has sailed.
The real story here is how badly the early reviews missed the mark. The Ed Botts of the world bought it hook, line, and sinker, as many suspect they are paid to do.
The press failed US, their READERS, in their gold-rush to the Microsoft advertising bonanza. How are we to trust them going forward?
Yes its popular to bash anything Microsoft while giving Apple a pass for farm more egregious failings and a far more combative attitude. But EVEN in that environment, where bashing is expected, the overwhelming majority of articles were positive. Those two or three posting negative stories are no longer with the organizations where their review appeared. Coincidence?
We would have been better off listening to Joe Random Blogger, who were out there with not a great deal of good to say about Vista. We would have been better off shunning any outlet that took any Advertising money from Microsoft, or were owned by a company that did. We would have been better off evaluating sources for thin reviews, outlandish claims and clear bias. Joe Average Reader is a pretty good judge of content character over time.
The Release Candidates were getting seriously bad reviews on many blogs, and even some of these very same publications. But somehow by the time it came to review the RTM release all of mainstream press guys stood at attention and saluted. The bloggers' voices were drowned out by the clicking if heels.
This same thing is happening with regard to other products, other major software release today. (The latest versions of Office, KDE4, Kindle, some Blackberries, etc, come to mind). Lots of carping, even some quite nasty, but uniformly glowing reviews in the major publications.
Mainstream press wants to play gatekeeper of information. They belittle the blogosphere, decry the lack of filters, and insist on professional credentials. Yet they deliver major misses on some topics where there was clear indication of trouble ahead.
That provided 20 million dollars or so of value to the Russian space program. You should be thankful that it's actually getting used, even if just for space tourism.
Nice of all these useful idiots to fund the slow Russian take over of the ISS. If Russia has a problem coming up with 20 Million maybe they should step aside and let the EU run the place permanently.
But I agree its probably a huge waste of time at this juncture as far as real science goes. Adding Tourism does nothing to make me even vaguely "thankful".
In an emergency I suppose someone would be responsible for barking orders.
But realistically everyone up there, (now that the Cirque du Soleil clown is gone) are professionals and scientific types, and virtually all work schedules are managed by ground support teams.
Commanders in such a working environment generally are cajolers rather than of commanders anyway, but with the working environment I can't see them having much real need of a commander on a day to day basis, other than to lobby ground controllers for workload changes, or more snacks in the next cargo ship.
I suppose if they are still bickering over who gets to use which toilet they might have selected the Euro guy to take the edge off the situation.
And more depressing are those that tell you you can't exceed 56k on copper pairs EVEN when presented with evidence that those same copper pairs can handle 24Meg, or with VDSL up to 53Meg.
This problem is settled physics. Your stubborn clinging to analog when the entire world has moved on is pathetic.
ADSL bypasses the problem entirely. So how does ADSL do it? By bypassing the phone infrastructure entirely.
No. Sorry that is simply NOT true.
ADSL uses the exact same two wire copper pair that your analog signal used to use. Its the same infrastructure you had previously. In most cases the switch to adsl uses the EXACT same physical stretch of wire.
The only difference is that instead of sending sound (analog) down the wire they send electrical pulses, 1s and 0s: digital data.
Nothing changed other than someone started thinking OUT of the box. Someone told the analog engineers to take a hike.
And yet this nonsense about maximums persists.
I just told you in the GP post that adsl can do 24Mbits/s on a single pair of plain old telephone wire.
You turn right around, stick your fingers in your ears, sing LA LA LA loudly so that you can't hear men and and insist that there is ONLY 64k of total bandwidth on those same wires.
(And some fool mods you informative).
Recent months have seen stories on Slashdot about even higher speeds achieved on plain old copper wires. Gigahertz speeds.
This is why this whole thread about inadequate bandwidth is totally nonsense. New technology and totally different ways of using what we already have will continue to produce ever more information density in the same radio spectrum.
Instead of discrete channels formerly used, we are already seeing spread spectrum transmission pumping huge volumes thru common bandwidth in unlicensed spectrum.
Some of those technologies are in the lab today. Some haven't even taken shape in any one's mind yet. And still more await the prerequisite inventions that always give birth to new technology.
But one thing is certain. There is a LONG way to go before we even come close to "saturating the airwaves."
Slashdot Mirror
From the Support Faq:
Q: Will I be charged wireless fees? Do I need any sort of contract?
A: No. There is no charge for your nook's wireless features. You do not need a contract.
So free wifi AND 3G from ATT, apparently for life of the product.
For some values of "readable" this might be true.
But I have the B&N reader, as well as Stanza and Kindle reader on the iPhone, and believe me it is a reading platform of last resort. Stuck on a train/plane/hotel-room; fine.
Anywhere else, no thanks.
Too small, too little info per page (no possible way to skim a book on that tiny screen) and a battery life of a new york minute.
Yes, you CAN use your iPhone. There's an App for that, but jeeze, talk about a platform mismatch!
Well wait till its been officially released and in the store before you ask for Linux on it. ;-)
If history is any guide it might take a week and a half for someone to post a hack.
But even in the absence of that, the fact that it is Android DOES matter, because Android is growing rapidly, its open source, and has a lot of support from a lot of companies and individuals (and its basically Linux under the skin).
This means there is an upgrade path for the device. Its not a dead-end device, and OS upgrades will likely become available, both official (B&N), and unofficial.
Exactly.
He took the money.
It had always been quasi open-source, and free to use, and he sold it to Sun. Now when it is acquired by a company who's only purpose for buying Sun was to kill this product and eat its heart he gets religion?
For urban locations where stops are seldom more than a block or two apart this makes for lower infrastructure costs, as no over-street trolly cables are needed.
The ability to alter routes would also be fairly flexible because you could tie into the power grid anywhere you need to add a station.
But the amount of power you need to deliver in a short time means that the stations have to have either the ability to acquire and store a massive charge in the between-bus intervals, (their own ultra-capacitors) or the grid inter-tie would really have to be massive enough to dump that much power into the bus in a couple minutes, for as many buses as you need to send down the line in rush hour.
A shorted capacitor might be fearsome fireworks display.
That means radios, satellite radios, GPS, garage door openers, and cell phones will be severely degraded
Radios, Satellite Radios use external antenna. So strike that over hyped issue.
GPS can as well use external antennas.
Garage door openers need a range of only 8 to 12 feet.
Put the cell phone down. You shouldn't talking while driving anyway, And cells work in elevators, they will work in cars.
So one out of 4 complaints here is valid.
The key being that the two were encoded with two totally different codecs.
Exactly. And as such they are not comparable.
This certainly does not say a thing about the ability of people to distinguish between a good encoding and a bad one when the only information provided was the bit rate.
At best TFA is a testament to AAC. Says nothing about human ability to distinguish.
You can encode a phone call, typically limited to a frequency response of between, roughly, 350Hz and 3,500Hz at 192kbps. Probably 16kbps would suffice.
I'm having a nightmare, and it would probably help to wake up (if I could just get it to compile first...).
Exactly!
It seems there is always that point in the nightmare where you realize:
"Wait, wait, wait... I DIDN'T flunk out of CS, and I DO have my degree, and this is MY OWN house and not my mom's basement, so..."
Wake up, turn over, back to sleep.
1) Because every IF implies an ELSE, and he has been bitten too many times by failing to recognize that.
2) He has learned to log all transactions, not just those that appear superficially to have succeeded.
Mod parent "I spit my coffee".
Software types are more analytical, (either as a result or as an cause of them being in their field). As such they see things that Joe Random doesn't even notice.
When the waitress says "If you need anything else, my name is Betty" Joe Random grunts and takes a bite of his meal. Programmer dude wonders what her name is if he doesn't need any thing else.
When the reporter says "For CNN, I'm Wolf Blitzer", programmer dude shouts at the TV demanding to know who the reporter is when he dons his lederhosen and cowboy hat and goes dancing.
Ouch, that hurts to think about, I'll stop now.
Computer types are so used to thinking about eventualities, undesirable consequences, dangling IF conditions, and protecting against them that they fall into doing so in personal life as well. A simple, carelessly worded question in normal conversation can render them speechless while the gears grind.
Actions or behavior without negative consequences may lead to new discovery, and therefore need not be avoided. Being a little weird may be a calculated strategy to see if those around them are hopelessly hidebound.
No, not irrelevant.
We all know that fingerprint identification is accurate at SOME LEVEL. The exact level has never been scientifically determined.
Adding another process to introduce error can't be good regardless of the error rate of the underlying process.
Fingerprints are at best exculpatory. Gross differences between two quality prints are easily detected. Even to the untrained eye.
Close matches are difficult, and significant disagreement can ensue between professionally trained experts, even in the absence of bias.
Somewhere between, there is a cohort of prints where mapping will induce greater error.
There is probably no scientific evidence relied upon unquestionably, that has such serious issues regarding accuracy as fingerprinting.
If we were dealing with finger prints most of these issues would not arise. However, when we deal with a set of numbers in a computer file that only have to match to a certain level of precision there are way too many points for error.
TFA lauds discusses 3D scanning and casts aspersions on pressing inked finger to card.
I consider 3D just another source of error.
After all, leaving a finger print involves pressure and leaves a 2D print. What would be a better comparison than another 2D print made with typical pressure?
Mapping a 3D image to a 2D latent print opens the door for, and requires yet another layer of unproven technology. Conviction by mathematicians is not the standard to which we adhere.
If John worked for the federal government or many state governments in ANY CAPACITY, they are on file. Jane Q Public has a far lower chance of having fingerprints on file simply because far fewer Janes than Johns serve in the military. As a college intern I worked for the Forest service. As soon as I had been there 90 days it was down to the cop-shop for printing. That put my life of crime on hold.
Perhaps DOE thinks this their private stimulus package.
Still, when all the screaming and whining is over and Microsoft has fired promoted the guilty at Danger, can it still be said that 32Million would have been too costly?
I think the complaint about the registry was more toward the fact that the registry is so critical, yet it is used by every random app for things it was never intended.
Some Apps stuff huge quantities crap in the registry. Things with sizes (32K!!!) no rational person would put in a critical database.
Why? Because the developers (and several popular authors) misinterpreted Microsoft's intent when they stated they were moving away from .ini files to a central registry.
I've even seem podcasts of early Vista development where Microsoft engineers, stated the registry is being used for things that simply do not belong there, and that Microsoft never told application developers that this was THE place to store all sorts of stuff.
Moving applications to new machines becomes nearly impossible with registry based storage. (Yeah, there are ways, but not once the registry is corrupted as it usually ends up being). Even an adequate backup is nearly impossible.
Bring back the .ini file!!
Say what you will about Vista, that ship has sailed.
The real story here is how badly the early reviews missed the mark. The Ed Botts of the world bought it hook, line, and sinker, as many suspect they are paid to do.
The press failed US, their READERS, in their gold-rush to the Microsoft advertising bonanza. How are we to trust them going forward?
Yes its popular to bash anything Microsoft while giving Apple a pass for farm more egregious failings and a far more combative attitude. But EVEN in that environment, where bashing is expected, the overwhelming majority of articles were positive. Those two or three posting negative stories are no longer with the organizations where their review appeared. Coincidence?
We would have been better off listening to Joe Random Blogger, who were out there with not a great deal of good to say about Vista. We would have been better off shunning any outlet that took any Advertising money from Microsoft, or were owned by a company that did. We would have been better off evaluating sources for thin reviews, outlandish claims and clear bias. Joe Average Reader is a pretty good judge of content character over time.
The Release Candidates were getting seriously bad reviews on many blogs, and even some of these very same publications. But somehow by the time it came to review the RTM release all of mainstream press guys stood at attention and saluted. The bloggers' voices were drowned out by the clicking if heels.
This same thing is happening with regard to other products, other major software release today. (The latest versions of Office, KDE4, Kindle, some Blackberries, etc, come to mind). Lots of carping, even some quite nasty, but uniformly glowing reviews in the major publications.
Mainstream press wants to play gatekeeper of information. They belittle the blogosphere, decry the lack of filters, and insist on professional credentials. Yet they deliver major misses on some topics where there was clear indication of trouble ahead.
That provided 20 million dollars or so of value to the Russian space program. You should be thankful that it's actually getting used, even if just for space tourism.
Nice of all these useful idiots to fund the slow Russian take over of the ISS. If Russia has a problem coming up with 20 Million maybe they should step aside and let the EU run the place permanently.
But I agree its probably a huge waste of time at this juncture as far as real science goes. Adding Tourism does nothing to make me even vaguely "thankful".
The money would be better spent developing a "runway to orbit" capability: http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/050527/050527_spacecom_whiteknight_hmed2p.hlarge.jpg
You make it sound like the rest of them are a bunch of enlisted men, with no brains, no training, no discipline.
What does being commander entail?
In an emergency I suppose someone would be responsible for barking orders.
But realistically everyone up there, (now that the Cirque du Soleil clown is gone) are professionals and scientific types, and virtually all work schedules are managed by ground support teams.
Commanders in such a working environment generally are cajolers rather than of commanders anyway, but with the working environment I can't see them having much real need of a commander on a day to day basis, other than to lobby ground controllers for workload changes, or more snacks in the next cargo ship.
I suppose if they are still bickering over who gets to use which toilet they might have selected the Euro guy to take the edge off the situation.
Sorry, there is no fiber involved in many ADSL conversions.
All you need is to be within 18000 feet of the nearest CO.
Some towns don't even have fiber. Its copper everywhere.
Time to move out of your analog world, and realize the rest of the world has gone digital.
And more depressing are those that tell you you can't exceed 56k on copper pairs EVEN when presented with evidence that those same copper pairs can handle 24Meg, or with VDSL up to 53Meg.
This problem is settled physics. Your stubborn clinging to analog when the entire world has moved on is pathetic.
Relevant to my document?
Typos and all?
We've been this way before:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/db/Clippy-letter.PNG
Clippy is back, and he's pushing Viagra right to your desktop.
If I wanted ad supported docs I'd use Google. In fact I prefer it, because its at least up front about the ads.
Google Docs is more than adequate for the casual user.
OpenOffice is still free, and easily able to handle book length documents, huge spreadsheets, etc.
So where does Microsoft think they will find a market for this stuff?
ADSL bypasses the problem entirely. So how does ADSL do it? By bypassing the phone infrastructure entirely.
No. Sorry that is simply NOT true.
ADSL uses the exact same two wire copper pair that your analog signal used to use. Its the same infrastructure you had previously. In most cases the switch to adsl uses the EXACT same physical stretch of wire.
The only difference is that instead of sending sound (analog) down the wire they send electrical pulses, 1s and 0s: digital data.
Nothing changed other than someone started thinking OUT of the box. Someone told the analog engineers to take a hike.
And yet this nonsense about maximums persists.
I just told you in the GP post that adsl can do 24Mbits/s on a single pair of plain old telephone wire.
You turn right around, stick your fingers in your ears, sing LA LA LA loudly so that you can't hear men and and insist that there is ONLY 64k of total bandwidth on those same wires.
(And some fool mods you informative).
Recent months have seen stories on Slashdot about even higher speeds achieved on plain old copper wires. Gigahertz speeds.
This is why this whole thread about inadequate bandwidth is totally nonsense. New technology and totally different ways of using what we already have will continue to produce ever more information density in the same radio spectrum.
Instead of discrete channels formerly used, we are already seeing spread spectrum transmission pumping huge volumes thru common bandwidth in unlicensed spectrum.
Some of those technologies are in the lab today. Some haven't even taken shape in any one's mind yet. And still more await the prerequisite inventions that always give birth to new technology.
But one thing is certain. There is a LONG way to go before we even come close to "saturating the airwaves."