While not allowing "common" passwords is not the worse idea, in general the more password rules you make, the worse passwords you'll get. In the end people end up writing them on post-it notes... Doesn't Microsoft own Skype? Cause I was trying to make a Skype account a couple of years ago and tried first concatenating three weird Greek words transliterated to latin. I don't remember which words exactly, in any case, the password was rejected as too weak. Yeah, try cracking something like "poliefkoloskodikos" (aka "veryeasypassword"). It rejected a couple of others as well (it did not give you a specific reason - perhaps it would if I was on a desktop) and in the fourth try accepted something as simple as "river1". How is this kind of policy helped by banning e.g. "password1", that is not the problem. Oh, my "favorite" password rules are the ones that reduce the search space for potential hackers. For example, I have one bank account that requires the password to start with a number. I have network security camera that doesn't accept over 8 characters and the list goes on...
Amazon has said (when they were trying to get publishers to agree to lower/variable prices) that their prices are set to generate maximum income, i.e. max profit x volume. You lower the price if you feel more people will buy it to justify the lower price, and Amazon apparently has great algorithms to do that. Now, if people can retroactively get the difference it is still doable if they are just a few so that you can ignore them and "eat" the difference. If many people started to do this with automated services, then it either becomes pretty much impossible to calculate the optimal price-drops, and/or you result in smaller price-drops to account for the refunds, meaning you end up with a smaller volume as well (due to the less desirable price), so overall it starts hurting Amazon sales. I've been a heavy Prime user for many years (first in the US, now in the UK) and apart from the refunds, Amazon has been really great with me in numerous occasions (when the manufacturer was unhelpful, long after Amazon's return window), so I won't mind these refunds going away.
There might have been a change in their methodology last month. Apart from the Windows 3.11 jump from 0.00% to 0.40% (sic - they use two decimal places) going from March to April there is also a jump to 0.03% for Win 2000 when it was steady for many months at 0.01% and Linux had quite a significant sudden drop in the same month when its changes were usually smaller. An emulation project might have explained Windows 3.11 (although archive.org for example has been up way before April), but which popular emulator is running Windows 2000?
I got a Casio Cosmo Phase since the time and date are always visible, along with the solar system simulation (makes it easy to know which planets are up after sunset and before sunrise to know if you'll take out your C9.25). Battery lasts for several years, it is actually waterproof (can do swimming and snorkeling) not just splash-resistant like the Apple Watch, it has the basics you'd want from a watch like multiple alarms, count-down timer, stopwatch, a very responsive button interface and I can tell you it is resilient as it has been working great for me since 1989!
"Frankenstein", while undoubtedly having a huge impact on modern society is basically unreadable by modern readers - the copy I have has a forward by Stephen King saying it took him four attempts over decades to get through the book.
That's strange, my wife recently finished Frankenstein and she told me the exact opposite, while urging me to read it. While she is a humanities PhD she actually puts down books that many people would say are "unreadable" like Ulysses (the James Joyce one), or Paradise Lost and actually English is not even her native language, so it is not like she reads unusually hard/unreadable etc books. Anyway, she told me it was an amazing book, that the narration method is so modern you'd think it was written recently. Out of curiosity I checked the good reads page and scrolled down to the first negative review and the guy actually says he hasn't hated a book that much since he read Kafka's "Metamorphosis"... Perhaps Stephen King is allergic to reading successful works of the genre?:)
DxOMark is indeed a perfect example of elaborate benchmarking and what can go wrong with it. To make a streamline and objective test they only measure the few things that are the easiest to measure objectively over various cameras. In the end they seem to just combine these test scores and come up with a number that makes no sense if you look at real life performance, since not only they do not measure a multitude of things that also affect performance, but in addition, the way they combine the things they measure is not helping things. For example they measure color depth in bits and they actually say that "22 bits is excellent, differences under 1 bit are hard to detect" and yet, since it is only one of the few things that they can measure, if a camera has a bit depth of 22.9 and another 22.4, with other things being equal the former will get a much higher score, even though they do admit both are excellent and their difference is not perceptible! And in their scores from what I can gather, they don't seem to include resolution, since I see cameras with the same stats getting the same overall score despite one managing exactly the same noise/bit depth etc at twice the resolution! So, what good is DxOMark? Like every benchmark it is perfect for what it measures. In fact from the posted SNR curves people have calculated things like the read noise and even the quantum efficiency of sensors with what seems to be good accuracy (if you compare the values for the few sensors which have a published or calculated otherwise QE), but the "overall score" is rubbish. The car analogy is of course being given cars to benchmark and you have excellent facilities to measure the breaking distance, the acceleration and the engine noise with great accuracy. You make them into "scores" and add them to give the "overall score" of a car! And to make the analogy more accurate, you measure two basically inaudible electric engines and your sensitive equipment gives you a few db difference in SPL, but it translates to a greater score to the one as inaudible to humans as the other electric car and because it is 1/3rd of the score, it becomes an "overall better" car. The CPU performance benchmarks are also the same thing. They will tell you how good a CPU runs the benchmark. Hence, when my CS lab for example wanted to get a new processing cluster I made benchmarks out of the projects that would be running on the cluster and Dell, HP and Sun gave us access to sample units to run them. If you don't have access of course things get a lot harder...
I am praying my Kindle Keyboard doesn't die. I have it from 2011, its battery still seems to hold about the same charge and I got it when Amazon gave you free worldwide 3G internet! I've been to some pretty exotic places and could still take out my kindle and google something in its experimental browser (current offerings also have worldwide 3G, but only for downloading books from Amazon - and perhaps wikipedia?). That said, more kindle offering is a good thing. I mean it is by far my favorite device (I increased my literature reading from about 4-5 books per year to something like 20 after getting the kindle), if it wasn't for that perk and the fact that even the old Kindle Keyboard is pretty fine as a book reader (with the official case that has an integrated light), I would definitely consider this, it is still much cheaper than most phones for example. But, yeah, you don't normally need to upgrade your Kindle every year. My wife has the paperwhite and the only reasons for her to upgrade would be either a large screen one (for pdfs) or a color one (for graphic novels).
The "year of the Linux Desktop" has already come and gone, it was 2008 with ASUS' EEE PC popularity. Even for a while after Windows XP EEE PCs were being sold people would still opt for the Linux one (as it gave you 20GB vs 12GB for the same price) and at least give it a try. I had a 900/20GB model and the Xandros desktop was not bad, especially for beginners, but for the rest of us you really had to enable the "advanced mode" which was a full KDE 3 desktop (yay!). I am not sure why it did not catch on more after so many people where exposed to it, I guess the lack of something that is a *real* replacement for MS Office might have been a factor and possibly the fact that it was not easy to switch to the full KDE 3 desktop (KDE at its finest - made a great replacement for windows) if you were not a beginner computer user, just a Linux newbie and the default tab interface was too restrictive but you wouldn't know how to switch from it. Anyway, I don't think there will be another chance like that.
I already have trouble deciphering some captchas, having need for a second (or even third) try in some occasions, which is REALLY annoying. If they make them any harder, I think only bots will be able to solve them and not humans... Wait, is that the next generation of captcha? You are human if you fail?
When I read soldiers would be outfitted with tiny drones, I thought they finally, after almost 3 long decades, have the Innerspace technology perfected... But alas, it is just small RC helicopters... Strangely (to me) they are not quadcopters, I thought is small sizes quadcopters have all sorts of advantages over helicopters, am I wrong?
I am also a bookworm. With my wife we own thousands of books. Well, ok, not *many* thousands, but they fill about 7 full height IKEA bookcases so definitely over 1 thousand. For about half of them I have only paid little over shipping, as you say they are so cheap used. That said, after getting a Kindle 5 years ago, I immediately I increased my reading about 3-4 times. How is that? Well, I can now comfortably read in my bed before I sleep. A combination of a very light device that you can hold in one hand, does not need page turning and includes a very nice light (external, but gets power from the internal battery so you don't charge other things) makes reading a joy before you sleep. With regular books it was always a struggle (to hold, change page and have some light but not too much to wake up the wife, while tablets are really tiring at night). Also, it fits in my jacket's pocket, so it is always on me with a few hundreds of books, whenever I am waiting for something or riding the train etc I can continue reading, before the Kindle I never did that because most books do not fit in your pocket and also if you have not started a specific book you have to plan ahead choosing one to bring along. Oh, which reminds me, going on vacation I had to spend some time deciding which book to bring along, since I couldn't carry lots. If it was a bad choice, tough luck. Now I have hundreds with me. Ok, I admit I am cheating a bit, I downloaded a pirated package with several thousand books and while I do own the hard-copy versions of almost all I have transferred to the Kindle, so I feel good ethically, it is technically not allowed. But if you don't like that, you can still get access to numerous free books or buy/lend books wherever you are. And when I say wherever you are, I really mean (with the cell-enabled version) everywhere - e.g. on a beach in the aegean. In fact, I don't change my old keyboard kindle because apart from books it also has some rudimentary (due to the limited browser) global internet access for free, so when I travel and I don't have roaming data I can use my kindle. Oh, and when I pick up a regular book and run into an archaic etc word, I try to click to get the dictionary lookup! As for your questions, my 5 year old kindle still holds a charge for several books (could be weeks of reading if you don't use the night light) so I'd say it is long lasting and I don't consider plugging it into my phone's charger every couple of weeks an inconvenience. I don't know how hard it would be to change the battery (it should not be very easy, as it is internal like an iphone). You can sell your kindle. First you unregister it (which will remove your DRM books), but you can leave non-DRM books. The books that you have purchased and are DRM'ed can be sent to any of your devices (it doesn't have to be a kindle, there are kindle readers for PC/Mac/Android/iOS) at any moment (wirelessly), the ones that you do not have on Amazon digital (e.g. downloads off internet, project Gutenberg etc) are just files you copy paste to your PC, your kindle etc so it's up to you to back them up and copy them to a new device. You cannot sell DRM books, they are like itunes mp3. I guess you could arrange to transfer your entire collection by giving someone your account after removing payment info, but it is not something that gets done a lot I assume:) Anyway, that's my experience, Kindle has enabled me to read much much more, so it is my favorite gadget ever. I prefer it even over the Casio watch with the solar system simulator that I am wearing since 1990 (Casio Cosmo Phase for the curious). If you gave it a try it might surprise you.
Wow, that completely misses the point of e-readers.
So does 13.3".
Well, no, I wouldn't say that. It definitely is not a replacement of a regular e-reader, you just can't beat a 6" e-reader for convenience when reading e-books, but it is about the size of a printed page so it would be an excellent PDF reader and would fit your briefcase, messenger bag etc wherever a stack of A4 papers would go. So while I think a 9-10" device would be more convenient even as a PDF reader, I can see how a 13.3" would still be useful. As long as you get to keep your 6" $100 e-reader for when you don't need to read pdfs or cbrs...
I could build a decent PC for that and it will last me years, the Android reader will probably stop getting updates after a year or two and then become a paperweight
Wow, that completely misses the point of e-readers.
Anyway, me and my wife use e-ink (Kindle) readers for a few years now and love them, but she needs to read a lot of pdfs as well, so she uses a 9" tablet for those. She'd love it if she could have a big e-ink display and she'd gladly pay a premium, but $699 is a bit too much, we had actually discussed it a few months ago and she asked me if there was something up to $400. Of course she was thinking about 9-10", but still, $699 is a lot for a reader. I assume thought that this will get funded, since they are only asking for 60 people to sign up...
Great summary to show off a couple of slashdot's worst issues: no unicode support for things as simple as quotes and useless "editing" that doesn't even correct the aforementioned obvious problem with the summary. So, new/. overlords, are you "on it" as you claimed or not?
Am I the only one surprised that the US intelligence has a bunch of space telescopes the size of Hubble? I mean, I get spy satellites etc, I did expect a lot of money to go there, but they have enough scopes THE SIZE OF HUBBLE to give away 2 of them like that? Perhaps they have even larger ones, and the HST that was made into a big deal about how expensive complex and unique it was, was never close to being the largest space telescopes, just the only one pointed at the right things?
The way I see it you could use electricity for the rotation of the ceramic disk of a Podkletnov device, which would solve your weight problems and also allow you to reach supersonic speeds with just a small jet engine using very little fossil fuel.
Well, you could always throw each battery as you exhaust it. Might be tricky if you are over land, but with a good radar (& infrared camera for night flights) I guess you could avoid hitting people.
Yeah, imagine if you bought an expensive car and you had a minor collision, broke your head light, replaced it with an after-market one (perhaps the only one available in your area) and drove away. Then, after a few months the car manufacturer sent an OTA update that disabled your car and told you "sorry, you should not have done that, but you have the chance to buy our newer and shinier car! 'k thanks bye!". Mandatory car analogy...
Apple always gets away with it and the other vendors don't follow, because they don't have customers who will eat up anything. Let me give you an example just from my experience. My 3rd iPhone 4S in a row has failed in the same exact way: wifi/gps disabled. Just do a quick google about the "grayed out wifi" problem, you will find thousands of posts and also a lot of iPhone 4/4S phones on ebay with that fault. Only the first of the 3 failed within warranty in my case and all three where always in an office and used once a week for testing/debugging (that's why I kept replacing it, I test on various devices). People have actually pinpointed the problem: the overheat detection of the wifi/gps module fails and the software disables it. In fact, this disabling was a "feature" introduced with iOS 6 IIRC, so people who had stayed with iOS 5 did not get the issue. For any other company there would have been a recall, since it would have been an easy class action otherwise, and even a software patch would fix it. But apple is happy with customers getting a new phone and their average customer doesn't mind much. Ooh, another example, my boss, who you would call a dedicated Apple fan, had bought a mac mini 5-6 years ago. After 6 months it started killing his keyboards. He went through a few expensive/fancy keyboards before figuring out it was the mac mini and so he took it to the Apple store (Manhattan) where they diagnosed a faulty MB and told him it would take a week to have it replaced. He left it there, got a call about a delay and finally went to get it almost two weeks later. Instead of returning a fixed mac mini they told him they had voided the warranty because they found "dust" inside!!! And the only solution they offered was a 10%-off a new mac mini!!! And he took it!!! Bought the same thing, at a 10% discount!!! He didn't even flinch, I mean, I only found out because I asked, he did not find it interesting enough to mention. My jaw dropped when I heard it, I told him there is no such thing as warranty voided because of "dust", that if the device maker thinks they should not have dust they put a little filter in the computer intake (I do that in my custom builds), that a 6-month old mac mini in a no-pet no-smoke office would not have any dust anyway (and even if it did, why would it fail when decade old dusty components work fine). For all my arguments his response was "the apple genius told me my warranty is voided there is nothing I can do". He actually believed they were right. Even after I showed him the warranty which of course does not mentions dust he though they were right somehow...
Slashdot Mirror
While not allowing "common" passwords is not the worse idea, in general the more password rules you make, the worse passwords you'll get. In the end people end up writing them on post-it notes...
Doesn't Microsoft own Skype? Cause I was trying to make a Skype account a couple of years ago and tried first concatenating three weird Greek words transliterated to latin. I don't remember which words exactly, in any case, the password was rejected as too weak. Yeah, try cracking something like "poliefkoloskodikos" (aka "veryeasypassword"). It rejected a couple of others as well (it did not give you a specific reason - perhaps it would if I was on a desktop) and in the fourth try accepted something as simple as "river1". How is this kind of policy helped by banning e.g. "password1", that is not the problem.
Oh, my "favorite" password rules are the ones that reduce the search space for potential hackers.
For example, I have one bank account that requires the password to start with a number. I have network security camera that doesn't accept over 8 characters and the list goes on...
Well, it is not that Microsoft isn't evil anymore. It is just that others are more evil and, more importantly, much more relevant than Microsoft.
Amazon has said (when they were trying to get publishers to agree to lower/variable prices) that their prices are set to generate maximum income, i.e. max profit x volume. You lower the price if you feel more people will buy it to justify the lower price, and Amazon apparently has great algorithms to do that. Now, if people can retroactively get the difference it is still doable if they are just a few so that you can ignore them and "eat" the difference. If many people started to do this with automated services, then it either becomes pretty much impossible to calculate the optimal price-drops, and/or you result in smaller price-drops to account for the refunds, meaning you end up with a smaller volume as well (due to the less desirable price), so overall it starts hurting Amazon sales.
I've been a heavy Prime user for many years (first in the US, now in the UK) and apart from the refunds, Amazon has been really great with me in numerous occasions (when the manufacturer was unhelpful, long after Amazon's return window), so I won't mind these refunds going away.
There might have been a change in their methodology last month. Apart from the Windows 3.11 jump from 0.00% to 0.40% (sic - they use two decimal places) going from March to April there is also a jump to 0.03% for Win 2000 when it was steady for many months at 0.01% and Linux had quite a significant sudden drop in the same month when its changes were usually smaller. An emulation project might have explained Windows 3.11 (although archive.org for example has been up way before April), but which popular emulator is running Windows 2000?
I got a Casio Cosmo Phase since the time and date are always visible, along with the solar system simulation (makes it easy to know which planets are up after sunset and before sunrise to know if you'll take out your C9.25). Battery lasts for several years, it is actually waterproof (can do swimming and snorkeling) not just splash-resistant like the Apple Watch, it has the basics you'd want from a watch like multiple alarms, count-down timer, stopwatch, a very responsive button interface and I can tell you it is resilient as it has been working great for me since 1989!
"Frankenstein", while undoubtedly having a huge impact on modern society is basically unreadable by modern readers - the copy I have has a forward by Stephen King saying it took him four attempts over decades to get through the book.
That's strange, my wife recently finished Frankenstein and she told me the exact opposite, while urging me to read it. While she is a humanities PhD she actually puts down books that many people would say are "unreadable" like Ulysses (the James Joyce one), or Paradise Lost and actually English is not even her native language, so it is not like she reads unusually hard/unreadable etc books. Anyway, she told me it was an amazing book, that the narration method is so modern you'd think it was written recently. Out of curiosity I checked the good reads page and scrolled down to the first negative review and the guy actually says he hasn't hated a book that much since he read Kafka's "Metamorphosis"... :)
Perhaps Stephen King is allergic to reading successful works of the genre?
DxOMark is indeed a perfect example of elaborate benchmarking and what can go wrong with it. To make a streamline and objective test they only measure the few things that are the easiest to measure objectively over various cameras. In the end they seem to just combine these test scores and come up with a number that makes no sense if you look at real life performance, since not only they do not measure a multitude of things that also affect performance, but in addition, the way they combine the things they measure is not helping things. For example they measure color depth in bits and they actually say that "22 bits is excellent, differences under 1 bit are hard to detect" and yet, since it is only one of the few things that they can measure, if a camera has a bit depth of 22.9 and another 22.4, with other things being equal the former will get a much higher score, even though they do admit both are excellent and their difference is not perceptible! And in their scores from what I can gather, they don't seem to include resolution, since I see cameras with the same stats getting the same overall score despite one managing exactly the same noise/bit depth etc at twice the resolution!
So, what good is DxOMark? Like every benchmark it is perfect for what it measures. In fact from the posted SNR curves people have calculated things like the read noise and even the quantum efficiency of sensors with what seems to be good accuracy (if you compare the values for the few sensors which have a published or calculated otherwise QE), but the "overall score" is rubbish. The car analogy is of course being given cars to benchmark and you have excellent facilities to measure the breaking distance, the acceleration and the engine noise with great accuracy. You make them into "scores" and add them to give the "overall score" of a car! And to make the analogy more accurate, you measure two basically inaudible electric engines and your sensitive equipment gives you a few db difference in SPL, but it translates to a greater score to the one as inaudible to humans as the other electric car and because it is 1/3rd of the score, it becomes an "overall better" car.
The CPU performance benchmarks are also the same thing. They will tell you how good a CPU runs the benchmark. Hence, when my CS lab for example wanted to get a new processing cluster I made benchmarks out of the projects that would be running on the cluster and Dell, HP and Sun gave us access to sample units to run them. If you don't have access of course things get a lot harder...
I am praying my Kindle Keyboard doesn't die. I have it from 2011, its battery still seems to hold about the same charge and I got it when Amazon gave you free worldwide 3G internet! I've been to some pretty exotic places and could still take out my kindle and google something in its experimental browser (current offerings also have worldwide 3G, but only for downloading books from Amazon - and perhaps wikipedia?).
That said, more kindle offering is a good thing. I mean it is by far my favorite device (I increased my literature reading from about 4-5 books per year to something like 20 after getting the kindle), if it wasn't for that perk and the fact that even the old Kindle Keyboard is pretty fine as a book reader (with the official case that has an integrated light), I would definitely consider this, it is still much cheaper than most phones for example.
But, yeah, you don't normally need to upgrade your Kindle every year. My wife has the paperwhite and the only reasons for her to upgrade would be either a large screen one (for pdfs) or a color one (for graphic novels).
The "year of the Linux Desktop" has already come and gone, it was 2008 with ASUS' EEE PC popularity. Even for a while after Windows XP EEE PCs were being sold people would still opt for the Linux one (as it gave you 20GB vs 12GB for the same price) and at least give it a try. I had a 900/20GB model and the Xandros desktop was not bad, especially for beginners, but for the rest of us you really had to enable the "advanced mode" which was a full KDE 3 desktop (yay!). I am not sure why it did not catch on more after so many people where exposed to it, I guess the lack of something that is a *real* replacement for MS Office might have been a factor and possibly the fact that it was not easy to switch to the full KDE 3 desktop (KDE at its finest - made a great replacement for windows) if you were not a beginner computer user, just a Linux newbie and the default tab interface was too restrictive but you wouldn't know how to switch from it.
Anyway, I don't think there will be another chance like that.
I already have trouble deciphering some captchas, having need for a second (or even third) try in some occasions, which is REALLY annoying. If they make them any harder, I think only bots will be able to solve them and not humans...
Wait, is that the next generation of captcha? You are human if you fail?
When I read soldiers would be outfitted with tiny drones, I thought they finally, after almost 3 long decades, have the Innerspace technology perfected... But alas, it is just small RC helicopters... Strangely (to me) they are not quadcopters, I thought is small sizes quadcopters have all sorts of advantages over helicopters, am I wrong?
I am also a bookworm. With my wife we own thousands of books. Well, ok, not *many* thousands, but they fill about 7 full height IKEA bookcases so definitely over 1 thousand. For about half of them I have only paid little over shipping, as you say they are so cheap used. That said, after getting a Kindle 5 years ago, I immediately I increased my reading about 3-4 times. How is that? Well, I can now comfortably read in my bed before I sleep. A combination of a very light device that you can hold in one hand, does not need page turning and includes a very nice light (external, but gets power from the internal battery so you don't charge other things) makes reading a joy before you sleep. With regular books it was always a struggle (to hold, change page and have some light but not too much to wake up the wife, while tablets are really tiring at night). Also, it fits in my jacket's pocket, so it is always on me with a few hundreds of books, whenever I am waiting for something or riding the train etc I can continue reading, before the Kindle I never did that because most books do not fit in your pocket and also if you have not started a specific book you have to plan ahead choosing one to bring along. Oh, which reminds me, going on vacation I had to spend some time deciding which book to bring along, since I couldn't carry lots. If it was a bad choice, tough luck. Now I have hundreds with me. Ok, I admit I am cheating a bit, I downloaded a pirated package with several thousand books and while I do own the hard-copy versions of almost all I have transferred to the Kindle, so I feel good ethically, it is technically not allowed. But if you don't like that, you can still get access to numerous free books or buy/lend books wherever you are. And when I say wherever you are, I really mean (with the cell-enabled version) everywhere - e.g. on a beach in the aegean. In fact, I don't change my old keyboard kindle because apart from books it also has some rudimentary (due to the limited browser) global internet access for free, so when I travel and I don't have roaming data I can use my kindle. Oh, and when I pick up a regular book and run into an archaic etc word, I try to click to get the dictionary lookup! :)
As for your questions, my 5 year old kindle still holds a charge for several books (could be weeks of reading if you don't use the night light) so I'd say it is long lasting and I don't consider plugging it into my phone's charger every couple of weeks an inconvenience. I don't know how hard it would be to change the battery (it should not be very easy, as it is internal like an iphone). You can sell your kindle. First you unregister it (which will remove your DRM books), but you can leave non-DRM books. The books that you have purchased and are DRM'ed can be sent to any of your devices (it doesn't have to be a kindle, there are kindle readers for PC/Mac/Android/iOS) at any moment (wirelessly), the ones that you do not have on Amazon digital (e.g. downloads off internet, project Gutenberg etc) are just files you copy paste to your PC, your kindle etc so it's up to you to back them up and copy them to a new device. You cannot sell DRM books, they are like itunes mp3. I guess you could arrange to transfer your entire collection by giving someone your account after removing payment info, but it is not something that gets done a lot I assume
Anyway, that's my experience, Kindle has enabled me to read much much more, so it is my favorite gadget ever. I prefer it even over the Casio watch with the solar system simulator that I am wearing since 1990 (Casio Cosmo Phase for the curious). If you gave it a try it might surprise you.
I'm sure they thought of it and discussed how they would be careful and not overdo it and spread the transactions etc. Then, greed.
Wow, that completely misses the point of e-readers.
So does 13.3".
Well, no, I wouldn't say that. It definitely is not a replacement of a regular e-reader, you just can't beat a 6" e-reader for convenience when reading e-books, but it is about the size of a printed page so it would be an excellent PDF reader and would fit your briefcase, messenger bag etc wherever a stack of A4 papers would go. So while I think a 9-10" device would be more convenient even as a PDF reader, I can see how a 13.3" would still be useful. As long as you get to keep your 6" $100 e-reader for when you don't need to read pdfs or cbrs...
I could build a decent PC for that and it will last me years, the Android reader will probably stop getting updates after a year or two and then become a paperweight
Wow, that completely misses the point of e-readers.
Anyway, me and my wife use e-ink (Kindle) readers for a few years now and love them, but she needs to read a lot of pdfs as well, so she uses a 9" tablet for those. She'd love it if she could have a big e-ink display and she'd gladly pay a premium, but $699 is a bit too much, we had actually discussed it a few months ago and she asked me if there was something up to $400. Of course she was thinking about 9-10", but still, $699 is a lot for a reader. I assume thought that this will get funded, since they are only asking for 60 people to sign up...
Yep, if we wanted to level the playing field we'd turn off the AC at the server room and disconnect those CPU fans. Let me see AlphaGo... eh, Go then.
Great summary to show off a couple of slashdot's worst issues: no unicode support for things as simple as quotes and useless "editing" that doesn't even correct the aforementioned obvious problem with the summary. /. overlords, are you "on it" as you claimed or not?
So, new
Am I the only one surprised that the US intelligence has a bunch of space telescopes the size of Hubble? I mean, I get spy satellites etc, I did expect a lot of money to go there, but they have enough scopes THE SIZE OF HUBBLE to give away 2 of them like that? Perhaps they have even larger ones, and the HST that was made into a big deal about how expensive complex and unique it was, was never close to being the largest space telescopes, just the only one pointed at the right things?
Your post will be used as proof of the name confusion when LEGO goes after LIGO for trademark infringement.
The way I see it you could use electricity for the rotation of the ceramic disk of a Podkletnov device, which would solve your weight problems and also allow you to reach supersonic speeds with just a small jet engine using very little fossil fuel.
Well, you could always throw each battery as you exhaust it. Might be tricky if you are over land, but with a good radar (& infrared camera for night flights) I guess you could avoid hitting people.
Not that impressive, other optical switches don't require a CPU at all, never mind an Atom!
(Yeah, I know, Title Case. Still doesn't help me parse correctly sometimes)
Well, it is a good time for SourceForge to attempt a come-back. Right guys?
Yeah, imagine if you bought an expensive car and you had a minor collision, broke your head light, replaced it with an after-market one (perhaps the only one available in your area) and drove away. Then, after a few months the car manufacturer sent an OTA update that disabled your car and told you "sorry, you should not have done that, but you have the chance to buy our newer and shinier car! 'k thanks bye!".
Mandatory car analogy...
Apple always gets away with it and the other vendors don't follow, because they don't have customers who will eat up anything.
Let me give you an example just from my experience. My 3rd iPhone 4S in a row has failed in the same exact way: wifi/gps disabled. Just do a quick google about the "grayed out wifi" problem, you will find thousands of posts and also a lot of iPhone 4/4S phones on ebay with that fault. Only the first of the 3 failed within warranty in my case and all three where always in an office and used once a week for testing/debugging (that's why I kept replacing it, I test on various devices). People have actually pinpointed the problem: the overheat detection of the wifi/gps module fails and the software disables it. In fact, this disabling was a "feature" introduced with iOS 6 IIRC, so people who had stayed with iOS 5 did not get the issue. For any other company there would have been a recall, since it would have been an easy class action otherwise, and even a software patch would fix it. But apple is happy with customers getting a new phone and their average customer doesn't mind much.
Ooh, another example, my boss, who you would call a dedicated Apple fan, had bought a mac mini 5-6 years ago. After 6 months it started killing his keyboards. He went through a few expensive/fancy keyboards before figuring out it was the mac mini and so he took it to the Apple store (Manhattan) where they diagnosed a faulty MB and told him it would take a week to have it replaced. He left it there, got a call about a delay and finally went to get it almost two weeks later. Instead of returning a fixed mac mini they told him they had voided the warranty because they found "dust" inside!!! And the only solution they offered was a 10%-off a new mac mini!!! And he took it!!! Bought the same thing, at a 10% discount!!! He didn't even flinch, I mean, I only found out because I asked, he did not find it interesting enough to mention. My jaw dropped when I heard it, I told him there is no such thing as warranty voided because of "dust", that if the device maker thinks they should not have dust they put a little filter in the computer intake (I do that in my custom builds), that a 6-month old mac mini in a no-pet no-smoke office would not have any dust anyway (and even if it did, why would it fail when decade old dusty components work fine). For all my arguments his response was "the apple genius told me my warranty is voided there is nothing I can do". He actually believed they were right. Even after I showed him the warranty which of course does not mentions dust he though they were right somehow...