Well, I don't know about that, my college is good at firewalling apparently - very few questionable programs work at all. Freenet cannot connect to the network, stealther cannot connect to superstealth. I think they blocked everything but web browsing and AIM. IRC DCC doesn't work etc...
I've had 2 CPU fan's fail on AMD AthlonXP cpu's (oddly enough both in my sister's computer - and within a month of each other). I've never had the heatsink itself fall off though. The fan failing did not damage the chip - though the computer would lock up totally in about 5 min of run time. We did get it to run by opening the window and blowing 20 degree farenheit air at it with big fans so my sis could finish a paper(in her parka lol) I offered to let her use my computer which worked fine and was in the next room, but she wouldn't...
I actually pay for spamex.com's service - not getting spam for $10 a year without worrying about giving out an e-mail address is worth it to me. Anytime I got spam that I couldn't opt-out of I just turned off the disposable address. Funny - I've been using spamex for a year and only got spam on one address. Makes me think that either I'm still pretty careful where I give out an address at all - or spammers just don't bother with @spamex.com addresses cause they know they just get turned off and the e-mails bounce.
As Cory acknowledges, noone is going to read a text of significant duration online.
I disagree. Look at how long people(maybe even you) spend reading slashdot... How about other weblogs?
People read long texts online all the time. Maybe not in a novel format but why not? I used to read fanfiction online all the time. Now I read it on my REB 1100.
Read my earlier post on the REB 1100. The weird thing is that:
eight to sixteen hours on a single charge
REB1100 - about 20hrs
one which is as easy on the eyes as a normal book
Well, you can pick any font you want on the REB 1100.... About as easy for me as paper - BACKLIGHT - you can set from 20% to 100% in 20% increments. At 100% you can use the sucker as a flashlight.
small-but-useful amount of storage (say, 8M of RAM and 512M of compactflash
8mb, got it. Smart Media to 64mb(the design was in 1999. Prolly not hard to update to bigger smartmedia cards. I do like using smart media(smaller).
It has to be durable as well
That's the big failing. To ruggidize something would 3x the price in my experiance looking at laptop prices. It can be done. Is it worth the price? You can't knock your textbook into an aquarium and expect it not to be damaged...
Give it some simple handwriting recognition
It had that. I didn't like it cause I was used to Palm's but I could learn it or use the on screen keyboard.
some decent calculation software
It didn't have that. That might be a cool(though mostly unnecessary for the general public - maybe a "college edition"?)
link up with a desktop via a USB cable
Yes. Did that. One way though(I think, I never got into using the note feature I just don't write in books.)Make it 2 way and I could see that more useful.
Textbook publishers could also get in on the game; charge half as much for an E-book (which can't be resold
Why not resell? Well - That would of course require good DRM. So... prolly best that way - no reselling. Someone would have to accept book deferments or financial aid still though.
Well, I think the main reason's e-books have not taken off is a mismanagement of the end user experiance. What am I talking about?
The e-book reading experiance.
We need readers of some sort - for techs PDA's make sense, but I hesitate to say that should be the answer for everyone. One of the best readers in my opinion was the RCA REB 1100 e-book. It was easy to use, it was comfortable and well designed overall. Too bad they decided on stupid DRM and couldn't market it right.
A disclaimer - I am not a business or marketing major. What follows is what I as a consumer thinks would sell. I have no facts to back this up, only acnetadotes.
Take the hardware of the REB1100. That was great. battery lasted 20hrs. With the backlight on. 2 buttons placed so your thumb could easily hit them while holding the reader. The button under your thumb was to go forward a page(this could be changed in settings though). You could change the page orintation so when switching hands you could flip the book and again hold it comfortably and still read it(right side up). Smart Media slot, expand the memory up to 64mb. Comes with 8mb internal. I have a 32mb card in mine, but never use it... I just don't keep THAT many books on there at once, but if you want to - go for it! Has a built in dictionary, double tap a word and it looks it up, but does so over your book, so when done, close the window and you haven't moved.
Now to address the problems.
1. Make the dictionary expandible or replaceable(you can remove it altogether for memory)
2. Change the DRM. Make it easy for you to add your own content - (Avant Go for it) allow html, doc, rtf, whatever format - as many as you can to go into the book. And this would happen not in the book but at the computer - this is software only really.
3. Price. The REB1100 is not worth $299. Look at PalmOne. Try getting the price down to $80 - $120. It is worth that much. That's in line with other handhelds. Or - do something like cell phone providers do. Buy a 2 year book of the month subscription for $20 a month and 5 new books per month or magizine subscription, newspaper, add in the online option below) and get X off the price of the reader.
4. Price of books. I know BookWarez, and that you can easily create your own titles as a user but wait.
How about Magizine subscriptions? Newspapers? etc... provide that at prices less than the paper copies and now it makes sense to pay for them. As a consumer I would get a subscription if offered for %50-75% of the print copy if it was all integrated. I.E. I plug in my book once a day to either my computer or plug a phone line to the integrated modem and dial up the toll free # and get my subscriptions. Sell e-books for $2-$3 each. See if you can sell them earlier than the print copy coming out. They did this... I can see that pushing the adoption of the books. But you cannot charge $26 a book, I(and I suspect everyone else) would just buy the hardcopy. But again, if on a hardcover release you came out with the e-book about 2-4 weeks earlier for $15, that would sell. Once paperback is going to ship, again maybe a month before the paperback edition lower your price to $2-$4 for the book. You could make a killing(assuming the publisher wasn't asking HUGE roylities).
5. Add a (limited) web browsing option. Like sprint on their phones... say for $3 a month on a local dialup with the modem, and some per min rate for the toll free #(because I know the phone company charges like $0.10/min so you can't really do a flat rate without losing money here)(Using your bookshelf/buying books would be free with the toll free #, you'd get that figured out in the book prices).
6. Market it. Play up the savings on books. Play up the early releases. Play up the ease of subscription and having back issues available and searchable. etc...
I don't know if this is feasible. No one has gotten this to work yet. Softbook failed. Rocketbook Failed. RCA Failed. Gemstar Failed.
I have introduced my family to the(now out of production)RCA REB 1100 ebook, and they love it. It's about as close to a regular book available, but with UPGRADES!
You can have 5,10, or 30 books on it at a time. It saves your place, or you can easily add many bookmarks. It is backlit so you can read in the dark.
My dad loves it because he can make the font bigger so he no longer needs a magnifying glass to read the books.
I also prefer reading books from my e-book. I no longer have to worry about finishing a book somewhere and then not having anything to read. The handheld is more comfortable than a book for me, one handed without the age old finger strain from a paperback at the beginning and end of the book from the different width of the pages to hold.
I can also pretty easily take some text from a website with me or get fanfiction etc... I hope someone starts again making something like the REB 1100 because I can't really see going back to the hassles of paperbacks.
I think the point of the whole athlon model # is that it is not how many Mhz the chip is. It never implies or says it is. It does indicate its performance relative to the (IIRC) thunderbird core Athlons.
I don't find it odd at all to see products released by model #'s it's done all the time. Epson has released C82's for instance which do not imply a direct linear dpi increase or ppm increase over their C62's.
I also feel AMD has made it clear that the model #'s are not to be confused as anything more than what they are - model#'s to indicate relative performance to one of their older products as a baseline.
AMD, and many others also make an important point as indicated above with Celerons - that a Mhz rating is no more indicative of performance than a model # - else why would a 2.2Ghz celeron perform any different than a 2.2Ghz P4?
It's been said for a long time: Mhz alone does not indicate performance overall or for a specific task. I think the general (computer buying) public is just starting to understand this.
As to your specific example - does the machine underperform for your use compared to an equivently priced Intel chip? If so - what you are doing is different than the benchmarks I've seen - but we all know benchmarks are really not that useful either. Why not just but Intel if that's what you like? I prefer to get similar performance for about 1/2 the $$. But that's just me.
But as in another comment on this story - this is an inditement of HP support - possibly tech support in general from big companies - than where the support is provided. I can't speak from tech support myself, but I did work in a call center, and often even though we could help the customer we were not allowed too - even ordered to provide obviously bullshit or unitelligable responses to some questions. I believe this is the case with tech support call centers also - see http://www.techcomedy.com someday to read from many callcenter techs the crap they have to do to keep their jobs.
This all is a management issue with callcenters, and maybe a training issue, but has nothing to do with where the call center is.
Well that's really just too bad. If the nature of programming has changed such that we no longer need so many skilled programmers, than that's too bad.
My main concern is for those "in the pipeline"(as put in an earlier post on this topic) like myself. We are at a good point to retrain as we are still in college. The problem I have is no one today has a suggested carreer to get into with any long term survivalibility. i.e. 30 years so I can retire afterwords.
This has been stated again and again - in the past creative disruptions or whatever they are called there was a path to retrain too. Farmers saw that they could work in factories or service carreers. Factory Workers saw they could work in Service carreers or Tech or Research. Today I see most carreer jobs being in government. The tech jobs are gone - maintenence jobs are going away - just buy a cheap replacement. Service by phone from somewhere else than the USA.
This leaves us with working for the government which cannot really be sustainable in the long term or working at Fast food restarunts which also is not sustainable. Where I live the biggest employer for entry level people was NCI a call center. This was after IBM moved out, etc... Guess what? People don't plan on making that a carreer for 2 reasons. One $8 an hour(which is high paying in the area). The other - how long will that really stay in the USA? It could be done from anywhere.
The big problem is where do we go? The people trying entry level work. Coming out of college in the next year or two. There aren't jobs for us. We can't wait for years for a new industry to emerge. I don't know what would happen if we all tried to go on welfare. I don't know about you all, but I've changed my goal from working at someplace like CISCO or a consultant to trying to get a job with the US government.
Well, no - America just lies to itself. Or better said, it is self deluded. We(the policymakers) think we are a moral policeman, but we are really a "power-hungry country that screws the whole world up". What someone or some orginazation thinks it is will be much less a concrete point than whether it has money or not. However I think most of India is still pretty poor. The issue is that it makes no sense for a capitalist nation to help it's competitors beat it. So America is right(or would be right) to stop providing aid. The sad part is that capilitism never really promotes charity or human causes itself.
I think this is why so many people do not question anything the government puts out regarding how the economy is doing, because it is totally against common sense. I doubt many people even begin to understand the economy - I'm not sure if anyone really does. This is why I also think that trying to manage the economy is doomed to failure. When it seems to go well it is usually because the government stays out of it.
The problem with the unemployment rate is that(AFAIK) it only counts those on unemployment payments. So people whose benefits run out suddenly are no longer counted in the statistics for the unemployed... even though they still do nto have a job and want one. I think this gives a falsly low unemployment percentage.
I think the de-facto law has been for some time like the first part of the GPL. YOU can make a copy or whatever and do whatever you want with just about any media - see VCR, Cassette etc... but you CANNOT distribute. As long as you do whatever it is you are doing for your own use, you're fine - it's primarily distribution. Now this is not what the LAW says - but it's about how it's been enforced (since the betamax thing I think)
However very few guns(none I'm aware of) kill people with a person activelly involved on the other side. As has been shown time and again - most(actually AFAIK all) technology is neutral - it's how people use it that determines if we see it as good or evil.
I think bittorrent is one of the few P2P programs I've seen that actually seems to have a legitimate use... Specifically for distributing Linux Iso's and other data that is large but freely available from sources that do not have $$$$ to host it. The only datahosting company I'm aware of charges about $1 a Gig down at individual rates, somewhat less for bulk - but it would still add up quick for most people.
In fact, if the LDS Church did not itself outlaw polygamy in the 1890's, I would still vigousrly practice it.
I have to ask... why would you disobey a state law you disagree with but not a church ruling? You come across as doing what you think is right any external force be damned.. so... why the hipocracy here?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't know about that, my college is good at firewalling apparently - very few questionable programs work at all. Freenet cannot connect to the network, stealther cannot connect to superstealth. I think they blocked everything but web browsing and AIM. IRC DCC doesn't work etc...
I've had 2 CPU fan's fail on AMD AthlonXP cpu's (oddly enough both in my sister's computer - and within a month of each other). I've never had the heatsink itself fall off though. The fan failing did not damage the chip - though the computer would lock up totally in about 5 min of run time. We did get it to run by opening the window and blowing 20 degree farenheit air at it with big fans so my sis could finish a paper(in her parka lol) I offered to let her use my computer which worked fine and was in the next room, but she wouldn't ...
I actually pay for spamex.com's service - not getting spam for $10 a year without worrying about giving out an e-mail address is worth it to me. Anytime I got spam that I couldn't opt-out of I just turned off the disposable address. Funny - I've been using spamex for a year and only got spam on one address. Makes me think that either I'm still pretty careful where I give out an address at all - or spammers just don't bother with @spamex.com addresses cause they know they just get turned off and the e-mails bounce.
As Cory acknowledges, noone is going to read a text of significant duration online.
I disagree. Look at how long people(maybe even you) spend reading slashdot... How about other weblogs?
People read long texts online all the time. Maybe not in a novel format but why not? I used to read fanfiction online all the time. Now I read it on my REB 1100.
Read my earlier post on the REB 1100. The weird thing is that:
eight to sixteen hours on a single charge
REB1100 - about 20hrs
one which is as easy on the eyes as a normal book
Well, you can pick any font you want on the REB 1100.... About as easy for me as paper - BACKLIGHT - you can set from 20% to 100% in 20% increments. At 100% you can use the sucker as a flashlight.
small-but-useful amount of storage (say, 8M of RAM and 512M of compactflash
8mb, got it. Smart Media to 64mb(the design was in 1999. Prolly not hard to update to bigger smartmedia cards. I do like using smart media(smaller).
It has to be durable as well
That's the big failing. To ruggidize something would 3x the price in my experiance looking at laptop prices. It can be done. Is it worth the price? You can't knock your textbook into an aquarium and expect it not to be damaged...
Give it some simple handwriting recognition
It had that. I didn't like it cause I was used to Palm's but I could learn it or use the on screen keyboard.
some decent calculation software
It didn't have that. That might be a cool(though mostly unnecessary for the general public - maybe a "college edition"?)
link up with a desktop via a USB cable
Yes. Did that. One way though(I think, I never got into using the note feature I just don't write in books.)Make it 2 way and I could see that more useful.
Textbook publishers could also get in on the game; charge half as much for an E-book (which can't be resold
Why not resell? Well - That would of course require good DRM. So... prolly best that way - no reselling. Someone would have to accept book deferments or financial aid still though.
even if it cost me a few hundred bucks.
Yeah I can see it if it was $180 or less.
Well, I think the main reason's e-books have not taken off is a mismanagement of the end user experiance. What am I talking about?
... I can see that pushing the adoption of the books. But you cannot charge $26 a book, I(and I suspect everyone else) would just buy the hardcopy. But again, if on a hardcover release you came out with the e-book about 2-4 weeks earlier for $15, that would sell. Once paperback is going to ship, again maybe a month before the paperback edition lower your price to $2-$4 for the book. You could make a killing(assuming the publisher wasn't asking HUGE roylities).
The e-book reading experiance.
We need readers of some sort - for techs PDA's make sense, but I hesitate to say that should be the answer for everyone. One of the best readers in my opinion was the RCA REB 1100 e-book. It was easy to use, it was comfortable and well designed overall. Too bad they decided on stupid DRM and couldn't market it right.
A disclaimer - I am not a business or marketing major. What follows is what I as a consumer thinks would sell. I have no facts to back this up, only acnetadotes.
Take the hardware of the REB1100. That was great. battery lasted 20hrs. With the backlight on. 2 buttons placed so your thumb could easily hit them while holding the reader. The button under your thumb was to go forward a page(this could be changed in settings though). You could change the page orintation so when switching hands you could flip the book and again hold it comfortably and still read it(right side up). Smart Media slot, expand the memory up to 64mb. Comes with 8mb internal. I have a 32mb card in mine, but never use it... I just don't keep THAT many books on there at once, but if you want to - go for it! Has a built in dictionary, double tap a word and it looks it up, but does so over your book, so when done, close the window and you haven't moved.
Now to address the problems.
1. Make the dictionary expandible or replaceable(you can remove it altogether for memory)
2. Change the DRM. Make it easy for you to add your own content - (Avant Go for it) allow html, doc, rtf, whatever format - as many as you can to go into the book. And this would happen not in the book but at the computer - this is software only really.
3. Price. The REB1100 is not worth $299. Look at PalmOne. Try getting the price down to $80 - $120. It is worth that much. That's in line with other handhelds. Or - do something like cell phone providers do. Buy a 2 year book of the month subscription for $20 a month and 5 new books per month or magizine subscription, newspaper, add in the online option below) and get X off the price of the reader.
4. Price of books. I know BookWarez, and that you can easily create your own titles as a user but wait.
How about Magizine subscriptions? Newspapers? etc... provide that at prices less than the paper copies and now it makes sense to pay for them. As a consumer I would get a subscription if offered for %50-75% of the print copy if it was all integrated. I.E. I plug in my book once a day to either my computer or plug a phone line to the integrated modem and dial up the toll free # and get my subscriptions. Sell e-books for $2-$3 each. See if you can sell them earlier than the print copy coming out. They did this
5. Add a (limited) web browsing option. Like sprint on their phones... say for $3 a month on a local dialup with the modem, and some per min rate for the toll free #(because I know the phone company charges like $0.10/min so you can't really do a flat rate without losing money here)(Using your bookshelf/buying books would be free with the toll free #, you'd get that figured out in the book prices).
6. Market it. Play up the savings on books. Play up the early releases. Play up the ease of subscription and having back issues available and searchable. etc...
I don't know if this is feasible. No one has gotten this to work yet. Softbook failed. Rocketbook Failed. RCA Failed. Gemstar Failed.
But they f
I have introduced my family to the(now out of production)RCA REB 1100 ebook, and they love it. It's about as close to a regular book available, but with UPGRADES!
You can have 5,10, or 30 books on it at a time. It saves your place, or you can easily add many bookmarks. It is backlit so you can read in the dark.
My dad loves it because he can make the font bigger so he no longer needs a magnifying glass to read the books.
I also prefer reading books from my e-book. I no longer have to worry about finishing a book somewhere and then not having anything to read. The handheld is more comfortable than a book for me, one handed without the age old finger strain from a paperback at the beginning and end of the book from the different width of the pages to hold.
I can also pretty easily take some text from a website with me or get fanfiction etc... I hope someone starts again making something like the REB 1100 because I can't really see going back to the hassles of paperbacks.
I think the point of the whole athlon model # is that it is not how many Mhz the chip is. It never implies or says it is. It does indicate its performance relative to the (IIRC) thunderbird core Athlons.
I don't find it odd at all to see products released by model #'s it's done all the time. Epson has released C82's for instance which do not imply a direct linear dpi increase or ppm increase over their C62's.
I also feel AMD has made it clear that the model #'s are not to be confused as anything more than what they are - model#'s to indicate relative performance to one of their older products as a baseline.
AMD, and many others also make an important point as indicated above with Celerons - that a Mhz rating is no more indicative of performance than a model # - else why would a 2.2Ghz celeron perform any different than a 2.2Ghz P4?
It's been said for a long time: Mhz alone does not indicate performance overall or for a specific task. I think the general (computer buying) public is just starting to understand this.
As to your specific example - does the machine underperform for your use compared to an equivently priced Intel chip? If so - what you are doing is different than the benchmarks I've seen - but we all know benchmarks are really not that useful either. Why not just but Intel if that's what you like? I prefer to get similar performance for about 1/2 the $$. But that's just me.
But as in another comment on this story - this is an inditement of HP support - possibly tech support in general from big companies - than where the support is provided. I can't speak from tech support myself, but I did work in a call center, and often even though we could help the customer we were not allowed too - even ordered to provide obviously bullshit or unitelligable responses to some questions. I believe this is the case with tech support call centers also - see http://www.techcomedy.com someday to read from many callcenter techs the crap they have to do to keep their jobs.
This all is a management issue with callcenters, and maybe a training issue, but has nothing to do with where the call center is.
Well that's really just too bad. If the nature of programming has changed such that we no longer need so many skilled programmers, than that's too bad.
My main concern is for those "in the pipeline"(as put in an earlier post on this topic) like myself. We are at a good point to retrain as we are still in college. The problem I have is no one today has a suggested carreer to get into with any long term survivalibility. i.e. 30 years so I can retire afterwords.
This has been stated again and again - in the past creative disruptions or whatever they are called there was a path to retrain too. Farmers saw that they could work in factories or service carreers. Factory Workers saw they could work in Service carreers or Tech or Research. Today I see most carreer jobs being in government. The tech jobs are gone - maintenence jobs are going away - just buy a cheap replacement. Service by phone from somewhere else than the USA.
This leaves us with working for the government which cannot really be sustainable in the long term or working at Fast food restarunts which also is not sustainable. Where I live the biggest employer for entry level people was NCI a call center. This was after IBM moved out, etc... Guess what? People don't plan on making that a carreer for 2 reasons. One $8 an hour(which is high paying in the area). The other - how long will that really stay in the USA? It could be done from anywhere.
The big problem is where do we go? The people trying entry level work. Coming out of college in the next year or two. There aren't jobs for us. We can't wait for years for a new industry to emerge. I don't know what would happen if we all tried to go on welfare. I don't know about you all, but I've changed my goal from working at someplace like CISCO or a consultant to trying to get a job with the US government.
The United States is *NOT* going down the drain - americans are not stupid enough to let that happen
As an American, I think you may overestimate Americans.
Well, no - America just lies to itself. Or better said, it is self deluded. We(the policymakers) think we are a moral policeman, but we are really a "power-hungry country that screws the whole world up". What someone or some orginazation thinks it is will be much less a concrete point than whether it has money or not. However I think most of India is still pretty poor. The issue is that it makes no sense for a capitalist nation to help it's competitors beat it. So America is right(or would be right) to stop providing aid. The sad part is that capilitism never really promotes charity or human causes itself.
I think this is why so many people do not question anything the government puts out regarding how the economy is doing, because it is totally against common sense. I doubt many people even begin to understand the economy - I'm not sure if anyone really does. This is why I also think that trying to manage the economy is doomed to failure. When it seems to go well it is usually because the government stays out of it.
The problem with the unemployment rate is that(AFAIK) it only counts those on unemployment payments. So people whose benefits run out suddenly are no longer counted in the statistics for the unemployed... even though they still do nto have a job and want one. I think this gives a falsly low unemployment percentage.
I think the de-facto law has been for some time like the first part of the GPL. YOU can make a copy or whatever and do whatever you want with just about any media - see VCR, Cassette etc... but you CANNOT distribute. As long as you do whatever it is you are doing for your own use, you're fine - it's primarily distribution. Now this is not what the LAW says - but it's about how it's been enforced (since the betamax thing I think)
However very few guns(none I'm aware of) kill people with a person activelly involved on the other side. As has been shown time and again - most(actually AFAIK all) technology is neutral - it's how people use it that determines if we see it as good or evil.
I think bittorrent is one of the few P2P programs I've seen that actually seems to have a legitimate use... Specifically for distributing Linux Iso's and other data that is large but freely available from sources that do not have $$$$ to host it. The only datahosting company I'm aware of charges about $1 a Gig down at individual rates, somewhat less for bulk - but it would still add up quick for most people.
In fact, if the LDS Church did not itself outlaw polygamy in the 1890's, I would still vigousrly practice it.
... why the hipocracy here?
I have to ask... why would you disobey a state law you disagree with but not a church ruling? You come across as doing what you think is right any external force be damned.. so