I am a happy owner of an iRex iLiad, which has a fairly large display (8" vs the Sony's 6, 16 gray shades vs 4), and it is absolutely brilliant for reading. I used to read some books on a Sharp CL860, but the eInk is so much better on the eyes it's hard to describe. I can write on it, which makes it excellent for academic purposes - I read and make changes to quite a few papers and articles. And it is excellent for Sudoku solving.:-)
The sweetest thing though, is that it runs Linux and has an increasing amount of community applications. It uses GTK, so quite some apps have been ported, and several nice changes has been done to the in-house PDF viewer. Together with some scripts on a PC, the iLiad can wake up in the morning, download the newspapers off the WIFI for me and turn itself off.
Only bad thing (except for the steep price tag) is that the battery only lasts for about 10-12 hours on a charge, as they in one way or another managed to not make it able to suspend...
And once, a small, black woman went and sat down at the front of the bus. This she did even though it clearly would have been a lot more efficient to just go to the back.
It costs something to stand up for your rights, your freedoms. It might not be for everyone, and if profit, "keep things quiet", and "avoid difficulties" is your main goal, the fight against insane "IP" laws might not be for you.
Some people would be disgusted by a black woman in front of the bus. Some will follow, some will rally, some will look the other way and pretend they didn't see it. Some will think it is an unnecessary or ill chosen way to rebel.
And Outlook not being able to import Thunderbird's mail is not really Thunderbird's fault. If Outlook wasn't closed, proprietary software, you could develop import filters. Some other people could create import filters. You could hire someone to create import filters. You could modify Thunderbird to export to a known format, if it can't already (e.g a unix MailBox file). Your problem was due to a lack of freedoms for Outlook, not due to "too much" freedom with Thunderbird.
But then again, nobody got fired for choosing Microsoft, but don't try to push your own "I just want a calm day at work" get in the way of other people trying to make the world a better place.
And don't forget, Apple had to do this to allow these songs to be available for download. If it was up to Apple, all would be DRM free. Where does even this come from? I've been an eMusic customer for years, and they never included *any* personal information. How come that you are so eager to give away all rights when the product is purely virtual? How hard would it be for someone to copy your music? Someone you trust? Someone at work? Why should it be so that if, say, you are invited to a party, you are fine with not being able to bring any music because of the *risk* of not all being deleted after said party? We could all bring our CD's, or better, "disposable" CDR's. What's up with you all?
And my advice for the P2P thing? If you feel you must distribute songs illegally, then just RIP from a CD first. Who needs to buy music to distribute on P2P? Just download it from P2P first, then share it. We're talking about why someone would give the vendor a possibility to "big brother" you whenever you play music. I find it appalling how you can all stand by Apple, a mega-corporation earning shitloads of money treating their customers like shit. I mean, you even have to backup the songs you own, even though it costs them virtually *nothing* to provide you with a new copy if you should loose it. What's that all about? And don't get me started on the "just burn to a virtual CD, rip and re-encode - easy peasy" thing either. Treating customers as thieving bastards waiting to happen is not giving them any business from me.
Well, as a Norwegian, I think this is magnificent. They don't say anything about moving the government to OpenOffice or anything, but they will demand that communication to/from the government can be done without proprietary software. So *I* can run OpenOffice, or KOffice, or MS Office. So can they.
There is no anti-MS about this, it's about not pressuring MS products on citizens, it's about allowing us to run what we want.
I use the closed ATI drivers for my laptop (using an X1600 card), and one of the real bonuses (except the 3D-beryl-accelereated wonderness), is the fact that I can clock it down when I want. So when unplugging the power chord, it is clocked from 470mhz to about 100. Still gives fluent video, but gives me about an hour extra battery time.
One of the critizisms of the proposal is in fact the insanely close coupling to technology. Terms such as "CD", "MP3" etc. really should not be within a law.
That whole limitation as to which player is regarded as appropriate for a medium is totally screwed, and is only likely to get worse. For example, what about a portable CD player that can also play mp3s? Is it illegal to use the "mp3" part of the player, or does the fact that it is compatible with a round, silvery plastic disk enough to make it "appropriate"?
Finally we'll all be content that the Norwegian Police discharge 80% of all cases due to "the state of the evidence"... "State", such as "yes, we did actually stop the burglar with a skrewdriver THE CAR LOCK, but hey, with the state of the evidence and all, we just have to let dismiss this case."
We're so going to end up as a nation of criminals.:-(
This law proposal is based on the EU InfoSoc directive, which is likely bought by the megacorps. As well, they have done a hearing of the proposal with different groups, such as the EFF in Norway, consumer organizations and of course a lot of recording associations.
Guess who's for and who's against. That alone should be enough to stop this kind of laws.
The difference is that on a Linux system the user is aware that she is installing software. In the windows world, you try to open an email ("the_numbers.xls" with a ton of spaces and ".scr" at the end). You do NOT think you're installing a screensaver!
Firefox, for example, has a dialog that says that you are about to install extentions - the "install" button is timed to a few seconds before being enabled, so the user does not accidentally click it.
Getting spyware by installing a malicious application is harder to prevent, and such software should probably be installed in the user's home directory, not as root.
It's inna box. At least FAST Search & Transfer (the ones that used to have 'All the web', remember?), sell their intranet search as software. That means that you must get the servers and install a very complex piece of software on them.
Selling this as a box (and $5K is not really that expensive), you get the whole monty.
I'm from Norway, and over here we only dub movies for kids. Cartoons are typically shown in theatres early in the afternoon dubbed, and later in the evening in their original language. All non-Norwegian movies are of course subtitled.
I more or less only see non-US movies at movie theatres now, simply because the risk of a US movie recycling a plot, focus on stars not story etc is too high... Thank God for french movies.:-)
P2P filsharing is not only about the money, it's very often about the convenience. The convenience to "return" crap, to play when you want, to reach outside of our "locally tailored" market et cetera.
Living in a small, scandinavian country (no "mass marked" for you!) makes the selection of f.eks. TV series hit rock bottom. P2P is often the only sensible way to watch other series. The only alternative is to sit out and wait for the DVD Box sets (which will cost twice the price due to shipping and customs).
Give me a torrent of the files (with commercials in them) and I'll get that one. Sell me a torrent for a decent price without commercials (the show already sold, remember? They cannot possibly loose money on this, distribution is free!). Then sell the Box set to the collectors, with some extras and a t-shirt.
The thing is that due to recent changes to the copyright laws of the US, the ??AA's now OWN our culture for however long they want.
Wether (uncommercial) piracy is ok or not can be discussed, but allowing a few large corporations to control our culture, freedom of speach, kill the public domain etc is NOT OK.
Check out Lawrence Lessigs Free Culture, or look for a presentation he did on the subject...
Next up should probably only include one single step:
1. Click on link
Download plugins/use some fancy backend and go. Seriously though, I tested Ogg Theora some way back, by popping by a site. It downloaded a Theora decoder in java and showed the movie. If we made it so easy, maybe ??AA will let our Torrents stay?:-)
What I would like to see is a game that allows "non-media spreading". On startup, you get a question "You're not a registered user Register [now] [later]".
Of course, if you didn't actually buy the game, you can pay for it when registering.
You didn't give them any distribution, printing, pressing costs, so why do they keep insisting? Keeping the game witout a CD/DVD, box, manual and shipping would also remove customs on import, hence becoming cheap.
Signing the torrent file with the "trusted servers" public key would allow anyone to verify it's integrity. As it contains hashes for all pieces of the file(s), it also protects the integrity of the file(s) themselves.
Of course, this does NOT include any extra load on the "trusted server", and trusting it should be done when you sign up for their (e.g. BBC's) service...
I only partially agree... What I think is the way to go is to design GNOME to be as easy to use as possible (also for new users - somewhat what they are doing now). However, it MUST take into consideration that very few people stay newbies.
The interface must be efficient to use (for example tab-completion in the file selector, a feature that is now disabled by default - no typing allowed!), so that we everyday users (computer experts or not) feel that we can do our work efficiently. Making that everyday functionality efficient would make GNOME the absolute killer desktop.
And for Nautilus - WHY is it so politically incorrect to allow "open in the same window" as a configuration parameter??? It might be great for utter newbies with new files, but for anyone with a big tree of directories and files, it is screenclutter.
A part from those little quirks, GNOME rulez - gthumb is the ABSOLUTE BEST digital-photo administration program I've had the pleasure of using.
Keep up the good work, but please don't forget the experienced user!
Oh, and when the file selector presents a list of files, why is it that GNOME 2.6 is unable to jump to files beginning with "w" when I hit the "w" button?
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I am a happy owner of an iRex iLiad, which has a fairly large display (8" vs the Sony's 6, 16 gray shades vs 4), and it is absolutely brilliant for reading. I used to read some books on a Sharp CL860, but the eInk is so much better on the eyes it's hard to describe. I can write on it, which makes it excellent for academic purposes - I read and make changes to quite a few papers and articles. And it is excellent for Sudoku solving. :-)
The sweetest thing though, is that it runs Linux and has an increasing amount of community applications. It uses GTK, so quite some apps have been ported, and several nice changes has been done to the in-house PDF viewer. Together with some scripts on a PC, the iLiad can wake up in the morning, download the newspapers off the WIFI for me and turn itself off.
Only bad thing (except for the steep price tag) is that the battery only lasts for about 10-12 hours on a charge, as they in one way or another managed to not make it able to suspend...
And once, a small, black woman went and sat down at the front of the bus. This she did even though it clearly would have been a lot more efficient to just go to the back.
It costs something to stand up for your rights, your freedoms. It might not be for everyone, and if profit, "keep things quiet", and "avoid difficulties" is your main goal, the fight against insane "IP" laws might not be for you.
Some people would be disgusted by a black woman in front of the bus. Some will follow, some will rally, some will look the other way and pretend they didn't see it. Some will think it is an unnecessary or ill chosen way to rebel.
And Outlook not being able to import Thunderbird's mail is not really Thunderbird's fault. If Outlook wasn't closed, proprietary software, you could develop import filters. Some other people could create import filters. You could hire someone to create import filters. You could modify Thunderbird to export to a known format, if it can't already (e.g a unix MailBox file). Your problem was due to a lack of freedoms for Outlook, not due to "too much" freedom with Thunderbird.
But then again, nobody got fired for choosing Microsoft, but don't try to push your own "I just want a calm day at work" get in the way of other people trying to make the world a better place.
Where does even this come from? I've been an eMusic customer for years, and they never included *any* personal information. How come that you are so eager to give away all rights when the product is purely virtual? How hard would it be for someone to copy your music? Someone you trust? Someone at work? Why should it be so that if, say, you are invited to a party, you are fine with not being able to bring any music because of the *risk* of not all being deleted after said party? We could all bring our CD's, or better, "disposable" CDR's. What's up with you all? And my advice for the P2P thing? If you feel you must distribute songs illegally, then just RIP from a CD first. Who needs to buy music to distribute on P2P? Just download it from P2P first, then share it. We're talking about why someone would give the vendor a possibility to "big brother" you whenever you play music. I find it appalling how you can all stand by Apple, a mega-corporation earning shitloads of money treating their customers like shit. I mean, you even have to backup the songs you own, even though it costs them virtually *nothing* to provide you with a new copy if you should loose it. What's that all about? And don't get me started on the "just burn to a virtual CD, rip and re-encode - easy peasy" thing either. Treating customers as thieving bastards waiting to happen is not giving them any business from me.
Well, as a Norwegian, I think this is magnificent. They don't say anything about moving the government to OpenOffice or anything, but they will demand that communication to/from the government can be done without proprietary software. So *I* can run OpenOffice, or KOffice, or MS Office. So can they. There is no anti-MS about this, it's about not pressuring MS products on citizens, it's about allowing us to run what we want.
I use the closed ATI drivers for my laptop (using an X1600 card), and one of the real bonuses (except the 3D-beryl-accelereated wonderness), is the fact that I can clock it down when I want. So when unplugging the power chord, it is clocked from 470mhz to about 100. Still gives fluent video, but gives me about an hour extra battery time.
Hey, just ban SEX! No porn, no children!
And if that doesn't work. at least get rid of this "free sex" thingy - it is the worst kind!
It's already here - it's called "Bittorrent". :-)
One of the critizisms of the proposal is in fact the insanely close coupling to technology. Terms such as "CD", "MP3" etc. really should not be within a law.
:-(
That whole limitation as to which player is regarded as appropriate for a medium is totally screwed, and is only likely to get worse. For example, what about a portable CD player that can also play mp3s? Is it illegal to use the "mp3" part of the player, or does the fact that it is compatible with a round, silvery plastic disk enough to make it "appropriate"?
Finally we'll all be content that the Norwegian Police discharge 80% of all cases due to "the state of the evidence"... "State", such as "yes, we did actually stop the burglar with a skrewdriver THE CAR LOCK, but hey, with the state of the evidence and all, we just have to let dismiss this case."
We're so going to end up as a nation of criminals.
This law proposal is based on the EU InfoSoc directive, which is likely bought by the megacorps. As well, they have done a hearing of the proposal with different groups, such as the EFF in Norway, consumer organizations and of course a lot of recording associations.
Guess who's for and who's against. That alone should be enough to stop this kind of laws.
The difference is that on a Linux system the user is aware that she is installing software. In the windows world, you try to open an email ("the_numbers.xls" with a ton of spaces and ".scr" at the end). You do NOT think you're installing a screensaver!
Firefox, for example, has a dialog that says that you are about to install extentions - the "install" button is timed to a few seconds before being enabled, so the user does not accidentally click it.
Getting spyware by installing a malicious application is harder to prevent, and such software should probably be installed in the user's home directory, not as root.
Try Multisync. It can synchronize between Ximian Evolution, PocketPC, SyncML, the Sharp Zaurus, PalmOS, IrMC, LDAP and take backups.
:-)
Works like a charm. Of course, it does nothing with Sunbird - yet.
It's inna box. At least FAST Search & Transfer (the ones that used to have 'All the web', remember?), sell their intranet search as software. That means that you must get the servers and install a very complex piece of software on them.
:-)
Selling this as a box (and $5K is not really that expensive), you get the whole monty.
Oh, and it's Google.
I'm from Norway, and over here we only dub movies for kids. Cartoons are typically shown in theatres early in the afternoon dubbed, and later in the evening in their original language. All non-Norwegian movies are of course subtitled.
Dubbed movies almost always suck IMHO.
No they didn't, but the nfos consistently failed to load into the registry...
I more or less only see non-US movies at movie theatres now, simply because the risk of a US movie recycling a plot, focus on stars not story etc is too high... Thank God for french movies. :-)
P2P filsharing is not only about the money, it's very often about the convenience. The convenience to "return" crap, to play when you want, to reach outside of our "locally tailored" market et cetera.
Living in a small, scandinavian country (no "mass marked" for you!) makes the selection of f.eks. TV series hit rock bottom. P2P is often the only sensible way to watch other series. The only alternative is to sit out and wait for the DVD Box sets (which will cost twice the price due to shipping and customs).
Give me a torrent of the files (with commercials in them) and I'll get that one. Sell me a torrent for a decent price without commercials (the show already sold, remember? They cannot possibly loose money on this, distribution is free!). Then sell the Box set to the collectors, with some extras and a t-shirt.
The thing is that due to recent changes to the copyright laws of the US, the ??AA's now OWN our culture for however long they want.
Wether (uncommercial) piracy is ok or not can be discussed, but allowing a few large corporations to control our culture, freedom of speach, kill the public domain etc is NOT OK.
Check out Lawrence Lessigs Free Culture, or look for a presentation he did on the subject...
Next up should probably only include one single step: 1. Click on link Download plugins/use some fancy backend and go. Seriously though, I tested Ogg Theora some way back, by popping by a site. It downloaded a Theora decoder in java and showed the movie. If we made it so easy, maybe ??AA will let our Torrents stay? :-)
What I would like to see is a game that allows "non-media spreading". On startup, you get a question "You're not a registered user Register [now] [later]". Of course, if you didn't actually buy the game, you can pay for it when registering. You didn't give them any distribution, printing, pressing costs, so why do they keep insisting? Keeping the game witout a CD/DVD, box, manual and shipping would also remove customs on import, hence becoming cheap.
Signing the torrent file with the "trusted servers" public key would allow anyone to verify it's integrity. As it contains hashes for all pieces of the file(s), it also protects the integrity of the file(s) themselves.
Of course, this does NOT include any extra load on the "trusted server", and trusting it should be done when you sign up for their (e.g. BBC's) service...
I only partially agree... What I think is the way to go is to design GNOME to be as easy to use as possible (also for new users - somewhat what they are doing now). However, it MUST take into consideration that very few people stay newbies.
The interface must be efficient to use (for example tab-completion in the file selector, a feature that is now disabled by default - no typing allowed!), so that we everyday users (computer experts or not) feel that we can do our work efficiently. Making that everyday functionality efficient would make GNOME the absolute killer desktop.
And for Nautilus - WHY is it so politically incorrect to allow "open in the same window" as a configuration parameter??? It might be great for utter newbies with new files, but for anyone with a big tree of directories and files, it is screenclutter.
A part from those little quirks, GNOME rulez - gthumb is the ABSOLUTE BEST digital-photo administration program I've had the pleasure of using.
Keep up the good work, but please don't forget the experienced user!
Oh, and when the file selector presents a list of files, why is it that GNOME 2.6 is unable to jump to files beginning with "w" when I hit the "w" button?