Yeah, it'd be great to see some fine print in diamond ads, just like for the lottery or any sort of sweepstakes. I can just see it now:
A diamond is forever.*
* Approximate resale value = 1/3 of retail price. Diamonds may chip or shatter, and quality jewel-grade diamonds have been created in a laboratory this year. The Kimberly process is not foolproof. About 250 tons of ore were removed to recover this diamond. Other terms and conditions may apply. Void where prohibited. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any illness. These statements have not been evaluated by anyone with more sense than money.
That's a strange way of viewing efficiency. Who gets to decide what is worthwhile to do for others? You're implying here a framework of value judgements independent of individual preferences, whereas typical definitions of efficiency [wikipedia.org] only require individual preferences.
Your assumptions are 1) all entrants for the NetFlix prize prefer to spend their time on the NetFlix prize rather than something else (reasonable, and I agree to some extent); and 2) because these entrants prefer to spend their time doing this, it is efficient for them to do so (because you claim that efficiency is defined by preferences).
Your second assumption relies on a definition of efficiency as individual utility maximization, which in turn assumes that individual utility is defined by preferences. Those are valid definitions and assumptions, but they are somewhat arbitrary. Your own link points to several other definitions of efficiency that do not necessarily rely on individual utility maximization.
Now from the second part of your comment, I have to infer that these value judgements have somthing to do with a certain dislike of duplication. That's fine as a personal preference, but does it make sense for assessing social value? On the contrary, I'd argue that duplication is important.
Duplication in the sense of replication of scientific work, or in the sense of duplicative effort of a bunch of schoolchildren learning the same thing is of course necessary and desirable (to some extent). Both of those examples have limits - only a certain amount of replication in science is useful. You don't want all scientists spending all their time replicating the same experiment. Likewise, while we do want all children to learn to read and write, we don't want all children to learn how to act, how to repair cars, how to program computers, or how to fly planes. (Note that this is true regardless of preferences - even if all children preferred to learn how to repair cars, it would not necessarily be most efficient for them to do so). Time and resources are limited, so specialization is necessary.
Duplication is only useful to a certain extent. Many entrants likely would have a comparative advantage in working on some other project, or learning some other skill than working with recommendation algorithms. However, because there is no prize giving them an incentive to work on a project where they have a comparative advantage, they instead all flock to the NetFlix prize.
The whole criticism essentially comes down to the point that if you are going to use prizes widely as a means of encouraging innovation, it's better to have many prizes that will draw people to various areas of interest, rather than having one big prize, which will draw too much interest.
The burger flipping example was facetious, of course. The point being that it doesn't matter if people are following their preferences - people do not automatically prefer to do that which they are most efficient at doing.
So, there simply is no shortage of burgerflippers in society as a direct result of the existence of the prize, only an increase in AI skills among a subpopulation.
Assume the entrants all had moderate computer programming skill. There was likely a lot of duplicative effort in the competition (this happens in other types of research as well). Overall benefits may have been greater if 50% of the entrants worked on 100 different open-source software projects (or 10 different prize projects) rather than everyone working on the NetFlix prize.
The benefits to society in disseminating knowledge of data mining technologies and good datasets largely dwarfs the knowledge of the winning entry (think Metcalfe's law).
You're only considering the benefits to society that result from this particular competition. The argument about prize systems being inefficient has to do with the fact that while they generate huge interest in a particular topic (and yes, generate more returns than simply the winning entry), they also result in an inefficient allocation of resources to that one particular topic.
I.e., some of the entrants would likely have benefited society more by flipping burgers or sweeping sidewalks than by wasting their time on the Netflix prize.
The problem is somewhat reduced if you have a large number of prizes on various topics, because then people can devote their time to areas where they have more of a chance of winning, or if you make the cost of entry non-zero (it can still be very low - anyone with any real interest and talent will not be turned off by a $1 or $5 registration fee, or by a simple test to assess their capabilities).
I think he's pointing to one of the inefficiencies of prize systems as a way to spur innovation. Thousands of people tried, spending tens or hundreds of thousands of work-hours and other resources, and only a fraction got "winning results" (yes, according to the arbitrary way that winning was defined). But the point is that the prize probably resulted in a very inefficient use of resources. We could hypothesize that the same result might have been achieved with only 25% of the resources spent on the prize - for example, by making the cost of entry non-zero, you could have eliminated teams with no chance of winning from participating.
Basically prize systems benefit from people's inability to accurately assess their real chances of winning - or put another way, prize systems free ride off of people's self-delusion.
Of course there are other factors to be considered, e.g., what would those wasted resources have gone to if they were not being used for the competition, perhaps there are incidental rewards to those resources having been used, perhaps people competed for reasons other than simply winning the prize, etc.
IIRC from my IP law class, when you sell a copyright to someone, there is a certain point where you can decide to take back control. I don't remember the exact details off the top of my head, but it's statutory. A quick glance here looks to be from 30 to 35 years into the license, but copyright math depends on a lot of factors, e.g. when the work was originally registered.
Also IIRC this was originally instituted as a statutory way to prevent publishers from forcing authors to turn over all their copyright rights - by building in a statutory exception giving the author a window of time when they could take control back, publishers wouldn't strike such hard bargains.
Let me get this straight, amazon sells PD books while Sony has free PD books powered by google and epub support. Yikes. Happy I didn't get a kindle now.
Why, exactly? You are aware that with free software like Calibre, you can convert EPUB to something the Kindle can natively read, like MOBI, right? It's very easy. It can even be scripted with the Linux version of calibre (well, I guess all versions, but easiest on Linux). Or, if you have a Kindle DX, you can download the PDF version from Google.
You're missing my point. If you have a complex product that might infringe on 100 patents, and you don't want to infringe and face these penalties, you're supposed to go to each patent holder and negotiate a license.
Not only is that time-consuming and expensive to do; not only might you not be able to track down each patent holder; not only might you miss some patent you might potentially infringe upon; not only might 99 patent holders be willing to license and 1 patent holder be unwilling; but even if everyone is willing to license, if each of the 100 patent holders wants 2% of your profits in royalties (after all, 2% is such a small amount, right?), it's impossible to license those patents and still make a profit.
Furthermore, the person who wants to license is basically at the mercy of the patent holder, since a single holdout can prevent the licensee from going to market, or force them to redesign their product at great cost.
If the CAFC is saying that in determining awards, the award amount should be linked to the importance of the patent to the overall product, this might give a signal to patent holders about the true value of their patents, making them willing to license those patents for more reasonable fees (since they will no longer be able to bank on huge awards if they win an infringement case). It reduces the incentive to simply be a holdout.
Reducing the award in a case like this makes sense. Part of the problem with software patents (actually patents in general whenever you have complex devices) is that it's easy to step into the territory of several of them.
The "free-market" answer to this case would be that Microsoft should have licensed the patent from Alcatel. Assuming that Microsoft could have even figured out its product would be found infringing (it is not necessarily obvious in patent cases), Outlook probably involves hundreds of potentially patented features. If Microsoft were really to try and license each one, their licensing fees would quickly outpace any profit they could ever hope to make from Outlook. Everyone is going to say "Oh, just give me 8% of your profits, it's not that much", but when you have a hundred patents to license and everyone wants 8%, guess what, that doesn't work.
Patent holders often don't have any idea how much their patent is really worth, but since they have the power to simply deny people the use of it at any price, they tend to overestimate its value. Then, if a company like MS decides to ignore the patent (either out of ignorance, confusion, or strategy), they risk a whopping award.
No, reducing awards in cases like these is a good step. We might not like the fact that it happened to big bad Microsoft, but if it sets a precedent for how the CAFC looks at these types of awards in the case of complex products, it's a good thing.
I don't have six monitors, but I do have three, and I use an Ergotron triple-wide stand for them.
Interesting that the card presents the six monitors as one big one. Great for software compatibility, but maybe not so much for usability... I know with my three, my typical work involves a window or program maximized on each screen. I still treat the three monitors independently - it's just more screen real estate for viewing multiple things at once.
. We all ready have huge downloaded folders with books in many formats:.chm.djvu.pdf
I have about 20 GB of downloaded books, too, mainly in PDF format (which my DX can read). I have some in CHM and DJVU, too, but not the sort I need to carry around with me separate from my computer.
I'm not sure how describing why the DX works for me, and my reading habits/situation, makes me a fanboy. I'm not saying it's right for everyone. It probably doesn't make sense for the typical undergraduate college student, given that they have to buy high-priced textbooks that almost everyone resells.
I talk about the DX because I have one. From what I understand, some Sony Readers can read PDFs; I know the iRex models can, too, and they have other advantages (and disadvantages). But from what I read on/. there is a lot of misinformation regarding e-readers in general, and people who just don't get the point of them, and think that laptops or netbooks are replacements.
The Kindle/PRS-505/DR-1000 may not be the solution to your digital library; it's not really a "solution" to my digital library either, so much as a way to make my digital library about 100 times more useful than it would be if I didn't have an e-reader.
I doubt it will be mainstream, but not for the same reasons as you think.
Strike 1: it's not e-ink/e-paper. So, that makes it what, a dual-screen tablet? Cool, but e-ink is what makes e-readers so great, and so much better for reading, than tablets or laptops or netbooks.
Now, $200 isn't bad, compared to $299 for the Kindle 2, or more for the DX. So that's a plus. As for the college students and the price of books... I sympathize to a point. I would definitely not purchase standard undergraduate texts in electronic form. They're a ripoff in paper form to begin with, but at least you can resell them (if only for a fraction of what you paid if you were unfortunate enough to buy new).
As a grad student, though, you'll find your reading habits changing. It's somewhat discipline dependent, but everyone will be reading articles, mostly in PDF format. Kindle DX, etc., are superb for that. I've also purchased two books for a class from Amazon for my Kindle. In both cases, they were cheaper than any used copies I could find. I know I can't resell them, but I don't anticipate selling that sort of book anyway (it was inexpensive to begin with, and I will probably need it for reference when studying for comps).
In the meantime, I've found at least one book for a class on a torrent site, and I do things like copy all my typed notes to the Kindle. Is it saving me money? Absolutely not. But I don't have to print out hundreds of pages or be stuck at a computer to read things, and that alone is worth it for me.
Well, I was lucky enough to get mine as a gift, so that helped:-)
If Amazon is serious about making the DX attractive in the academic world, they must must must allow some kind of folder structure, or something. A long list of files is not an organizational scheme. I don't know what the hell is wrong with whoever's in charge of making THAT decision.
I cope with it by "tagging" articles in their file names, but my collection isn't that large yet...
You're right, I misspoke with the external drive. Sounds like you want a netbook with a 3G connection. You'd get much more than the 2 GB of storage on the Kindle 2, and you'd get a lot better keyboard. You'd also get a better screen refresh rate.
Is it cool that they did this? Sure. But I can't see many practical reasons for doing so, other than perhaps abusing the 3G connection.
Just like you, they don't realize that the books people want to display aren't just ASCII and have color.
The Kindle is not limited to displaying ASCII. Graphics, charts, photographs look quite good on the DX. Any kind of PDF I throw at it looks great.
As for color... probably 95% or more of my printed, physical books are black and white. And FWIW, I believe they are making progress on color e-ink displays, so that's probably just a matter of time. Maybe you're in a field where color is critical, in which case a tablet might be a better choice for you, but I doubt that's the case with the majority of people.
The one device philosophy would work the best in this case.
My experience has been otherwise. Aside from the fact that reading on an e-ink display is simply worlds better than reading on a backlit LCD display, I like having a separate device to take notes on.
The key word there is "public." If he's just working on an individual basis with clients, it very well may not count.
The classic example of public use or sale was a guy who designed a special type of corset for a friend's wife, who went around wearing it for a year, telling everyone about it. Then someone else started selling the corset, and the original inventor tried to patent it, but wasn't able, since it had been used in public for a year. (I might have some minor details wrong, but that was the gist of the story).
Likewise, I wasn't trying to criticize you. I agree with you, replacing the Kindle's OS is probably pretty pointless right now. (Actually, not totally, there are alternative versions of it that allow you to do stuff like download PDFs directly on it, change the screensaver images, and view unicode characters).
Then it sounds like you want an external hard drive.
The Kindle doesn't have 802.11b/g/n or Bluetooth. Putting (a different distro of) Linux on it won't magically make that hardware appear.
Maybe, just maybe, putting this distro on it will make it possible to e-mail files as attachments over the Kindle's 3G connection (for all I know someone may have already figured out how to do that with the stock distro), but what's the point of turning it into a glorified USB pen drive?
Fact: no, it's not. I have the largest Kindle, and it's much smaller than a laptop. Probably even thinner than the MacBook Air.
An eight hour, low power setting, would be more than enough to merit e-book reader status.
No, it would just be a tablet computer with long battery life.
Eight hours for an ebook reader is a joke. The Kindle manages a week of heavy usage. I'm not saying that Apple can't make a decent e-book reader, but tablets and ebook readers are different devices with different uses.
I'm a grad student, and I can't begin to tell you how many PDF files my professors have distributed to classes as reading material. Hundreds of pages, probably thousands. Sometimes I find torrents of books I'm supposed to read for class; other times, the Kindle version is cheaper than any available used copy (and I get it instantaneously, no waiting a week for shipping).
I'd like a netbook too, mainly for taking notes, but they're different devices with different purposes.
I recently bought a Kindle book (was cheaper than used copies), and discovered that it appeared to have been scanned, and poorly at that. There were OCR artifacts, and the font was crappy. I read up on the situation, and found that Amazon offers refunds for 7 days after a Kindle book purchase. I called, complained, and was refunded the price for my purchase. (Not sure if the 7 days is accurate, read that online, but it worked for me).
I had backed up my Kindle files, and I was curious what would happen when I 'synced' the Kindle with its wireless connection. Sure enough, the book I was refunded for disappeared. Also out of curiosity, I restored the backed-up file of the book to the Kindle, and it was still readable.
And if so, on what end is the code that limits the kindle to accessing wikipedia and amazon?
In your head? Or is that just a Kindle 2 limitation? 'Cause the DX can visit any site its primitive browser is capable of displaying. I've got a slashdot bookmark on my DX.
Or, did you mean the code that prevents you from tethering it?
Seriously, I thought it was a pretty cool rundown of how they did it. Nice to know you can purchase SATA port-multiplier backplanes, though I doubt I'll ever have a need to.
I know they have 6 fans, but I still wonder about temperature issues with so many drives so close together.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it'd be great to see some fine print in diamond ads, just like for the lottery or any sort of sweepstakes. I can just see it now:
A diamond is forever.*
* Approximate resale value = 1/3 of retail price. Diamonds may chip or shatter, and quality jewel-grade diamonds have been created in a laboratory this year. The Kimberly process is not foolproof. About 250 tons of ore were removed to recover this diamond. Other terms and conditions may apply. Void where prohibited. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any illness. These statements have not been evaluated by anyone with more sense than money.
That's a strange way of viewing efficiency. Who gets to decide what is worthwhile to do for others? You're implying here a framework of value judgements independent of individual preferences, whereas typical definitions of efficiency [wikipedia.org] only require individual preferences.
Your assumptions are 1) all entrants for the NetFlix prize prefer to spend their time on the NetFlix prize rather than something else (reasonable, and I agree to some extent); and 2) because these entrants prefer to spend their time doing this, it is efficient for them to do so (because you claim that efficiency is defined by preferences).
Your second assumption relies on a definition of efficiency as individual utility maximization, which in turn assumes that individual utility is defined by preferences. Those are valid definitions and assumptions, but they are somewhat arbitrary. Your own link points to several other definitions of efficiency that do not necessarily rely on individual utility maximization.
Now from the second part of your comment, I have to infer that these value judgements have somthing to do with a certain dislike of duplication. That's fine as a personal preference, but does it make sense for assessing social value? On the contrary, I'd argue that duplication is important.
Duplication in the sense of replication of scientific work, or in the sense of duplicative effort of a bunch of schoolchildren learning the same thing is of course necessary and desirable (to some extent). Both of those examples have limits - only a certain amount of replication in science is useful. You don't want all scientists spending all their time replicating the same experiment. Likewise, while we do want all children to learn to read and write, we don't want all children to learn how to act, how to repair cars, how to program computers, or how to fly planes. (Note that this is true regardless of preferences - even if all children preferred to learn how to repair cars, it would not necessarily be most efficient for them to do so). Time and resources are limited, so specialization is necessary.
Duplication is only useful to a certain extent. Many entrants likely would have a comparative advantage in working on some other project, or learning some other skill than working with recommendation algorithms. However, because there is no prize giving them an incentive to work on a project where they have a comparative advantage, they instead all flock to the NetFlix prize.
The whole criticism essentially comes down to the point that if you are going to use prizes widely as a means of encouraging innovation, it's better to have many prizes that will draw people to various areas of interest, rather than having one big prize, which will draw too much interest.
The burger flipping example was facetious, of course. The point being that it doesn't matter if people are following their preferences - people do not automatically prefer to do that which they are most efficient at doing.
So, there simply is no shortage of burgerflippers in society as a direct result of the existence of the prize, only an increase in AI skills among a subpopulation.
Assume the entrants all had moderate computer programming skill. There was likely a lot of duplicative effort in the competition (this happens in other types of research as well). Overall benefits may have been greater if 50% of the entrants worked on 100 different open-source software projects (or 10 different prize projects) rather than everyone working on the NetFlix prize.
The benefits to society in disseminating knowledge of data mining technologies and good datasets largely dwarfs the knowledge of the winning entry (think Metcalfe's law).
You're only considering the benefits to society that result from this particular competition. The argument about prize systems being inefficient has to do with the fact that while they generate huge interest in a particular topic (and yes, generate more returns than simply the winning entry), they also result in an inefficient allocation of resources to that one particular topic.
I.e., some of the entrants would likely have benefited society more by flipping burgers or sweeping sidewalks than by wasting their time on the Netflix prize.
The problem is somewhat reduced if you have a large number of prizes on various topics, because then people can devote their time to areas where they have more of a chance of winning, or if you make the cost of entry non-zero (it can still be very low - anyone with any real interest and talent will not be turned off by a $1 or $5 registration fee, or by a simple test to assess their capabilities).
I think he's pointing to one of the inefficiencies of prize systems as a way to spur innovation. Thousands of people tried, spending tens or hundreds of thousands of work-hours and other resources, and only a fraction got "winning results" (yes, according to the arbitrary way that winning was defined). But the point is that the prize probably resulted in a very inefficient use of resources. We could hypothesize that the same result might have been achieved with only 25% of the resources spent on the prize - for example, by making the cost of entry non-zero, you could have eliminated teams with no chance of winning from participating.
Basically prize systems benefit from people's inability to accurately assess their real chances of winning - or put another way, prize systems free ride off of people's self-delusion.
Of course there are other factors to be considered, e.g., what would those wasted resources have gone to if they were not being used for the competition, perhaps there are incidental rewards to those resources having been used, perhaps people competed for reasons other than simply winning the prize, etc.
IIRC from my IP law class, when you sell a copyright to someone, there is a certain point where you can decide to take back control. I don't remember the exact details off the top of my head, but it's statutory. A quick glance here looks to be from 30 to 35 years into the license, but copyright math depends on a lot of factors, e.g. when the work was originally registered.
Also IIRC this was originally instituted as a statutory way to prevent publishers from forcing authors to turn over all their copyright rights - by building in a statutory exception giving the author a window of time when they could take control back, publishers wouldn't strike such hard bargains.
Let me get this straight, amazon sells PD books while Sony has free PD books powered by google and epub support. Yikes. Happy I didn't get a kindle now.
Why, exactly? You are aware that with free software like Calibre, you can convert EPUB to something the Kindle can natively read, like MOBI, right? It's very easy. It can even be scripted with the Linux version of calibre (well, I guess all versions, but easiest on Linux). Or, if you have a Kindle DX, you can download the PDF version from Google.
You're missing my point. If you have a complex product that might infringe on 100 patents, and you don't want to infringe and face these penalties, you're supposed to go to each patent holder and negotiate a license.
Not only is that time-consuming and expensive to do; not only might you not be able to track down each patent holder; not only might you miss some patent you might potentially infringe upon; not only might 99 patent holders be willing to license and 1 patent holder be unwilling; but even if everyone is willing to license, if each of the 100 patent holders wants 2% of your profits in royalties (after all, 2% is such a small amount, right?), it's impossible to license those patents and still make a profit.
Furthermore, the person who wants to license is basically at the mercy of the patent holder, since a single holdout can prevent the licensee from going to market, or force them to redesign their product at great cost.
If the CAFC is saying that in determining awards, the award amount should be linked to the importance of the patent to the overall product, this might give a signal to patent holders about the true value of their patents, making them willing to license those patents for more reasonable fees (since they will no longer be able to bank on huge awards if they win an infringement case). It reduces the incentive to simply be a holdout.
Reducing the award in a case like this makes sense. Part of the problem with software patents (actually patents in general whenever you have complex devices) is that it's easy to step into the territory of several of them.
The "free-market" answer to this case would be that Microsoft should have licensed the patent from Alcatel. Assuming that Microsoft could have even figured out its product would be found infringing (it is not necessarily obvious in patent cases), Outlook probably involves hundreds of potentially patented features. If Microsoft were really to try and license each one, their licensing fees would quickly outpace any profit they could ever hope to make from Outlook. Everyone is going to say "Oh, just give me 8% of your profits, it's not that much", but when you have a hundred patents to license and everyone wants 8%, guess what, that doesn't work.
Patent holders often don't have any idea how much their patent is really worth, but since they have the power to simply deny people the use of it at any price, they tend to overestimate its value. Then, if a company like MS decides to ignore the patent (either out of ignorance, confusion, or strategy), they risk a whopping award.
No, reducing awards in cases like these is a good step. We might not like the fact that it happened to big bad Microsoft, but if it sets a precedent for how the CAFC looks at these types of awards in the case of complex products, it's a good thing.
I don't have six monitors, but I do have three, and I use an Ergotron triple-wide stand for them.
Interesting that the card presents the six monitors as one big one. Great for software compatibility, but maybe not so much for usability... I know with my three, my typical work involves a window or program maximized on each screen. I still treat the three monitors independently - it's just more screen real estate for viewing multiple things at once.
. We all ready have huge downloaded folders with books in many formats: .chm .djvu .pdf
I have about 20 GB of downloaded books, too, mainly in PDF format (which my DX can read). I have some in CHM and DJVU, too, but not the sort I need to carry around with me separate from my computer.
I'm not sure how describing why the DX works for me, and my reading habits/situation, makes me a fanboy. I'm not saying it's right for everyone. It probably doesn't make sense for the typical undergraduate college student, given that they have to buy high-priced textbooks that almost everyone resells.
I talk about the DX because I have one. From what I understand, some Sony Readers can read PDFs; I know the iRex models can, too, and they have other advantages (and disadvantages). But from what I read on /. there is a lot of misinformation regarding e-readers in general, and people who just don't get the point of them, and think that laptops or netbooks are replacements.
The Kindle/PRS-505/DR-1000 may not be the solution to your digital library; it's not really a "solution" to my digital library either, so much as a way to make my digital library about 100 times more useful than it would be if I didn't have an e-reader.
I doubt it will be mainstream, but not for the same reasons as you think.
Strike 1: it's not e-ink/e-paper. So, that makes it what, a dual-screen tablet? Cool, but e-ink is what makes e-readers so great, and so much better for reading, than tablets or laptops or netbooks.
Now, $200 isn't bad, compared to $299 for the Kindle 2, or more for the DX. So that's a plus. As for the college students and the price of books... I sympathize to a point. I would definitely not purchase standard undergraduate texts in electronic form. They're a ripoff in paper form to begin with, but at least you can resell them (if only for a fraction of what you paid if you were unfortunate enough to buy new).
As a grad student, though, you'll find your reading habits changing. It's somewhat discipline dependent, but everyone will be reading articles, mostly in PDF format. Kindle DX, etc., are superb for that. I've also purchased two books for a class from Amazon for my Kindle. In both cases, they were cheaper than any used copies I could find. I know I can't resell them, but I don't anticipate selling that sort of book anyway (it was inexpensive to begin with, and I will probably need it for reference when studying for comps).
In the meantime, I've found at least one book for a class on a torrent site, and I do things like copy all my typed notes to the Kindle. Is it saving me money? Absolutely not. But I don't have to print out hundreds of pages or be stuck at a computer to read things, and that alone is worth it for me.
Well, I was lucky enough to get mine as a gift, so that helped :-)
If Amazon is serious about making the DX attractive in the academic world, they must must must allow some kind of folder structure, or something. A long list of files is not an organizational scheme. I don't know what the hell is wrong with whoever's in charge of making THAT decision.
I cope with it by "tagging" articles in their file names, but my collection isn't that large yet...
You're right, I misspoke with the external drive. Sounds like you want a netbook with a 3G connection. You'd get much more than the 2 GB of storage on the Kindle 2, and you'd get a lot better keyboard. You'd also get a better screen refresh rate.
Is it cool that they did this? Sure. But I can't see many practical reasons for doing so, other than perhaps abusing the 3G connection.
Just like you, they don't realize that the books people want to display aren't just ASCII and have color.
The Kindle is not limited to displaying ASCII. Graphics, charts, photographs look quite good on the DX. Any kind of PDF I throw at it looks great.
As for color... probably 95% or more of my printed, physical books are black and white. And FWIW, I believe they are making progress on color e-ink displays, so that's probably just a matter of time. Maybe you're in a field where color is critical, in which case a tablet might be a better choice for you, but I doubt that's the case with the majority of people.
The one device philosophy would work the best in this case.
My experience has been otherwise. Aside from the fact that reading on an e-ink display is simply worlds better than reading on a backlit LCD display, I like having a separate device to take notes on.
The key word there is "public." If he's just working on an individual basis with clients, it very well may not count.
The classic example of public use or sale was a guy who designed a special type of corset for a friend's wife, who went around wearing it for a year, telling everyone about it. Then someone else started selling the corset, and the original inventor tried to patent it, but wasn't able, since it had been used in public for a year. (I might have some minor details wrong, but that was the gist of the story).
Likewise, I wasn't trying to criticize you. I agree with you, replacing the Kindle's OS is probably pretty pointless right now. (Actually, not totally, there are alternative versions of it that allow you to do stuff like download PDFs directly on it, change the screensaver images, and view unicode characters).
Then it sounds like you want an external hard drive.
The Kindle doesn't have 802.11b/g/n or Bluetooth. Putting (a different distro of) Linux on it won't magically make that hardware appear.
Maybe, just maybe, putting this distro on it will make it possible to e-mail files as attachments over the Kindle's 3G connection (for all I know someone may have already figured out how to do that with the stock distro), but what's the point of turning it into a glorified USB pen drive?
Fact: The kindle is as big as a laptop.
Fact: no, it's not. I have the largest Kindle, and it's much smaller than a laptop. Probably even thinner than the MacBook Air.
An eight hour, low power setting, would be more than enough to merit e-book reader status.
No, it would just be a tablet computer with long battery life.
Eight hours for an ebook reader is a joke. The Kindle manages a week of heavy usage. I'm not saying that Apple can't make a decent e-book reader, but tablets and ebook readers are different devices with different uses.
Finally, someone who gets it.
I'm a grad student, and I can't begin to tell you how many PDF files my professors have distributed to classes as reading material. Hundreds of pages, probably thousands. Sometimes I find torrents of books I'm supposed to read for class; other times, the Kindle version is cheaper than any available used copy (and I get it instantaneously, no waiting a week for shipping).
I'd like a netbook too, mainly for taking notes, but they're different devices with different purposes.
I already synced again, to see what would happen. It didn't disappear. (I had renamed the file, not sure if that has any effect).
You can already do that. The Kindle appears to the computer as a USB mass storage device.
I recently bought a Kindle book (was cheaper than used copies), and discovered that it appeared to have been scanned, and poorly at that. There were OCR artifacts, and the font was crappy. I read up on the situation, and found that Amazon offers refunds for 7 days after a Kindle book purchase. I called, complained, and was refunded the price for my purchase. (Not sure if the 7 days is accurate, read that online, but it worked for me).
I had backed up my Kindle files, and I was curious what would happen when I 'synced' the Kindle with its wireless connection. Sure enough, the book I was refunded for disappeared. Also out of curiosity, I restored the backed-up file of the book to the Kindle, and it was still readable.
And if so, on what end is the code that limits the kindle to accessing wikipedia and amazon?
In your head? Or is that just a Kindle 2 limitation? 'Cause the DX can visit any site its primitive browser is capable of displaying. I've got a slashdot bookmark on my DX.
Or, did you mean the code that prevents you from tethering it?
Seriously, I thought it was a pretty cool rundown of how they did it. Nice to know you can purchase SATA port-multiplier backplanes, though I doubt I'll ever have a need to.
I know they have 6 fans, but I still wonder about temperature issues with so many drives so close together.