Well, it explains why my podcast app didn't update my favorite podcast--just ran a whois to confirm that they're hosted on GoDaddy.
What's obnoxious about something like this is that the attack isn't likely to get the attention of the general public. Most people will see their favorite site is down, say "Aw, shucks," and check again later. The news likely won't even mention this, what with election season going on and giving them better yellow journalism fodder. The people who will know the reason why some of their favorite sites are down are like those here on Slashdot: The same people that already dislike GoDaddy.
I'm not saying that protest is a bad thing--far from it. But ineffective protest is. All this attack accomplishes is to hurt the little guy--the people who use GoDaddy.
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe GoDaddy's customers will all jump ship because of this. I doubt it, though.
Not to mention the fact that many of the acts of terrorism these days involve suicide bombers. Maybe the assumption is that terrorists all live in secluded bunkers in the middle of nowhere and don't have ready access to McDonald's?
What I like is "buying firearms outside of season". Okay, hunting rifles, I can sort of see--except for the fact that many gun stores hold sales in the off season in order to keep customers coming in. But what about handguns? Is there a "handgun season" I don't know about? Some high-caliber revolvers are used in boar hunting, but that's all I know. I guess the take-away is, "Legally own a firearm, which the Constitution lets you do? You might be a terrorist."
One thing that should be mentioned, though, is the key phrase: "large quantities". The list mentions propane gas. Just buying one tank for your family BBQ isn't going to arouse suspicion. Buying 50 canisters, though, might--and, honestly, even I would raise my eyebrows at that. My favorite part, though: "Shoplifting or purchasing [...] several large aircraft, engines, or transmitters". If a guy manages to fit several large aircraft under his coat, he deserves to keep them.
I'm taking an online (English) course from a professor with whom I have previously taken in-classroom classes. He says he really enjoys teaching online--it's easier for him and he can take more students--but the school district has always had a hard time battling student attrition. In my area, at least, online courses see a higher drop rate than courses where you have to physically go to school.
I think part of the issue is that there's more accountability on the student to "show up" for class. When you have a physical class to attend, you have more structure than an online class. With an online class, you run the risk of putting things off until the last minute (even more than a physical class--now you can put the lecture off, too!), getting stressed, and dropping out.
So for those with the discipline to complete an online course, it's great. More convenient, potentially quicker, etc. But there are lots of undisciplined people out there--not to mention people simply learn much better in a classroom environment. I don't see physical classes going anywhere any time soon.
There's definitely a hit on contrast with the Nook. For what it's worth, I believe the Engadget hands-on says that, despite there being another layer, contrast does look a bit improved over the previous-generation Kindles. It looks real nice in the videos I've seen, but obviously that's not a great benchmark.
Do you have any justification for this viewpoint? Because--and I mean no offense--it's coming off as some kind of crazy and irrational resistance against progress. I assume you know it's not backlit, but rather side-lit, meaning the effect the light has on your eyes should be about the same as light reflecting off a real piece of paper (or a so-called "true" e-ink reader).
For myself, I can't stand to read an ereader without a light anymore. I bought the Nook when their lighted solution came out, and I preordered a Paperwhite because it looks far superior to B&N's offering.
But the ads really are creepy and a nuisance. Every time you stop reading for a while, an ad comes up. To get past the ad, you have to click a button. Then it talks to your wifi network and pops up the details of the ad. Then you can finally click again to get back to reading Pride and Prejudice.
I have a Kindle Touch, and have never experienced this. When you put it to sleep, it shows an ad, yes, but I've never had to click through it or read the ad. All I have to do is wake it and go back to reading. Maybe there's been a new (and obnoxious) update that changes this behavior--or maybe it's an issue with the cheapest Kindle (which I did briefly own, but don't remember having this problem).
When I first got the Kindle Touch, I intended on eventually opting out of the ads. As you say, though, they're surprisingly unobtrusive, and I even wound up taking advantage of some of the offers. I can understand other people not sharing my opinion, though.
Agreed. B&N has more attractive and better-made hardware, but the reading experience is lesser than Amazon's. The Paperwhite may dethrone B&N, though, as it has a significantly higher resolution (212 ppi vs 167 ppi).
Looks like Amazon itself isn't carrying it anymore. If you click on the products pages, you see that they're being sold by Marketplace sellers, such as "STL Pro" and "greentree9". The latter, at least, is fulfilled by Amazon, and thus has Prime available. It's still $56 over MSRP, though.
I never had any problems with it. You tap, you don't swipe. The screen isn't glossy, either, so even if you do get fingerprints, you'll have a harder time noticing them.
Then again, some people might be bothered by it where I'm not. My suggestion? Go to a Best Buy and look at one of the demo units. If fingerprints are ever a problem on Kindles, you'd see it there. If the screen still looks fine, then you should be good. Unless, of course, they clean the things... (Hint: look at the nearby tablets to see if they do!)
I initially bought a non-Touch Kindle for this reason. I later tried out a Touch at a store and realized it was fine. Wound up returning the one I bought and got the Touch. The touch area for navigating to the next page is very large--I can easily hit it with my thumb, even though I'm left-handed.
That said, I still want physical buttons. Their omission is just not a deal breaker for me.
I keep thinking of it as Paperwight, which is an entirely different image than Amazon wants to convey, I'm sure. Although, the idea of reading on a paper wraith is strangely appealing, if fraught with danger.
You've met any siblings? If one wants to do something, the other will want to do the same thing, just because the other does it. Time share plan is a good idea in theory... practice on the other hand... not so much.
Talk about a first-world problem. "I had to get little Timmy his own iPad because he and little Johnny were always fighting over the other one." Heaven forbid kids should learn to share. (Strongly resisting the obvious "back when I was a kid" anecdote. I'm only partially successful.)
I have the GlowLight model. B&N's hardware is nicer than Amazon's, as is their software, but their actual ebooks leave something to be desired. I've encountered a lot more formatting errors than I did on the Kindle, and even several books that didn't let me change the font. I actually had to resort to stripping the DRM from the EPUBs (or just downloading pirate copies of books I bought), unzipping them, and manually adding the font files and editing the manifest, CSS, etc. It's a damn pain, and the reason why I preordered the Paperwhite.
I bought the Nook in part because I wanted to support someone who wasn't Amazon, and I don't want this to become a market dominated by one player. Honestly, though, Amazon's doing a better job. This isn't even getting into the poor syncing between the Nook and the iOS app, or the fact that sideloading is more difficult than on the Kindle (no syncing there, and you can't sideload into the iOS app).
The only things I dislike about the Kindle Touch software are that it shows books as a list of titles rather than cover art, and it doesn't show you how much left you have in a chapter (oddly, the non-Touch Kindle does show you this data). The first looks like it might be remedied, at least from screenshots, and in the presentation today, Bezos said that the Paperwhite tells you how much time you have left in your current chapter. Yes, time, not pages or "locations" or percentage. It tracks your reading speed. Pretty neat.
I'm preordering the thing as soon as it goes up. I'd hoped the release would be today (in a perfect, pipe dream sort of world) or at the most a week out. The wait until October will be agonizing.
I have a Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight and, while I like the thing well enough, the contrast is low compared to similar Kindles (due to the anti-reflective film on it) and Amazon has far superior syncing capabilities than BN. But most of all, not all books on the Nook allow you to change fonts, and you're stuck with the default font that I despise. Couple that with awkward formatting, and it's a real irritation. I could live with the other issues, but that's a deal-breaker.
Amazon also has me considering keeping my Audible.com subscription, which I'd planned on canceling this month. It syncs up with your ebook location, so you can read, then listen at where you stopped, or vice versa (or even listen while reading, like those proctors want you to do during standardized tests in high school). Now, if an Audible purchase automatically conferred an ebook download, I'd definitely keep it. But if I have to buy the same book twice, I'm not sure it's worth it.
I agree on the movement aspect, and it's why I use a 360 controller as a gamepad in some games. Some games just work better with a joystick (or even d-pad) than they do on a keyboard. On the other hand, other games are much better with the traditional KB/M setup.
I'm also not convinced apple hardware is actually high quality, it's just that their os will only install on their hardware. apple is basically like a crossbreed between dell & microsoft, and this lets them charge premium prices on their run-of-the-mill hardware because their os won't install on other (less expensive, perhaps higher quality) intel hardware.
The internal components are the same that other manufacturers use (well, for the most part). The cases themselves, however, are more than just pretty and shiny--they are very well made and durable, with no case flex evident even on the Macbook Air. Anecdote time! My boss got a unibody Macbook Pro which, unlike every other laptop ever, survived his abuse: several times dropping it over 5 feet onto tile floor, while turned on, both open and closed; as well as general carelessness (I hope I never see anyone else prop a laptop up by opening it halfway, flipping it upside down, and resting it as though you're trying to build a house of cards). The thing is dented all over and the screen is cracked, but it still works. The internal HDD connector eventually broke, so now he uses it as some sort of bizarre Frankenstein desktop running OS X through an external hard drive.
The other area Apple excels is in trackpads. Maybe things have changed in the PC laptop world, but for the longest time I would buy nothing else, simply because Apple's trackpads were so much better--both in terms of functionality and in overall feel of running your fingers over the thing. I like it so much I bought the Magic Trackpad for my iMac.
Yes, they're expensive. Yes, you can get more powerful machines. Honestly, though, most people don't need the extra power that faster machines offer. They will all run your OS, web browser, and word processor just fine. They all can access Facebook. They all can do full-disk encryption without a noticeable performance hit. So the question is whether access to OS X, the excellent customer support, and the nice case are worth the extra price.
Or you could do it like OS X does it: Auto-save, and implicit saves make snapshots that you can then roll back to. No having to wade through tons of keystrokes, no ridiculous overhead.
It's not a perfect system (for instance, snapshots aren't persistent across systems if you copy/move the file; they're stored on the local machine. I actually tried to get it to sync over Dropbox via symlinking, but ran into permissions problems. Maybe someone else will have/has had more luck.), but it works pretty well. I find I use it a lot less than I'd anticipated, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it explains why my podcast app didn't update my favorite podcast--just ran a whois to confirm that they're hosted on GoDaddy.
What's obnoxious about something like this is that the attack isn't likely to get the attention of the general public. Most people will see their favorite site is down, say "Aw, shucks," and check again later. The news likely won't even mention this, what with election season going on and giving them better yellow journalism fodder. The people who will know the reason why some of their favorite sites are down are like those here on Slashdot: The same people that already dislike GoDaddy.
I'm not saying that protest is a bad thing--far from it. But ineffective protest is. All this attack accomplishes is to hurt the little guy--the people who use GoDaddy.
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe GoDaddy's customers will all jump ship because of this. I doubt it, though.
Not to mention the fact that many of the acts of terrorism these days involve suicide bombers. Maybe the assumption is that terrorists all live in secluded bunkers in the middle of nowhere and don't have ready access to McDonald's?
What I like is "buying firearms outside of season". Okay, hunting rifles, I can sort of see--except for the fact that many gun stores hold sales in the off season in order to keep customers coming in. But what about handguns? Is there a "handgun season" I don't know about? Some high-caliber revolvers are used in boar hunting, but that's all I know. I guess the take-away is, "Legally own a firearm, which the Constitution lets you do? You might be a terrorist."
One thing that should be mentioned, though, is the key phrase: "large quantities". The list mentions propane gas. Just buying one tank for your family BBQ isn't going to arouse suspicion. Buying 50 canisters, though, might--and, honestly, even I would raise my eyebrows at that. My favorite part, though: "Shoplifting or purchasing [...] several large aircraft, engines, or transmitters". If a guy manages to fit several large aircraft under his coat, he deserves to keep them.
I'm taking an online (English) course from a professor with whom I have previously taken in-classroom classes. He says he really enjoys teaching online--it's easier for him and he can take more students--but the school district has always had a hard time battling student attrition. In my area, at least, online courses see a higher drop rate than courses where you have to physically go to school.
I think part of the issue is that there's more accountability on the student to "show up" for class. When you have a physical class to attend, you have more structure than an online class. With an online class, you run the risk of putting things off until the last minute (even more than a physical class--now you can put the lecture off, too!), getting stressed, and dropping out.
So for those with the discipline to complete an online course, it's great. More convenient, potentially quicker, etc. But there are lots of undisciplined people out there--not to mention people simply learn much better in a classroom environment. I don't see physical classes going anywhere any time soon.
There's definitely a hit on contrast with the Nook. For what it's worth, I believe the Engadget hands-on says that, despite there being another layer, contrast does look a bit improved over the previous-generation Kindles. It looks real nice in the videos I've seen, but obviously that's not a great benchmark.
Do you have any justification for this viewpoint? Because--and I mean no offense--it's coming off as some kind of crazy and irrational resistance against progress. I assume you know it's not backlit, but rather side-lit, meaning the effect the light has on your eyes should be about the same as light reflecting off a real piece of paper (or a so-called "true" e-ink reader).
For myself, I can't stand to read an ereader without a light anymore. I bought the Nook when their lighted solution came out, and I preordered a Paperwhite because it looks far superior to B&N's offering.
What light? There isn't one in a true e-ink device.
Kindle Paperwhite with built-in light
Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight
No internet access, no ads (unless the ads are cached).
They are--at least, they are on the eInk Kindles. It shows the ads, and asks you to connect to a WiFi network if you click on them.
But the ads really are creepy and a nuisance. Every time you stop reading for a while, an ad comes up. To get past the ad, you have to click a button. Then it talks to your wifi network and pops up the details of the ad. Then you can finally click again to get back to reading Pride and Prejudice.
I have a Kindle Touch, and have never experienced this. When you put it to sleep, it shows an ad, yes, but I've never had to click through it or read the ad. All I have to do is wake it and go back to reading. Maybe there's been a new (and obnoxious) update that changes this behavior--or maybe it's an issue with the cheapest Kindle (which I did briefly own, but don't remember having this problem).
When I first got the Kindle Touch, I intended on eventually opting out of the ads. As you say, though, they're surprisingly unobtrusive, and I even wound up taking advantage of some of the offers. I can understand other people not sharing my opinion, though.
Agreed. B&N has more attractive and better-made hardware, but the reading experience is lesser than Amazon's. The Paperwhite may dethrone B&N, though, as it has a significantly higher resolution (212 ppi vs 167 ppi).
And even if the light in your eInk reader does go out, you can still use it just fine. It's not necessary to use it.
Looks like Amazon itself isn't carrying it anymore. If you click on the products pages, you see that they're being sold by Marketplace sellers, such as "STL Pro" and "greentree9". The latter, at least, is fulfilled by Amazon, and thus has Prime available. It's still $56 over MSRP, though.
I never had any problems with it. You tap, you don't swipe. The screen isn't glossy, either, so even if you do get fingerprints, you'll have a harder time noticing them.
Then again, some people might be bothered by it where I'm not. My suggestion? Go to a Best Buy and look at one of the demo units. If fingerprints are ever a problem on Kindles, you'd see it there. If the screen still looks fine, then you should be good. Unless, of course, they clean the things... (Hint: look at the nearby tablets to see if they do!)
I initially bought a non-Touch Kindle for this reason. I later tried out a Touch at a store and realized it was fine. Wound up returning the one I bought and got the Touch. The touch area for navigating to the next page is very large--I can easily hit it with my thumb, even though I'm left-handed.
That said, I still want physical buttons. Their omission is just not a deal breaker for me.
But, but...NEON...
I keep thinking of it as Paperwight, which is an entirely different image than Amazon wants to convey, I'm sure. Although, the idea of reading on a paper wraith is strangely appealing, if fraught with danger.
You've met any siblings? If one wants to do something, the other will want to do the same thing, just because the other does it. Time share plan is a good idea in theory... practice on the other hand ... not so much.
Talk about a first-world problem. "I had to get little Timmy his own iPad because he and little Johnny were always fighting over the other one." Heaven forbid kids should learn to share. (Strongly resisting the obvious "back when I was a kid" anecdote. I'm only partially successful.)
I have the GlowLight model. B&N's hardware is nicer than Amazon's, as is their software, but their actual ebooks leave something to be desired. I've encountered a lot more formatting errors than I did on the Kindle, and even several books that didn't let me change the font. I actually had to resort to stripping the DRM from the EPUBs (or just downloading pirate copies of books I bought), unzipping them, and manually adding the font files and editing the manifest, CSS, etc. It's a damn pain, and the reason why I preordered the Paperwhite.
I bought the Nook in part because I wanted to support someone who wasn't Amazon, and I don't want this to become a market dominated by one player. Honestly, though, Amazon's doing a better job. This isn't even getting into the poor syncing between the Nook and the iOS app, or the fact that sideloading is more difficult than on the Kindle (no syncing there, and you can't sideload into the iOS app).
Actually it is [a replacement for a tablet]. I use one in that fashion regularly.
I used to think that before I got a Kindle. How wrong I was.
The only things I dislike about the Kindle Touch software are that it shows books as a list of titles rather than cover art, and it doesn't show you how much left you have in a chapter (oddly, the non-Touch Kindle does show you this data). The first looks like it might be remedied, at least from screenshots, and in the presentation today, Bezos said that the Paperwhite tells you how much time you have left in your current chapter. Yes, time, not pages or "locations" or percentage. It tracks your reading speed. Pretty neat.
I'm preordering the thing as soon as it goes up. I'd hoped the release would be today (in a perfect, pipe dream sort of world) or at the most a week out. The wait until October will be agonizing.
I have a Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight and, while I like the thing well enough, the contrast is low compared to similar Kindles (due to the anti-reflective film on it) and Amazon has far superior syncing capabilities than BN. But most of all, not all books on the Nook allow you to change fonts, and you're stuck with the default font that I despise. Couple that with awkward formatting, and it's a real irritation. I could live with the other issues, but that's a deal-breaker.
Amazon also has me considering keeping my Audible.com subscription, which I'd planned on canceling this month. It syncs up with your ebook location, so you can read, then listen at where you stopped, or vice versa (or even listen while reading, like those proctors want you to do during standardized tests in high school). Now, if an Audible purchase automatically conferred an ebook download, I'd definitely keep it. But if I have to buy the same book twice, I'm not sure it's worth it.
You don't need to wait days to get back to iTunes, even with an SD-less iPhone. It backs up automatically online.
I agree on the movement aspect, and it's why I use a 360 controller as a gamepad in some games. Some games just work better with a joystick (or even d-pad) than they do on a keyboard. On the other hand, other games are much better with the traditional KB/M setup.
What if you only want one song off the album? That's when ITMS is a good option. Besides, it's DRM-free.
I'm also not convinced apple hardware is actually high quality, it's just that their os will only install on their hardware. apple is basically like a crossbreed between dell & microsoft, and this lets them charge premium prices on their run-of-the-mill hardware because their os won't install on other (less expensive, perhaps higher quality) intel hardware.
The internal components are the same that other manufacturers use (well, for the most part). The cases themselves, however, are more than just pretty and shiny--they are very well made and durable, with no case flex evident even on the Macbook Air. Anecdote time! My boss got a unibody Macbook Pro which, unlike every other laptop ever, survived his abuse: several times dropping it over 5 feet onto tile floor, while turned on, both open and closed; as well as general carelessness (I hope I never see anyone else prop a laptop up by opening it halfway, flipping it upside down, and resting it as though you're trying to build a house of cards). The thing is dented all over and the screen is cracked, but it still works. The internal HDD connector eventually broke, so now he uses it as some sort of bizarre Frankenstein desktop running OS X through an external hard drive.
The other area Apple excels is in trackpads. Maybe things have changed in the PC laptop world, but for the longest time I would buy nothing else, simply because Apple's trackpads were so much better--both in terms of functionality and in overall feel of running your fingers over the thing. I like it so much I bought the Magic Trackpad for my iMac.
Yes, they're expensive. Yes, you can get more powerful machines. Honestly, though, most people don't need the extra power that faster machines offer. They will all run your OS, web browser, and word processor just fine. They all can access Facebook. They all can do full-disk encryption without a noticeable performance hit. So the question is whether access to OS X, the excellent customer support, and the nice case are worth the extra price.
Or you could do it like OS X does it: Auto-save, and implicit saves make snapshots that you can then roll back to. No having to wade through tons of keystrokes, no ridiculous overhead.
It's not a perfect system (for instance, snapshots aren't persistent across systems if you copy/move the file; they're stored on the local machine. I actually tried to get it to sync over Dropbox via symlinking, but ran into permissions problems. Maybe someone else will have/has had more luck.), but it works pretty well. I find I use it a lot less than I'd anticipated, though.