1. Strip the DRM 2. I don't find ePaper to be a problem, but I don't like reading a phone or tablet. On the other hand, every ebook I have has the spacing, margins, font and font size I want it to have - not that which fitted the format the publisher wanted or typesetter liked one day. 3. The last three I bought (on Amazon) were 1/3rd cheaper than their paperback versions. 4. Yes - biggest problem, gifting a used book is problematic, though Strip the DRM and it's not so hard to sideload them to most devices. 5. Didn't you just say that? Strip the DRM and remember not to read them or loan them out to others while your recipient is reading them.
Honestly, the industry is going to have to learn that restricting ownership rights to licensing for personal use is a dead end and a bad move that will increase piracy. Until then, I'll just buy eBooks and notionally treat them as paper books.
* Have randomly sized text * Are impractical to carry in enough quantity for 1-2 weeks away from home * Require an external light source * Can't be easily searched * Annotation is messy and often frowned upon * You lose your place if you fall asleep while reading them * Can't read themselves to you * You have to visit a physical store to get a new one
I don't disagree with your list, just think there's an equal (or in my view greater) list on the other side.
DRM is the big problem, but honestly - screw what I've signed up for, I just treat them as if I'd bought the book, I hope governments will eventually forcibly equalise this difference.
In other news, students and staff have reported that their computers are performing much better than usual and site-wide malware and associated bandwidth hogging has massively reduced.
That's completely unfair - they'll decided to retire the product in a couple of years not only ceasing collecting information from those users but also leaving them stranded and without a solution because they'd spent the previous years stifling competition by offering a competent free alternative.
Not read the article (sorry, it's just tradition not to), but sounds like me - The only music I really tend to like is music that reminds me of my youth - nothing else much inspires me or attracts me.
As far as I'm aware, the only thing is lacks is any sort of aperture control. That's because it's fixed at, from memory, F2.2.
Does that mean it's not the same as a DSLR? Yes, that's exactly what it means.
Does it mean it's much better than anything else you can get in a phone (and most things you get in point-and-shoot)? Yes, it does.
But the killer app here is the 41mp. Each photo sensor is awful - look at 1:1 zoom and you'll see so much noise it'll give you headaches. But that's not the point. The point is that you can scale that down to 21mp and there's be much less noise. Put it through noise ninja and there'll be less again. Bring it down to 5mp and it'll, in some circumstances - common circumstances - be up there with the Micro 4/3rds cameras.
I'll be buying one, and I'll be buying the camera grip with the extended battery built in. When I'm out as a tourist or a proud dad, I'll carry them both. From day-to-day, I'll just carry the phone and be ready to take far better photos than almost everyone else.
I just don't get how it's actually supposed to do it.
One of the independent coding initiatives (in fact, most of them) in the UK had a bunch donated to them by Google. My club of 15 kids got three and I'm supposed to give them out to the kids. I'm almost 100% certain they will sit in a cupboard and never get used - I mean, what's the point? 99% of families have a laptop - that includes a keyboard and a screen, without that - for most people - a computer is useless.
Decisions on equipment like this are usually made at school level (by the head and by the board of governors). I don't recall any mandate to buy interactive whiteboards.
That said - I can't see why you use that example - they are amongst the most engaging pieces of equipment in the classroom and allow the teachers to "buy in" materials to really add interest to their lesson plans.
The sad thing is how the schools are ripped off by vendors, in fact LEAs pretty much mandate that schools should be ripped off by forcing them to use specific vendors. Something rotten in the state of Denmark...
I've taught 9-11 year-olds programming and about 80% of the class is capable of learning enough to solve simple problems given to them. Frankly, the 20% are unable to concentrate on anything other than video games or TV - they're the ones that would be staring into space or playing football every waking hour 20-30 years ago.
20-30% can excel and really grasp some or all of the basic concepts in such a way that they can solve significant novel problems and even set those problems for themselves.
We now have Code Club, Coder Dojo, Coding in Schools and half a dozen more individuals and groups working towards roughly the same goals. Each one of these groups is effectively cannibalising each other's target audience. All these people at the helm of each of these groups needs to be congratulated and then locked in a room with all of the others until they can agree a single national plan.
Personally I've gone with Code Club and teach a weekly hour class in my kids' primary school (kindergarten). I've brought one set of kids through the first of three "terms" of coding, been given 3x RPi to give out to semi randomly selected members of the club and plan to do a better job next year. The weekly tasks do a pretty good job of introducing practice in the basic concepts of programming (variables, variable scope, loops, conditions etc..) but weren't explicit enough to allow the kids to use them outside the context in which they were taught. To be honest, I think much of it was done by mimicry rather than understanding.
I read about this on the BBC news website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20972027), missing the first line of the article that said it was US only, I logged into the service to see what I'd bought that was going to show up. Immediately, Beautiful South, Gaze popped up. Strange, I didn't actually remember buying it but it's possible. Then that was it. So I go through my purchases and, like others, there were heaps of popular CDs that I'd bought as gifts.
Apart from the obvious problem, I put a message in to Amazon wondering why Gaze was the only track I got. About an hour later I got a call (during the work day, to my mobile from a hidden number!) from a confused CS rep. Eventually established that it was US only and that Gaze was some weird quirk and I shouldn't have received it.
Somehow, this seems a bit of an ill conceived dodgily implemented service. I bet it sinks without a trace. I assume Amazon are having to pay for all these tracks (at some massively discounted rate) and are doing it to try to convince people to use their service. That's some financial commitment - wonder if the physical CD prices are about to be hiked...?
Has anyone who's posted so far actually ever been in a union? They don't just try to protect incompetence or continually raise pay rates (though, yes, they do tend traditionally tend to try to do that as well). They also enforce worker protection laws. They provide legal protection and legal insurance. They provide workplace representation, worker representation.
Seems like a bunch of turkeys voting for [Thanksgiving|Christmas]...
Totally agree - VS is a great IDE and one that really helps with code navigation, standards compliance and more. Gotta think the GP has no idea how to effectively use all of the features even the worst of modern IDEs bring. I suppose, if Eclipse is the best you've had, notepad++ looks promising but if you've used VS - there's no reason to use anything else.
What is such a pity about this is that it really doesn't matter how good this is, how bad the iPad is, how boring the Android is, or any combination of those 3 features and platforms. Apple will either continue to convince the world that the Emperor is fully dressed, Android will convince the world that cheap is good or MS will convince the world that, well, they shouldn't change horses mid-stream.
The three platforms all work just fine. I happen to think and hope that the Surface Pro will show the world that both bulky laptops and tablets in general are technology of the past, but for the majority of consumers the difference is moot. The real challenge here is ridding the world of java applets and flash videos and getting moved on to decent, compliant, reliable web standards... Then who cares what the medium is...?
Buy a (relatively cheap) Lumia and you can use the industry standard for wireless charging and also NFC + open data transfer standards (bluetooth to the speaker systems for instance). Buy a (relatively expensive) iPhone and you'll be stuck with even more expensive accessories, with god knows what means of communicating with them.
Not in the 10k region but still - I appreciate the first post was a bit heavy on the enthusiasm - my guess is an enthusiastic MVP rather than anything more sinister..
A dual core CPU and a huge battery are pretty great hardware specs. Also a mechanically stabilized sensor mechanism could be very big news, especially if their software really does make innovative use of the available pixels. The point has been made recently that for PC usage (sharing on FB etc, 2MP is more than enough, for print 5MP is enough - IF THE QUALITY IS THERE.
I assume the stock has plummeted because until a few days ago everyone was hoping for a 20MP sensor and a new tablet to go with the phones. On the other hand - the markets are idiots - buy today, you'll be 10-15% richer by the end of the month if you sell at a time when they don't arbitrarily decide to mood swing again...
I am a bit disappointed that we loose the smaller screen model - the 820 doesn't really replace the 800, it's more of a slightly smaller variation on the 920 - which is a pity. I personally prefer to hold a smaller screen closer to my face... However, for the feature set that WP8 brings (NFC, more home/lock screen flexibility, better camera tech), I might just have to go larger.
Final comment as everyone takes a snipe at this. I have a lumia 800 and I'm looking forward to windows 7.8. I don't care that they're not giving me Windows 8 - the differences between 7.8 and 8 are the differences between the base specification of the current hardware and the next gen hardware (screen resolution, NFC etc). Microsoft are just being honest that their latest phones have features that their older phones don't support. Apple astroturf that fact and that causes heaps of faulty software that fails to cope well enough.
Love Windows Phone, like iPhone (though these days can't justify the cost), frustrated by having to sideload, hack and generally tweak Android whenever I use it.
Passwords are clearly a very bad idea - they just don't work for any number of logical, social and practical reasons. So it's great to see real thought going into alternatives. Although I think the overhead of 45 mins learning and other issues with this are a problem, I think the general premise must have something in it that would work well.
The fact we can recognise that we know something, even if we can't repeat it - e.g. you know if someone sings the wrong lyrics to a song even if you can't remember them yourself - MUST have some solution to this problem embedded in it somewhere...
It wasn't long ago that you'd have had to watch these on a laptop, at best hooked up to the TV for the duration of the show. Complete, probably, with AV, update and email pop-ups...
Now we just watch it on our $200 XBMC boxes, our XBOX 360, Wii or whatever device it is we normally hook up to the TV. We also get it in every room (Wii in the Playroom with Netflix + netflix kids, Xbox 360 in the main room, old xbox running xbmc in the kitchen, tablet everywhere else).
And that's even with a very limited selection of shows - just wait until the rest of the world catches up with content, Cable and Satellite will be converting all their resources to suing their customers MPAA stylee!
The Nokia N9 and the Nokia N900 had this integration feature for years. It's nice to have, but it was not and will never be a killer app.
There are no killer apps anymore
I know next to nothing about the N900 but killer apps need an ecosystem in which to exist. You can't just have one thing right and miss out on the other important stuff. Metro is an innovative UI that works really well. The marketplace has 50,000 apps. Who cares how many cores it has, the UI is responsive, properly written apps are fast to load and use.
Really, tell me how will the hardware manufacturers differentiate themselves when they ALL have to have the exact same OS and hardware specs, and they ALL have access to the same apps, etc.
This was pretty much my point. It's a problem MS have to get over. There's plenty they can do to achieve it. Manufacturers can use higher res, lower res screens (e.g. smaller, bigger). They can add keyboards. They can have better speakers, worse speakers, stereo speakers. They can have cool multi-colour polycarbonate shells. Or, they could do what Nokia is doing and write a few genuinely useful apps and parcel them with the device. I am of the opinion, as a developer, that if they can succeed with this, they've gone one over on Android (which is a royal pain to work with) and could easily get more market penetration than Apple.
Define properly conceived and integrated.
Yes, that was a rider to my main point so I didn't delve. I consider my WP7 device to be well conceived and properly integrated. It's a communications device and it covers most of the big communication services available to it and present them to me as one. I've not used the N900 but iPhone and Android certainly don't have it nailed as well as MS do.
Most consumers don't do "any amount of serious work". They read reddit, and update their status. They play games and compare scores. I'm not saying the tablet is right for everyone. I think some people will want a netbook (preferably with capactive touch screen, everything should have a capacitive touchscreen) and a cellphone. Some people might have a smartphone and a laptop, some might have every conceivable format of device (me for instance, that's likely me).
The killer app of the iPhone was capacitive touchscreen. You know, one that actually responded when you touched it, and for that matter, didn't when you didn't...?
To go with it, an OS that prioritised user input. That was novel.
iPhone is not, and has never been about all about being a "fashion icon". Sure, it's pretty, but that's just one of it's features.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Strip the DRM
2. I don't find ePaper to be a problem, but I don't like reading a phone or tablet. On the other hand, every ebook I have has the spacing, margins, font and font size I want it to have - not that which fitted the format the publisher wanted or typesetter liked one day.
3. The last three I bought (on Amazon) were 1/3rd cheaper than their paperback versions.
4. Yes - biggest problem, gifting a used book is problematic, though Strip the DRM and it's not so hard to sideload them to most devices.
5. Didn't you just say that? Strip the DRM and remember not to read them or loan them out to others while your recipient is reading them.
Honestly, the industry is going to have to learn that restricting ownership rights to licensing for personal use is a dead end and a bad move that will increase piracy. Until then, I'll just buy eBooks and notionally treat them as paper books.
* Have randomly sized text
* Are impractical to carry in enough quantity for 1-2 weeks away from home
* Require an external light source
* Can't be easily searched
* Annotation is messy and often frowned upon
* You lose your place if you fall asleep while reading them
* Can't read themselves to you
* You have to visit a physical store to get a new one
I don't disagree with your list, just think there's an equal (or in my view greater) list on the other side.
DRM is the big problem, but honestly - screw what I've signed up for, I just treat them as if I'd bought the book, I hope governments will eventually forcibly equalise this difference.
In other news, students and staff have reported that their computers are performing much better than usual and site-wide malware and associated bandwidth hogging has massively reduced.
University now plans to do this every month.
That's completely unfair - they'll decided to retire the product in a couple of years not only ceasing collecting information from those users but also leaving them stranded and without a solution because they'd spent the previous years stifling competition by offering a competent free alternative.
Not read the article (sorry, it's just tradition not to), but sounds like me - The only music I really tend to like is music that reminds me of my youth - nothing else much inspires me or attracts me.
As far as I'm aware, the only thing is lacks is any sort of aperture control. That's because it's fixed at, from memory, F2.2.
Does that mean it's not the same as a DSLR? Yes, that's exactly what it means.
Does it mean it's much better than anything else you can get in a phone (and most things you get in point-and-shoot)? Yes, it does.
But the killer app here is the 41mp. Each photo sensor is awful - look at 1:1 zoom and you'll see so much noise it'll give you headaches. But that's not the point. The point is that you can scale that down to 21mp and there's be much less noise. Put it through noise ninja and there'll be less again. Bring it down to 5mp and it'll, in some circumstances - common circumstances - be up there with the Micro 4/3rds cameras.
I'll be buying one, and I'll be buying the camera grip with the extended battery built in. When I'm out as a tourist or a proud dad, I'll carry them both. From day-to-day, I'll just carry the phone and be ready to take far better photos than almost everyone else.
I just don't get how it's actually supposed to do it.
One of the independent coding initiatives (in fact, most of them) in the UK had a bunch donated to them by Google. My club of 15 kids got three and I'm supposed to give them out to the kids. I'm almost 100% certain they will sit in a cupboard and never get used - I mean, what's the point? 99% of families have a laptop - that includes a keyboard and a screen, without that - for most people - a computer is useless.
Decisions on equipment like this are usually made at school level (by the head and by the board of governors). I don't recall any mandate to buy interactive whiteboards.
That said - I can't see why you use that example - they are amongst the most engaging pieces of equipment in the classroom and allow the teachers to "buy in" materials to really add interest to their lesson plans.
The sad thing is how the schools are ripped off by vendors, in fact LEAs pretty much mandate that schools should be ripped off by forcing them to use specific vendors. Something rotten in the state of Denmark...
I've taught 9-11 year-olds programming and about 80% of the class is capable of learning enough to solve simple problems given to them. Frankly, the 20% are unable to concentrate on anything other than video games or TV - they're the ones that would be staring into space or playing football every waking hour 20-30 years ago.
20-30% can excel and really grasp some or all of the basic concepts in such a way that they can solve significant novel problems and even set those problems for themselves.
...but the government isn't one of them.
We now have Code Club, Coder Dojo, Coding in Schools and half a dozen more individuals and groups working towards roughly the same goals. Each one of these groups is effectively cannibalising each other's target audience. All these people at the helm of each of these groups needs to be congratulated and then locked in a room with all of the others until they can agree a single national plan.
Personally I've gone with Code Club and teach a weekly hour class in my kids' primary school (kindergarten). I've brought one set of kids through the first of three "terms" of coding, been given 3x RPi to give out to semi randomly selected members of the club and plan to do a better job next year. The weekly tasks do a pretty good job of introducing practice in the basic concepts of programming (variables, variable scope, loops, conditions etc..) but weren't explicit enough to allow the kids to use them outside the context in which they were taught. To be honest, I think much of it was done by mimicry rather than understanding.
Chances are that no-one else has and doing so will help you understand it as well as producing some useful output to get the project going again.
I read about this on the BBC news website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20972027), missing the first line of the article that said it was US only, I logged into the service to see what I'd bought that was going to show up. Immediately, Beautiful South, Gaze popped up. Strange, I didn't actually remember buying it but it's possible. Then that was it. So I go through my purchases and, like others, there were heaps of popular CDs that I'd bought as gifts.
Apart from the obvious problem, I put a message in to Amazon wondering why Gaze was the only track I got. About an hour later I got a call (during the work day, to my mobile from a hidden number!) from a confused CS rep. Eventually established that it was US only and that Gaze was some weird quirk and I shouldn't have received it.
Somehow, this seems a bit of an ill conceived dodgily implemented service. I bet it sinks without a trace. I assume Amazon are having to pay for all these tracks (at some massively discounted rate) and are doing it to try to convince people to use their service. That's some financial commitment - wonder if the physical CD prices are about to be hiked...?
Has anyone who's posted so far actually ever been in a union? They don't just try to protect incompetence or continually raise pay rates (though, yes, they do tend traditionally tend to try to do that as well). They also enforce worker protection laws. They provide legal protection and legal insurance. They provide workplace representation, worker representation.
Seems like a bunch of turkeys voting for [Thanksgiving|Christmas]...
Totally agree - VS is a great IDE and one that really helps with code navigation, standards compliance and more. Gotta think the GP has no idea how to effectively use all of the features even the worst of modern IDEs bring. I suppose, if Eclipse is the best you've had, notepad++ looks promising but if you've used VS - there's no reason to use anything else.
What is such a pity about this is that it really doesn't matter how good this is, how bad the iPad is, how boring the Android is, or any combination of those 3 features and platforms. Apple will either continue to convince the world that the Emperor is fully dressed, Android will convince the world that cheap is good or MS will convince the world that, well, they shouldn't change horses mid-stream.
The three platforms all work just fine. I happen to think and hope that the Surface Pro will show the world that both bulky laptops and tablets in general are technology of the past, but for the majority of consumers the difference is moot. The real challenge here is ridding the world of java applets and flash videos and getting moved on to decent, compliant, reliable web standards... Then who cares what the medium is...?
Just thought I'd pop back... Stock price "plummeted" from 2.80 to 2.40 - it's now back up to 2.79 - as I said, easy 10% on your money...
Stock market swings are not a reflection of the consumer market, it's a reflection of how bankrupt that whole industry is...
Just sayin'
Buy a (relatively cheap) Lumia and you can use the industry standard for wireless charging and also NFC + open data transfer standards (bluetooth to the speaker systems for instance). Buy a (relatively expensive) iPhone and you'll be stuck with even more expensive accessories, with god knows what means of communicating with them.
I think some were still expecting a 20MP sensor and a tablet device.
I'd advise that the drop is entirely temporary and you can make yourself an easy 10% in less than a month by buying today.
Not in the 10k region but still - I appreciate the first post was a bit heavy on the enthusiasm - my guess is an enthusiastic MVP rather than anything more sinister..
A dual core CPU and a huge battery are pretty great hardware specs. Also a mechanically stabilized sensor mechanism could be very big news, especially if their software really does make innovative use of the available pixels. The point has been made recently that for PC usage (sharing on FB etc, 2MP is more than enough, for print 5MP is enough - IF THE QUALITY IS THERE.
I assume the stock has plummeted because until a few days ago everyone was hoping for a 20MP sensor and a new tablet to go with the phones. On the other hand - the markets are idiots - buy today, you'll be 10-15% richer by the end of the month if you sell at a time when they don't arbitrarily decide to mood swing again...
I am a bit disappointed that we loose the smaller screen model - the 820 doesn't really replace the 800, it's more of a slightly smaller variation on the 920 - which is a pity. I personally prefer to hold a smaller screen closer to my face... However, for the feature set that WP8 brings (NFC, more home/lock screen flexibility, better camera tech), I might just have to go larger.
Final comment as everyone takes a snipe at this. I have a lumia 800 and I'm looking forward to windows 7.8. I don't care that they're not giving me Windows 8 - the differences between 7.8 and 8 are the differences between the base specification of the current hardware and the next gen hardware (screen resolution, NFC etc). Microsoft are just being honest that their latest phones have features that their older phones don't support. Apple astroturf that fact and that causes heaps of faulty software that fails to cope well enough.
Love Windows Phone, like iPhone (though these days can't justify the cost), frustrated by having to sideload, hack and generally tweak Android whenever I use it.
Passwords are clearly a very bad idea - they just don't work for any number of logical, social and practical reasons. So it's great to see real thought going into alternatives. Although I think the overhead of 45 mins learning and other issues with this are a problem, I think the general premise must have something in it that would work well.
The fact we can recognise that we know something, even if we can't repeat it - e.g. you know if someone sings the wrong lyrics to a song even if you can't remember them yourself - MUST have some solution to this problem embedded in it somewhere...
It wasn't long ago that you'd have had to watch these on a laptop, at best hooked up to the TV for the duration of the show. Complete, probably, with AV, update and email pop-ups...
Now we just watch it on our $200 XBMC boxes, our XBOX 360, Wii or whatever device it is we normally hook up to the TV. We also get it in every room (Wii in the Playroom with Netflix + netflix kids, Xbox 360 in the main room, old xbox running xbmc in the kitchen, tablet everywhere else).
And that's even with a very limited selection of shows - just wait until the rest of the world catches up with content, Cable and Satellite will be converting all their resources to suing their customers MPAA stylee!
Opera on WM 6.5 was truly legendary. Though generally Safari on iOS equalled it, but on far far better hardware.
I know next to nothing about the N900 but killer apps need an ecosystem in which to exist. You can't just have one thing right and miss out on the other important stuff. Metro is an innovative UI that works really well. The marketplace has 50,000 apps. Who cares how many cores it has, the UI is responsive, properly written apps are fast to load and use.
This was pretty much my point. It's a problem MS have to get over. There's plenty they can do to achieve it. Manufacturers can use higher res, lower res screens (e.g. smaller, bigger). They can add keyboards. They can have better speakers, worse speakers, stereo speakers. They can have cool multi-colour polycarbonate shells. Or, they could do what Nokia is doing and write a few genuinely useful apps and parcel them with the device. I am of the opinion, as a developer, that if they can succeed with this, they've gone one over on Android (which is a royal pain to work with) and could easily get more market penetration than Apple.
Yes, that was a rider to my main point so I didn't delve. I consider my WP7 device to be well conceived and properly integrated. It's a communications device and it covers most of the big communication services available to it and present them to me as one. I've not used the N900 but iPhone and Android certainly don't have it nailed as well as MS do.
Most consumers don't do "any amount of serious work". They read reddit, and update their status. They play games and compare scores. I'm not saying the tablet is right for everyone. I think some people will want a netbook (preferably with capactive touch screen, everything should have a capacitive touchscreen) and a cellphone. Some people might have a smartphone and a laptop, some might have every conceivable format of device (me for instance, that's likely me).
The killer app of the iPhone was capacitive touchscreen. You know, one that actually responded when you touched it, and for that matter, didn't when you didn't...?
To go with it, an OS that prioritised user input. That was novel.
iPhone is not, and has never been about all about being a "fashion icon". Sure, it's pretty, but that's just one of it's features.
Nokia have also released the Lumia 710 which is in (or close to) that price range I believe.