Chrome is obviously not ready for real use on OS X or Linux yet, but it is an architectural leap forward. It has real sandboxing of tabs so that one tab can't make the others unresponsive or take down the browser is a huge leap forward. With the Web being so central to most people's workflow these days this is akin to the move to a multitasking OS. I think that's what has most of us excited, not speed or new features at this point. It has a long way to go, but the underlying architectural decisions provide for more potential.
I know they advertise this, but it honestly hasn't proven to be true. I've been using Chrome daily since it came out (less bloat than Firefox, less suck than IE), and when a tab freezes, they all freeze.
Next thing we know, someone will be inventing a "capacitive stylus" touting "higher precision" while using your iPhone. Well yes, but that's SO not the point of a capacitive, finger-friendly touchscreen.
Also, you can get gloves with capacitive tips on the fingers, for iPhone use when it's too damn cold outside (less relevant in summer...) http://www.tavoproducts.com/
I gave my daughter a Firefly when she was in first grade for all of the reasons every has mentioned. They are incredibly easy to use. However, there is still one fatal flaw -- they have to be turned on.
You may not think that's a problem but it was for my daughter. See, the school absolutely insists that all cell phones are turned off during the day. I'm not talking about "mute" or "vibrate" or anything. Off. And yes, they would actually do random checks to verify. I tried to tell them that you can restrict who calls the Firefly so it won't be randomly ringing during the day but it was no good. In the end, it was up to my daughter to remember to turn it on. She almost never did.
Some schools do have that policy. Mine didn't, and cellphones were allowed in my classroom. The largest difficulty I experienced as a teacher was the kids calling their parents cause "Timmy pushed me!", etc.
However, for a teacher with any level of real control over her classroom, it doesn't take long for calling someone on the phone to join going to the bathroom or sharpening a pencil as activities that you need to raise your hand and ask permission for first.
Also, my students had phones with restricted calling lists and no text capability... and most of them were just learning to spell their own names. Texting was not an issue. I imagine it's the bane of middle school teacher's life.
My nonprofit is an accrediting association. We don't have to keep track of donors and grants, but we do have to track our member institutions and all of the reporting that they do. Our current database is the most user-unfriendly, arcane, bizarre piece of shit software I have ever seen. Seriously, this database is worse than IE.
We've gotten quotes from a couple private developers on custom-made solutions, but they have all been prohibitively expensive, and several of our sister organizations have recently sunk millions of dollars and several years into private developers for dysfunctional products.
I'm pretty sure that if a solution doesn't magically present itself soon, the person in charge of the project is going to decide that the old database is just fine, and stick his head in the sand until he retires in a year or two.
My older brother got a Sega Master system for his fifth Christmas, which puts me at three years old. So, the system is twenty years old.
We still have Afterburner, Hang On!/Safari Hunt, and Wonder Boy, and a light gun controller. All of these still function when I last checked about a year ago, although to use it now it and all of its cables must be recovered from the electronics graveyard (my dad's garage).
My iPhone was added to a pre-existing family plan (550 minutes), not the minimum-level iPhone plan:
$50 First Line (iPhone)
$30 Unlimited Data (iPhone)
$10 Second Line (Cheap-ass handset)*
$15 Unlimited Texts (Cheap-ass handset)*
---
$105 + taxes and stuff
Total: $101/mo**, for two phones.
*Second line used by little brother and his BFF Jill. He pays me $45/mo for his share.
**My math doesn't suck (that badly). I have a 15% discount from my University of Maryland Alumni affliation, which I actually had to remove before the iPhone could be added to the plan- discounts like that can't be combined with an iPhone plan. I removed the discount plan, activated the phone, and left it at that. The next billing cycle the discount reapplied itself. I didn't complain.
An interesting turn of events... a member of the Kindle mailing list I'm on alerted us that books that were purchased before the TTS disabling and redownloaded after still have TTS enabled.
I just tested it with my Cesar Milan book, re-downloaded this morning, and yes, it still reads it out loud. I wonder why Customer Support didn't tell me this- do they even know?
This is similar to an earlier experience I had, where I bought a few Kindle books very early on (Coldfire Trilogy by C.S. Friedman), and the author later pulled them from the Kindle Store. The books are still available from Amazon's Media Library for me to re-download, but no one else can purchase them.
If you check your records under the View Your Digital Orders link at www.amazon.com/your-account you'll see that you purchased this book in November of 2008. At that time, there was no text-to-speech function available for the Kindle (Original), and we had not yet made any announcements about Kindle 2 or its text-to-speech option, so there is no less functionality for that book now compared to when it was first purchased.
Additionally, we cannot refund Kindle purchases that are more than 7 days old. You can read the Kindle Content Return Policy and contact us via phone or e-mail from our Kindle Support pages here:
Yeah, as another poster pointed out, and as I implied in some other post on this thread, this was almost certainly in the TOS/EULA, but obviously not exactly advertised when the Kindle was released.
Actually, they advertised TTS on ALL books, and their TOS said nothing about disabling it. I actually did read the TOS, too. They changed the TOS after the Author's Guild raised a stink, which was covered here on/.
I'm honestly surprised this is getting the reaction it is, considering that's it's not a surprise to anyone. They said they would, and now they did.
And comparing automated TTS to audio books is a complete farce.
There's nothing quite like an automated voice trying to tackle Elvish. I probably would have been offended at how bad it was, if it wasn't so hilarious.
I'm not sure how the TTS disabling works, but in terms of the Kindle removing whole books, it works like this, from lots of observation:
-User Kindle connects to Whispernet. (It does not connect itself periodically, nor does it shut down if unable to phone home after so many months.)
-Kindle compares all Amazon-purchased books in its memory to all books registered to that account on the server, and updates last page read, notes, and bookmarks (these can be disabled- notes and page syncing does not work for non-Amazon books).
-If a book is found that is not registered to that account, but DRMed, it is deleted. (If you remove your Kindle from the account, all books stay and are readable, even if you turn whispernet on- it has no account to compare to. If you register the Kindle to a different account, all Amazon books dissapear the first time you turn on whispernet, but are readable prior to that point.)
So, I imagine that any TTS disabled books will update themselves the next time that Kindle connects to Whispernet. If a buyer has a TTS disabled book but bought it anytime before it was disabled, and has not connected to Whispernet, it should not know about the TTS update. This, unfortunately, is all theory, because the only TTS disabled book I have wasn't very good, so I deleted it from my Kindle's memory months ago.
I presume the TTS flag was added in the most recent Kindle software update, which came out a few weeks ago.
Think back a few years, when Apple sold DRMed music, before iTunes+.
Apple had to have a big market and be generating a lot of revenue to get enough clout to force the music industry to give up on DRM- and even then they had to concede the flat pricing.
I hope that in time Amazon will be able to do the same for the publishing market, but they can't do it unless they have a customer base.
Anything you get yourself from a source other than Amazon has no DRM on it.
If you're paranoid, and since you're not buying from Amazon anyways, just never turn on the Wireless connection. Then, even if some killswitch exists, they can't activate it.
Remember, even that guy who got his Amazon.com account closed for excessive refunds didn't get his Kindle bricked- he just couldn't re-download the DRMed content. He still HAD that content, just couldn't get new copies from Amazon, and he still had every other document he ever put on that device.
Pick up MobiPocket Creator (free from Mobipocket.com) and muck with it there.
You're going to get poor results with PDFs that are just image containers of scanned pages, and with other PDFs you may have to muck with the XML to get the output you like.
When you're all done mucking with the file, export it to.prc and load that up the Kindle via USB.
The Wacom layer also adds a significant bit of glare when reading in sunlight or very bright conditions. They are also an additional possible point of failure.
If the touchscreen is a must for you, check out the Sony Reader or any of the iRex products.
I believe Apple's patent is for multi-touch gestures, like pinching to zoom. Not too sure though.
Rather than "free," think "included in the purchase price."
And then compare this to cellphones, where each text message and kb of data is an extra charge on top of the price of the device and the price of the subscription plan.
I've heard tell some newspapers are planning a subsidy with long-term subscription, but I can't recall where I heard it.
If the books you're looking for are in the public domain, then you're set. Project Gutenburg and the rest of the internet already have them for you.
Otherwise, hound publishers. Older works have to be OCR'd, which means they have to be proofread before publishing (and often aren't), but if you suggest that you have three classes of students that would by X book if it were available as a PDF...
There is at least one person I know of who lives in Montana, with no cellphone reception of any kind. Her Kindle has not seen a direct connection to Amazon since the day it rolled out of the factory, sometime in early 2008. It has not shut down or shown ill effects from inability to phone home.
Software updates are available as downloads from Amazon support pages, should she choose to install them.
PDFs are awesome and all, but they REALLY want to be 8.5x11. The whole point storing a document in the PDF format is to retain formatting regardless of viewing platform. The Kindle 1 and 2 depend on the ability to freely reflow text at need. The point of a PDF is to disallow the adjustment of text flow. These things are fundamentally incompatible, and what you get are halfass workarounds like the Sony Reader's tedious zooming in and out, or the Kindle's demand to convert to a more friendly format. (If you send a document of scanned pages through the Kindle conversion system, you get those page on your kindle... at 600x800, and a 6" diagonal. Not big enough to be readable. They've recently changed it so that it chops each page in half, so it's readable but on documents with columns you're flipping back and forth between two pages.)
What you will see is good PDF support on this new student Kindle, since it can just display the damn PDF and doesn't have to worry about the resizing things to make them readable.
Try and pick up a biography or companion piece to the books you're reading. Each of these authors and works were shaped by their times.
If you're trying to understand the evolution of science as a whole, it will help to understand the cultural influences that acted on these people, and what they might not have published for fear of reprisal.
Remember, the Origin of Species never goes so far as to suggest that humans had evolved from anything, much less monkeys. It was certainly implied, but he probably felt that it was too great a leap for his contemporaries to accept, and he kept his theories to plants and animals.
Of course, he did go back and explicitly state his theory as applies to man in the Decent of Man, 10 years later.
Slashdot Mirror
Chrome is obviously not ready for real use on OS X or Linux yet, but it is an architectural leap forward. It has real sandboxing of tabs so that one tab can't make the others unresponsive or take down the browser is a huge leap forward. With the Web being so central to most people's workflow these days this is akin to the move to a multitasking OS. I think that's what has most of us excited, not speed or new features at this point. It has a long way to go, but the underlying architectural decisions provide for more potential.
I know they advertise this, but it honestly hasn't proven to be true. I've been using Chrome daily since it came out (less bloat than Firefox, less suck than IE), and when a tab freezes, they all freeze.
Next thing we know, someone will be inventing a "capacitive stylus" touting "higher precision" while using your iPhone. Well yes, but that's SO not the point of a capacitive, finger-friendly touchscreen.
You're late to the party: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/cellphone/a31f/
Also, you can get gloves with capacitive tips on the fingers, for iPhone use when it's too damn cold outside (less relevant in summer...) http://www.tavoproducts.com/
I gave my daughter a Firefly when she was in first grade for all of the reasons every has mentioned. They are incredibly easy to use. However, there is still one fatal flaw -- they have to be turned on.
You may not think that's a problem but it was for my daughter. See, the school absolutely insists that all cell phones are turned off during the day. I'm not talking about "mute" or "vibrate" or anything. Off. And yes, they would actually do random checks to verify. I tried to tell them that you can restrict who calls the Firefly so it won't be randomly ringing during the day but it was no good. In the end, it was up to my daughter to remember to turn it on. She almost never did.
Some schools do have that policy. Mine didn't, and cellphones were allowed in my classroom. The largest difficulty I experienced as a teacher was the kids calling their parents cause "Timmy pushed me!", etc.
However, for a teacher with any level of real control over her classroom, it doesn't take long for calling someone on the phone to join going to the bathroom or sharpening a pencil as activities that you need to raise your hand and ask permission for first.
Also, my students had phones with restricted calling lists and no text capability... and most of them were just learning to spell their own names. Texting was not an issue. I imagine it's the bane of middle school teacher's life.
Get her a Firefly or similar device. You can add it to your phone plan or get it prepaid.
Even very young children can use these. Several of the first graders I used to work with had them, and were perfectly comfortable using them.
http://www.fireflymobile.com/
My nonprofit is an accrediting association. We don't have to keep track of donors and grants, but we do have to track our member institutions and all of the reporting that they do. Our current database is the most user-unfriendly, arcane, bizarre piece of shit software I have ever seen. Seriously, this database is worse than IE.
We've gotten quotes from a couple private developers on custom-made solutions, but they have all been prohibitively expensive, and several of our sister organizations have recently sunk millions of dollars and several years into private developers for dysfunctional products.
I'm pretty sure that if a solution doesn't magically present itself soon, the person in charge of the project is going to decide that the old database is just fine, and stick his head in the sand until he retires in a year or two.
My older brother got a Sega Master system for his fifth Christmas, which puts me at three years old. So, the system is twenty years old.
We still have Afterburner, Hang On!/Safari Hunt, and Wonder Boy, and a light gun controller. All of these still function when I last checked about a year ago, although to use it now it and all of its cables must be recovered from the electronics graveyard (my dad's garage).
My iPhone was added to a pre-existing family plan (550 minutes), not the minimum-level iPhone plan:
$50 First Line (iPhone)
$30 Unlimited Data (iPhone)
$10 Second Line (Cheap-ass handset)*
$15 Unlimited Texts (Cheap-ass handset)*
---
$105 + taxes and stuff
Total: $101/mo**, for two phones.
*Second line used by little brother and his BFF Jill. He pays me $45/mo for his share.
**My math doesn't suck (that badly). I have a 15% discount from my University of Maryland Alumni affliation, which I actually had to remove before the iPhone could be added to the plan- discounts like that can't be combined with an iPhone plan. I removed the discount plan, activated the phone, and left it at that. The next billing cycle the discount reapplied itself. I didn't complain.
An interesting turn of events... a member of the Kindle mailing list I'm on alerted us that books that were purchased before the TTS disabling and redownloaded after still have TTS enabled.
I just tested it with my Cesar Milan book, re-downloaded this morning, and yes, it still reads it out loud. I wonder why Customer Support didn't tell me this- do they even know?
This is similar to an earlier experience I had, where I bought a few Kindle books very early on (Coldfire Trilogy by C.S. Friedman), and the author later pulled them from the Kindle Store. The books are still available from Amazon's Media Library for me to re-download, but no one else can purchase them.
From Amazon Customer Support:
If you check your records under the View Your Digital Orders link at www.amazon.com/your-account you'll see that you purchased this book in November of 2008. At that time, there was no text-to-speech function available for the Kindle (Original), and we had not yet made any announcements about Kindle 2 or its text-to-speech option, so there is no less functionality for that book now compared to when it was first purchased.
Additionally, we cannot refund Kindle purchases that are more than 7 days old. You can read the Kindle Content Return Policy and contact us via phone or e-mail from our Kindle Support pages here:
http://www.amazon.com/kindlesupport
They do have a good point. When I bought it, there was no TTS anywhere, as the K2 hadn't been announced.
I wonder if they'll consider differently for books purchased more recently?
Yeah, as another poster pointed out, and as I implied in some other post on this thread, this was almost certainly in the TOS/EULA, but obviously not exactly advertised when the Kindle was released.
Actually, they advertised TTS on ALL books, and their TOS said nothing about disabling it. I actually did read the TOS, too. They changed the TOS after the Author's Guild raised a stink, which was covered here on /.
I'm honestly surprised this is getting the reaction it is, considering that's it's not a surprise to anyone. They said they would, and now they did.
And comparing automated TTS to audio books is a complete farce.
There's nothing quite like an automated voice trying to tackle Elvish. I probably would have been offended at how bad it was, if it wasn't so hilarious.
They have statements about TTS on disabled books on the book pages on Amazon.com now, right below the pricing.
The real problem is for people who bought books before the TTS was disabled and now have less than they paid for.
I'm not sure how the TTS disabling works, but in terms of the Kindle removing whole books, it works like this, from lots of observation:
-User Kindle connects to Whispernet. (It does not connect itself periodically, nor does it shut down if unable to phone home after so many months.)
-Kindle compares all Amazon-purchased books in its memory to all books registered to that account on the server, and updates last page read, notes, and bookmarks (these can be disabled- notes and page syncing does not work for non-Amazon books).
-If a book is found that is not registered to that account, but DRMed, it is deleted. (If you remove your Kindle from the account, all books stay and are readable, even if you turn whispernet on- it has no account to compare to. If you register the Kindle to a different account, all Amazon books dissapear the first time you turn on whispernet, but are readable prior to that point.)
So, I imagine that any TTS disabled books will update themselves the next time that Kindle connects to Whispernet. If a buyer has a TTS disabled book but bought it anytime before it was disabled, and has not connected to Whispernet, it should not know about the TTS update. This, unfortunately, is all theory, because the only TTS disabled book I have wasn't very good, so I deleted it from my Kindle's memory months ago.
I presume the TTS flag was added in the most recent Kindle software update, which came out a few weeks ago.
Out of the 63 Kindle books I've purchased since Feb 08, only one has had TTS Disabled (Cesar Milan's "A Member of the Family," purchased Nov 2008)
The return policy states quite clearly seven days, not seven months, but I've submitted a return request on the basis of TTS anyway.
I'll let you know what happens.
Think back a few years, when Apple sold DRMed music, before iTunes+.
Apple had to have a big market and be generating a lot of revenue to get enough clout to force the music industry to give up on DRM- and even then they had to concede the flat pricing.
I hope that in time Amazon will be able to do the same for the publishing market, but they can't do it unless they have a customer base.
You can't use the Kindle for school books because too many students need to take notes on books, which Kindle doesn't support.
Actually... it does. That's kinda what the keyboard below the screen is for.
Anything you get yourself from a source other than Amazon has no DRM on it.
If you're paranoid, and since you're not buying from Amazon anyways, just never turn on the Wireless connection. Then, even if some killswitch exists, they can't activate it.
Remember, even that guy who got his Amazon.com account closed for excessive refunds didn't get his Kindle bricked- he just couldn't re-download the DRMed content. He still HAD that content, just couldn't get new copies from Amazon, and he still had every other document he ever put on that device.
Pick up MobiPocket Creator (free from Mobipocket.com) and muck with it there.
You're going to get poor results with PDFs that are just image containers of scanned pages, and with other PDFs you may have to muck with the XML to get the output you like.
When you're all done mucking with the file, export it to .prc and load that up the Kindle via USB.
The Wacom layer also adds a significant bit of glare when reading in sunlight or very bright conditions. They are also an additional possible point of failure.
If the touchscreen is a must for you, check out the Sony Reader or any of the iRex products.
I believe Apple's patent is for multi-touch gestures, like pinching to zoom. Not too sure though.
Rather than "free," think "included in the purchase price."
And then compare this to cellphones, where each text message and kb of data is an extra charge on top of the price of the device and the price of the subscription plan.
I've heard tell some newspapers are planning a subsidy with long-term subscription, but I can't recall where I heard it.
Sprint provides it, Amazon pays for it. You'll want to make sure you're in Sprint's service area.
I subscribe to WaPo on my Kindle, and I live inside the beltway, so I have no idea what you are referencing.
If the books you're looking for are in the public domain, then you're set. Project Gutenburg and the rest of the internet already have them for you.
Otherwise, hound publishers. Older works have to be OCR'd, which means they have to be proofread before publishing (and often aren't), but if you suggest that you have three classes of students that would by X book if it were available as a PDF...
There is at least one person I know of who lives in Montana, with no cellphone reception of any kind. Her Kindle has not seen a direct connection to Amazon since the day it rolled out of the factory, sometime in early 2008. It has not shut down or shown ill effects from inability to phone home.
Software updates are available as downloads from Amazon support pages, should she choose to install them.
PDFs are awesome and all, but they REALLY want to be 8.5x11. The whole point storing a document in the PDF format is to retain formatting regardless of viewing platform. The Kindle 1 and 2 depend on the ability to freely reflow text at need. The point of a PDF is to disallow the adjustment of text flow. These things are fundamentally incompatible, and what you get are halfass workarounds like the Sony Reader's tedious zooming in and out, or the Kindle's demand to convert to a more friendly format. (If you send a document of scanned pages through the Kindle conversion system, you get those page on your kindle... at 600x800, and a 6" diagonal. Not big enough to be readable. They've recently changed it so that it chops each page in half, so it's readable but on documents with columns you're flipping back and forth between two pages.)
What you will see is good PDF support on this new student Kindle, since it can just display the damn PDF and doesn't have to worry about the resizing things to make them readable.
Try and pick up a biography or companion piece to the books you're reading. Each of these authors and works were shaped by their times.
If you're trying to understand the evolution of science as a whole, it will help to understand the cultural influences that acted on these people, and what they might not have published for fear of reprisal.
Remember, the Origin of Species never goes so far as to suggest that humans had evolved from anything, much less monkeys. It was certainly implied, but he probably felt that it was too great a leap for his contemporaries to accept, and he kept his theories to plants and animals.
Of course, he did go back and explicitly state his theory as applies to man in the Decent of Man, 10 years later.