For sure, yes, it's a SoC, but I'm still going to wait for a complete "on the shelf" system to make an appearance before holding my hopes too high. Leaked releases are about as useful as "New solar cell technology yields 50% more efficiency" announcements.

What is interesting is that they only mention the elevated power consumption in relation to video playback (720p) which is something that'd likely be handed off to a dedicated section of silicon, not something done in the general purpose CPU core. Hopefully we can get some more comprehensive data soon so we can all stop speculating.

The Atom's have always had a reasonable core power consumption... but the external chipsets that ruin the system power consumption figure. Will be curious to see what the total system consumption is going to be with these new one, maybe time to look towards a nice replacement for my Asus eeebox B202's for the desktop.

Fine time for me to run out of mod points... +1 to you... though also have to start adding in the "eBook/evil-Amazon" ones too now, as I've noticed a lot of eBook related stories lately.

The "Ask Slashdot" ones are the most annoying though.... may as well be "It hurts when I breathe, what should I oh wonderful master?"

It's pretty simple if you're the developer, if you don't want this happening, use GPL. If you don't mind or don't care, use BSD.

What I find amusing is when people start trying to coerce developers into choosing a licence when in reality it's simply none of their damned business. I'm sick of receiving emails from GPL-extremists telling me that I'm ruining my life or destroying the universe because I'm letting people copy-and-profit from my code. I opted for that licence choice for my own reasons, to hell with anyone who thinks they can make my choices for me on something as trivial as software.

All my open-source code is now BSD-revised licenced, and this is precisely the behaviour I see, large corps (even IBM and national banks) have submitted patches back to me simply because it's far easier for them to do so and not have to try and maintain their own parallel edition. A lot of the time it's just the "admin" person you're dealing with and it's likely they're perfectly happy to send patches back as they're often rather pro-"OpenSource" themselves.

As for corps taking my code, modifying it and making a profit, that's great - if I didn't accept things like that occurring then I'd not have released as BSD. People should choose their release licence for their own reasons, not because it's "what everyone else is doing".

They would stand to pick up a lot more sales of their hardware and subsequently their instore books if they did this, at least that's my theory. A lot of people avoid the Kindles because of the lack of ePub. I suppose Amazon fears people will buy their books from elsewhere and read them on the Kindle, but in reality Amazon does have a nice 1-click/buy/delivery system which is hard to walk away from, it's just so damned convenient (most of the time).

I fully sympathise... it made me cry to do it, literally (because of a huge argument I was having). It'd be nice if SW offered an ePub or HTML+CSS upload, since that's what they work from internally to feed the meatgrinder. Given that they're forcing people to use the SW Styling Guide, I don't see why they can't offer an equally strict HTML/CSS styling guide. The biggest pain I found is the disconnect between your submitted doc and the errors that often come out say from the ePub validation, you just have to thumb-suck and hope that you find the true cause of the glitch.

It's something we certainly discuss in great length between each other (independent writers), most frequently becoming rather heated. For some it works best to go to $2.99+, for others they find they lose their traction and retreat back to $0.99 or lower.

Personally I'm just glad we're sticking with the $2.99 vision because there's just no practical way to do it as even a small scale home job/business, not when you have to factor in artwork, editing, proofing and marketing. I suppose some people could make it work if they lived in the basement and had someone else pay their bills. As you probably know, Amazon will give you 35c/sale at 99c, even at 100/day I think you'd be still slowly sliding backwards and I don't know too many indies that sustain 100/day for more than a few months on each release (there are some exceptions of course, like Amanda Hocking).

I completely agree - that sort of thing just makes the brain pop.

Just don't dare tell people that you don't use MS-Word ... :D

As a general rule, PDFs cannot be reflowed (there is a new revision in the PDF standard that allows this now, but it's a bit of a crutch).

ePub/mobi/what-ever-other-ebook-format is more akin to HTML than Postscript/PDF, as such eBooks can then be read on all manner of devices without knowing in advance the limitations of the output media. So it's fine if you have a nice 9~10" tablet to read the PDFs on, and things like datasheets for electronics work well in this format, but if you try it on a 5~6" display device it becomes a case of either scrolling/panning to read or reading with a lot of detail lost.

Hey, many thanks for that :D We've been quiet lately because we're building up to our latest release "My Boyfriend is a Zombie"... YA romance... already having fun with an Apple-vs-Samsung wrangle over the cover artwork ( http://elitadaniels.com/images/zombie-cover.jpg vs http://www.criticnic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Passion-by-Lauren-Kate.jpg ) ... fun fun fun ...

Given that I'm the geek *cough* and my wife is the writer, I put her on LyX, it has its shortcomings but for novels they're not a problem and it's a nice bridge between mainstream wordprocessing and my world :) (our biggest complaint lies with the dictionaries and grammar... but then we do have editors that we contract). Anyhow, from within LyX we just do the HTML export and then import via Calibre with our own tweaked stylesheet to give us the mobi and epub. For print-publishing of course LyX/LaTeX does a bloomen nice job with very little work as we all know.

I do like the the Palitino font combined with the Memoir document class. Unfortunately of course, all that goes down the chute for the eBooks :(

I have a great deal of bitterness towards Smashwords and their singular MS-Word submission format, rather a stab in the eye considering their profit is built on OpenSource software - but that's something I've complained about long and hard to Mark's face with thus far very little gain.

No doubt other independent publishers reading these comments know still how annoying it can be when you think you've got everything finished and a few hours after you've released the book you get an email from a reader "Your formatting is totally broken on device XYZ" :(

Depends on where you stand... right now, from an independent writer's perspective, eBook prices are plummeting - couple of years ago most people were at $2.99 and $0.99 was the 'magical free marketing ride', then last year going $0.00 was the key and everyone was trying to get on the Amazon free bandwagon to get some exposure... I expect soon that writers will be _paying_ people to read their book. In the race to the bottom, it seems we're going to punch through and start digging our own graves. We've personally actually stopped ourselves and put our eBooks back to $1.49~$2.99, there's nothing wrong with asking people to pay $2.99 for a 40k~100k word book, hell that's less than a small coffee.

Watch each day and see what eBooks Amazon puts out for free, won't be long and you'll have enough material to last you a lifetime. Of course, if you're wanting eBook editions of a Big-6 published new release, then yes, you'll be lucky to get $0.50 off the price.

It's already a nightmare trying to cover all the bases as a book writer/publisher, adding more to the mix just makes things more annoying, confusing and likely to pop up crazy formatting mistakes. The forums are already filled with people having enough grief getting a decent looking eBook generated (though I blame them for using MSWord... tsk tsk *hugs LaTeX*). A lot of us would LOVE it if Amazon simply supported ePub, though that would in many ways erode their empire, at least in their view. Right now a lot of publishers are pushing out mobi / ePub / pdf as the main 3 formats to support, at least along with print publishing, unfortunately even within ePub there's a few quirks and you have to generate slightly different versions for iPad, Nook and 'everything else'. ... reminds me of the bloomen browser wars at their worst ... and to think I switched to doing novels / writing / publishing to try avoid this sort of crap *maniacal laugh*.

http://elitadaniels.com/