The 700 could be much, much better, but the things that are holding it back are teh things that could potentially make it great.

My biggest issue with it is the screen. It's got an insane amount of glare because it's got a touchscreen covering. It's also got LED lighting, but it's not very good. The quality of the touchscreen leaves a lot to be desired, too. The hand gestures to turn the pages only pick up the gesture about half the time. My co-worker bought one and I almost did, too. I'm glad I held back and decided to borrow my co-worker's 700. Playing with it in the store made me want it really bad.

I'm curious what other ebook readers you're looking at. So far, I've used a Foxit eBook reader, Sony PRS-700, kindle, iPhone and various computers.

The Foxit totally sucks. It's got a nice formfactor, but it's slow and difficult to read PDFs without having the text get wrapped and lose all spacing (sometimeswordsgetjumbledtogetherlikethis).

The Sony reader is pretty good except that the glare totally sucks and when reading PDFs, it's only got pre-set zoom levels; no fit-to-width, so the text is constantly either too small or it's the right size, but wraps all over the place.

I was waiting for the PlasticLogic to come out (something like mid 2010, last I heard). It's a good size, so PDFs will render well and it seems fast and very sturdy.

I haven't had a chance to check out any ePub books, yet, but I've heard good things. The only problem is that Amazon has a HUGE selection of eBooks for the kindle and ePub doesn't have that many commercial books; at least, I was only able to find 1 book I wanted in ePub format and 2 or 3 in PDF format.

Considering that books from O'Reilly, Pragmatic Programmers and other tech publishers are available only in PDF (since the kindle format doesn't support fonts for code snippets), I feel like the new KindleDX is the perfect solution--not only does it allow me to buy the most widely available eBook format but it also allows me to read PDFs on an acceptably large screen.

I tried to hold off, but I HAD to preorder the KindleDX... I'm a little concerned that it's not gonna be as good as I hope, but I think it'll be a good purchase in the longrun. I really hope that amazon/publishers come to their senses and stop with this garbage of disabling TTS or other features.

When I first moved to NYC from New Jersey about 5 years ago, my friends were freaking out about the fact that I was paying about 20% more in rent. Once I did the math, I was able to show that I was saving significantly more money by not having a car between gas, maintenance, tolls, parking, insurance, etc. I get an unlimited metrocard for the same cost that I was spending on gas every month (this is in 2004, so I was spending about $60-70/month).

When I moved back to jerz, I opted to not get a car. I still worked in the city and would walk about a mile to the train station every day and take the train in... the monthly train pass was around $250, and I could avoid getting a metrocard since I could walk to work from the train station. Although the monthly cost of a car would probably be under $250, the up-front cost of the car just didn't make me want to get one.

Now that I'm living in NY again, I just take the subway everywhere. I really wish there was better public transportation outside of major metropolitan areas.

In today's Virtual world, physical access to the machine doesn't mean meatspace access. My company and several of my friend's companies are looking into virtualized desktops by using small desktop boxes and low-end PCs to connect to PCs in the datacenter over either RDP or other proprietary protocols.

With the proliferation of cloud-based applications, it's only a matter of time before someone offers a browser-based virtual desktop in the cloud. Once someone hacks into some server up there, they have physical access to the machines for all intents and purposes.

This is a very interesting threat from a virtual infrastructure security standpoint.

I'd imagine that they're not intentionally blocking google because they're a competitor (although it could be a contributing factor). I would think that they consider Live.com to be more compatible with family filter and google allows access to cached pages which the family filter may not be able to block.

Of course, one way that MS could show good faith would be to open up the family filter's API in some way so as to let it play nice with google and allow google to disable cached pages for users of the filter.

Why didn't someone infected with this, say last month, change their pc clock ahead...

First of all, I'm sure that the payload itself wasn't made available until the last minute.

Second, if it were me who wrote the virus, I would have written it to *start* looking for a payload, start looking in no particular place, and continue looking until it's been found. Considering that it's getting its payload from an established botnet, it could just be poking around looking for machines that can give it its payload and the payload wasn't made available until today.

When you have control of as many machines as the Storm or Waledac botnets, the world really is your oyster. You're not restricted by IPs, and if your botnet is large enough, you can just iterate through addresses looking for a system that has your payload for you. Without access to the botnet or the payload, it doesn't matter how much you reverse engineer or adjust your clock, you just can't predict what will happen in the future.

everyone worshipped Macs

Yeah, at the time, the software just didn't exist on windows for professional image editing and digital pre-press software. 90% of the plugins were mac-only and fonts on windows was a joke. Macs came with scsi by default and supported dual monitors so they were just better suited for the type of work that industry did.

We were used to literally going to the kitchen and making a coffee while those things happened on our Macs. Often we returned, coffee in hand, to find the machine had crashed.

Ha, I remember those days. It's amazing how fast the macs felt, especially compared to the windows machines at the time. Plus the fact that we had PCI add-on PowerShop cards that would do photoshop acceleration (essentially offloading filters and image rotation to a multi CPU card) that only worked on the macs. I still have an invoice from when we upgraded to the 8500/180s. They were around $3500 each, came with 16MB RAM and a 2GB drive. We got 4 additional 64MB DIMMs for $362 each, and upgraded to 4MB of VRAM for another $120. All told, with the add-ons and monitors for them, plus tax, the 2 machines cost nearly $17,000. I can't even imagine paying that anymore, let alone 10x that for SGI.

At the time, I used to have extension sets loaded that were the bare minimum to get everything working to prevent crashes. It was rare that the machine would crash while running photoshop, if I recall correctly. Usually, it was a sign of something being seriously wrong if photoshop would lock up the computer. If I wanted to surf the web or play some starcraft or Myth at work, I'd have to change sets and reboot. Only the nostalgia makes me miss those days... we're much better off today.

Another little story... back in 1998, I worked on an invitation for Tiffany & Co. that was a folding envelope with a bow on it. Had to completely fabricate the ribbon and bow in photoshop from a bunch of photos of bows and ribbons in order for it to lay right on the cover. The file was around 600MB, had as many as 90 layers (I had to keep merging and flattening to keep the file manageable... photoshop had a limit of 99 layers and there were no layer groups, yet). I would adjust the curves adjustment layer and save the file and I could literally take a nap while that all calculated and saved. It would take a minimum of 45 minutes to save. We had to buy an external 6GB drive to use as scratch disk for the project because the machine at the time just didn't have a big enough HD to have an OS and handle scratch for such a large file. I believe the system had its RAM maxed out at 384MB- it was a first-gen 266mhz G3 (when they were still beige). Nice machine at time time, though.

Opening up DRM'd media so that it can legally be used in more situations by someone with a valid license is not the same as rampant piracy

Agreed.

You have no idea how often I run into issues where some file won't play/can't be viewed on some device because it doesn't support the DRM. I've run into this with audio files (iTunes Store), PDFs, videos and ebooks.

I don't see why DRM'd media files must be tied to the device rather than the user. Why not have some kind of public key that authorizes the file? Of course there are issues with sharing the key, but there could be ways around that, too (device key negotiations with the DRM server).

Although... not having DRM at all would be the best case scenario.

I've seen Malcolm Gladwell do talks about 3 or 4 times and he's very engaging as both a speaker and a writer. I got a free copy of his previous book, Blink, which is about how people can "thin-slice" their experiences and make snap judgements based on gut feelings. I twas a fascinating read, but the only problem that I have with his writing style is that it occasionally gets painfully repetitive. He'll make a point, support it with an argument, make the point again, support it some more, revisit the point and give a summary of his previous arguments, then make more arguments to support his point.

I've been meaning to read Tipping Point and Outliers for a while, but I dunno. I feel like I get a lot more out of his talks (he goes off on tangents, frequently) than I got out of Blink.

the biggest problems with any computer deployment in our K-12 classrooms are always support and training

It's very sad that that's the biggest hurdle for OSS in k-12.

When I was in HS, we had an intro to programming class (using VB) and an advanced programming class (C++). The problem was that the cost of entry for working on projects at home was high. If you're going to teach a subject, especially in public schools, you should either provide all of the tools for free to the students to use at home or use free tools. I didn't want to buy VisualStudio for home and luckily the majority of the code we worked on was platform independent (all cin/cout crap using iostream), but those were the tools we were taught on. I owned CodeWarrior, so I was able to do stuff at home.

At the time (this is 97-99), Linux wasn't really an option for such a class... LiveCDs weren't prevalent and the usability of desktop Linux was so low, imho, that I don't think I would have recommended that at the time. Now, on the other hand, I feel that you could distribute a liveCD with the full development environment for people to use the tools at home and save the files to a USB stick. It wouldn't be expensive to supply every kid with a 256MB stick and a CDR with their environment on it.

this is one of the reasons that I think Java is so widely taught in colleges. It's not the greatest language, but it's got no cost of entry and developing in windows isn't that hard, even when you're only using notepad++. Of course, arguments could be made that you could teach the kids Python or Ruby instead, and I agree, but that's another subject for discussion.

Also, having OSS in schools doesn't necessarily have to mean Linux exclusively. You could have macs or windows machines with OSS software running on them. Not everyone can afford to buy Office, so you could have OpenOffice.

You can have a pretty decent mostly free desktop environment running in a commercial, non-free OS that won't cost a fortune to support.

My name is "Spike"

xboxlive won't let me use that name in the "real name" field of my xboxlive profile. It says that it's a banned word.

Why could that be? I think it might be because it contains 'spik,' but even that seems ridiculous.

*shrug*

hey, I don't give you any news!

The original xbox was a pile of crap. The 360 is actually incredibly good, and the strange thing is that most of what makes is a feature that Microsoft is great at: creating a platform.

What I mean is that they manage to keep a consistent interface from dashboard to game where multiplayer gaming uses the same interface from game to game (although I hear EA uses their own multiplayer/matchmaking system, but I haven't played any games like that). With XboxLive, they really made the 360 an amazing system.

Now, I do have some hate for the 360; namely, my cablemodem's connection failed the other night for several hours, and over those hours, I was unable to play any of my xboxlivearcade games (they were all stuck in trial mode), wasn't able to play my ipod, nor was I able to stream movies from my mediaserver. This was all because the 360 couldn't connect to MS's servers to authenticate the apps (the streaming and ipod apps being FREE) to allow me to use them.

I've heard that this is because my gamertag originated on a different 360 and that I can re-pair them, but I haven't had time to look into that fully nor do I feel that that should be necessary.

On another note, the PS3 is a great piece of hardware with some of the worst software I've ever delt with. Even Sony's PS3 website had severe issues when I tried to contact them for support.