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Comment Re:Why would anyone want to use a kindle? (Score 4, Informative) 155

You are confusing the hardware device with the Amazon service. Amazon has gone to great pains to make it super-easy to buy things from their bookstore directly on the device, and manage those purchases on your device through the Amazon website.

But the device itself is a regular e-reader, you can put files on it via USB and manage them via the filesystem or an app like Calibre. And Amazon does not manage books on the device except the ones that you buy through the Amazon service.

Most people who complain about the Kindle have never even used one.

So to address these complaints directly: 1. "sharing" a book is a feature of Amazon's DRMed service. It doesn't apply to regular e-books. 2. They promised they'd never delete a book from a person's account again again. And again, that only applies to DRMed books purchased through Amazon.

I tend to get my books from Project Gutenberg or manybooks.net and then manage them via USB with Calibre. You could load most of Project Gutenberg on a Kindle and send it to a place without network (but with electricity) and it would be much better than sending them trunkfuls of books.

Comment This looks like a typical straw man argument. (Score 4, Insightful) 476

Here's Apple's page about the new display: http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/retina-display.html

They say "the Retina display’s pixel density is so high, your eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels." I suppose we can assume that they imply "at the typical distance at which you hold your iPhone" because otherwise the claim would be nonsense. Because surely you can hold it close enough to distinguish the pixels. (Unless you really can't, I haven't seen the screen).

But in any case, it's more of a marketing claim than a technical spec. They do not literally mean "this screen has the same 'resolution' as your retina". Your retina doesn't even have pixels! They just mean "it makes web pages looks great!".

So this "president of DisplayMate Technolgies" [sic] is tilting at windmills here.

Comment layers of complication (Score 1) 411

I think you should e-mail that guy that wanted to manage his Windows desktops by running Windows images on top of Linux, using some virtualization technology, but also passing through the hardware capabilities of the video cards, so he could run multiple monitors.

I bet he'd have some great tips about how to spice up your shell scripts. He probably edits them in emacs (running inside an AJAX terminal inside his web browser, connected to a web server on the machine he's editing the file on).

Comment I read that as "6.1 million dollars" (Score 1) 325

and I thought, "oh, that's not bad, that's ~10 FTEs and ~$5million of equipment, you can really accomplish something with that". And then I realized I was off by a factor of a _thousand_!!!

So that's 10 _thousand_ full time employees, and 5 _billion_ for equipment. Wow. What the hell are you doing that you need $6 billion dollars for 50 "combat air patrols"? Tracking every squirrel in Afghanistan's mountains?

Comment Re:LTO-4? (Score 1) 411

If I understand you correctly, you're insinuating that "drive compression" depends on the drive model or something. And that it might not be possible to decode the data in the future.

In fact, hardware compression performed by the drive as it's writing to tape is part of the LTO spec. So it's the same across all drives. Think of it as standard LZW compression, performed by the drive hardware while it is writing.

Comment LTO-4? (Score 1) 411

With easily compressible data (e.g. genomics data), I've gotten as much as 5TB onto a single LTO-4 tape using the regular drive compression.

An LTO-4 tape costs me ~$50. It's smaller than a 3.5" SATA drive and easier to handle. It can probably even survive a drop to the floor from chest height.

You'll need to spend some money on a drive or tape library. So it depends on how many datasets like this you need to write.

Comment Re:DRM? (Score 1) 209

Wow, that's 57 pages of people asking the official representative to describe exactly what the limitations of the DRM are, and not getting a complete answer that doesn't conflict with what it says on the box or on Steam.

It sounds like you need to have SecuROM (max 5 activations, whatever that means) and also Microsoft Games for Windows Live (max 15 activations, whatever that means) and you need to register online with Microsoft before being able to use the disk you purchased at the store.

Comment Re:Goodbye to the ThinkPad brand. (Score 4, Informative) 806

The laptops that are getting this change are the Thinkpad Edge models. They are the low-end consumer level Lenovo laptops, Thinkpads in name only. They are not the regular Thinkpad T or X or R series models. The R series is discontinued now anyway. The regular T and X series are staying as they were (with minor modifications). You can read more details here: http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=349

I look forward to the Thinkpad T series being the solid black square tanks that they have always been.

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