Your current kindle may be fine but the new editions are more tightly locked down. You can't plug them in to your laptop at all -- which is why they're justifying removal of access to actual files.
Good lord. This conversation has been happening all over the fediverse for more than a week with far better information than this weak tea.
Who the hell cares what PCMag or Tom's thinks. The answer is plain -- download your epubs locally and stop using Kindles.
The Slashdot of decades past would have pointed out that this "you only got a lease" nonsense is a CHOICE:
1. Some publishers sell their books without DRM -- Baen, Tor and MacMillan all do and you can buy from them direct. Kobo is also an option that still allows downloads.
2. Some ebook readers exist that will read anything. You don't need a Kindle -- why buy into that walled garden at all? Try an Onyx or perhaps a Kobo.
Yes, yes. You can use project gutenberg and the public library (where you still just get temporary access) but here -- have 19 more sources for books you can download:
Open Library
Google Books
ManyBooks
PDF Drive
Bookboon
Free-Ebooks
Smashwords
DigiLibraries
GetFreeEbooks
Obooko
Baen Free Library
Internet Archive
HathiTrust
Standard Ebooks
ReadPrint
Bookrix
Librophile
Online Books Page.edu
You can manage your LOCAL, backed up library of books with Calibre (which is free) and if you need to read DRM-locked books on your laptop once you've downloaded them, you can use Adobe Digital Editions -- which you can use without breaking the DRM. I won't explain how to strip the DRM, but that is also certainly an option as long as it's for private use.
This site used to be worth something. I'm deeply disappointed in you all.
At some point I should really put together a post full of true ball-mover research. There's *plenty* out there.
Anyhow, I'm glad it was of use to someone.
Literally every time we have a discussion of gender roles here, someone says "people should all do what they want and women don't want computing"... well let me see if I can frame this up.
Fallacy #1: People seldom "naturally" like things:
You "like" things many of the things you like when you're young because people showed them to you/shared them with you/included you in them. If you never spent much time with them, you might stumble across them at random and decide you LOVE them. It does happen, but it's a lot less likely. We need to help girls know what computers are good for so their choices are actually honest ones.
Fallacy #2: Things you "naturally" like are what you should have.
You might naturally like blowing up buildings, but except in the very narrow case that you become a demolitions expert as an engineer, that's really not a societal good and we should be steering your shit out of it. We *know* that tech teams with diversity on race and gender lines are healthier, so steering for that objective is probably in our societal interest.
Yes, you'll note -- I am indeed failing to supply you with data. I linked to some in an earlier comment, though, if you're interested. If you don't buy my basic logic, though, there's no point in arguing about whose fact set is better.
This is a really poor quality Slashdot story - and I say that as a woman.
Yes of course *I* can name women who are or have been company leaders in tech (Melissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg)
And I can also name hands-on technologists. Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace, Kathy Sierra and Sandi Metz all come to mind without trying.
That said, "we have a problem with an absence of women in tech -- most people can only name Siri and Alexa" is a story without real merit.
If you must discuss gender imbalance in our industry could you pick something smacking a bit less of click-bait as your only link? I mean, please.
If you'd like a link talking about why gender diversity is actually a boon to companies, try this one:
https://www.ncwit.org/sites/de...
If you'd like a link on ways of actually getting women to take the computer science plunge, try this one:
https://cs.stanford.edu/people...
I should really not allow myself to be trolled into commenting, but this is garbage and Slashdot can do better without even trying very hard.
I work on the east coast and I am (I admit) a manager, though I write code about half the time. I completely understand the class of people this guy is talking about. The power hungry incompetent douches exist. No doubt. But there ARE those of us who are not project managers, but dev staff managers whose job is
a. figuring out who should be on which project so that people learn from each other and good work gets done
b. making sure that when a programmer comes up with a really good process or tool it gets propagated to the rest of the teams.
c. making sure that people who need mentoring because they're on a problem outside their expertise get it even when they're too stubborn to ask for it
d. making sure that when programmers have expressed an estimate of the complexity of a problem, the over-eager PM who is probably NOT a software person doesn't over-reach and try to push some bullshit schedule.
e. defending my team against idiotic business requirements and pseudo-experts.
f. fighting for budget, headcount and training
g. really working at finding ways of making our distributed team collaborate more effectively.
Maybe in the rarified air of San Francisco there are so many fantastic programmers capable of concentrating on both the big picture and the small that all of these things get done magically and in a self organizing way by the 1st among equals in the dev staff. Maybe. But I believe in the service I give my team. I took a hit to stop writing code so much because it needed to be done at the time, we didn't want an outsider who was apt to be douchey and I'm good with the people involved. The extra money doesn't mean that much and god knows I hate the sense that every programmer who doesn't know me assumes I'm an idiot until they've worked with me. I wouldn't do what I'm doing if I didn't believe it actually made my team a better place.
So thanks, a LOT for making it harder for real dev managers to exist, by declaring we don't.
We all appreciate your eye rolling world weary lack of belief.
"In 2007, when Deborah Rice was appointed chair of an Environmental Protection Agency panel assessing the safety levels of flame retardants, she arrived as a respected Maine toxicologist with no ties to industry. Yet the EPA removed Rice from the panel after an intense push by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), an industry lobbying group that accused her of bias. Her supposed conflict of interest? She had publicly raised questions about the safety of a flame retardant under EPA review."
Hear! Hear! A. I'm female. and B. My 6 yr old daughter just enthusiastically signed up for robotics camp this summer. I'm hoping to god the person teaching it isn't some complete tool who can't engage her. The good news is, her good friend's mom is a research scientist and I'm a programmer. We're jokingly planning on taking over the robotics team when the girls get to highschool. So role models, they do have.
Keeping female role models in front of your daughter would help if you've got them. If not, finding "girl-friendly" science projects is actually a full time sport. I recently discovered Leah Buechley's Lily Pad Arduino project and have been plotting electronic circuitry education through sewing projects over the next few years. The metal boards are pricey, but they've started making the fabric ones cheaply.
I'm looking for robotics projects, but haven't got any on-tap this minute.
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
