I miss Usenet. Yes, the many of the groups got overrun with spam, and I'm not talking the binaries, but I really like the decentralized nature of it. But really, with a good reader, of your own choosing, you could just rip through discussions or participate. How it looked to you was your own doing. Some of the web forums these days are just painfull if you're trying to skim lots of messages. I really like slrn. Oh well.

Yes, this inclusion into the Dash has gone a bit to far.

I upgraded a machine over the weekend to 12.10, and after a couple of installs of my various packages I like, I went to Unity Dash to search for "Eclipse" to see if I'd already installed the Java IDE or not.

Instead of simply saying "no", it instead gave me returns for all sorts of Twilight movies and books. Amazon probably has it on my wish list already.

I'll search Amazon when I want to search Amazon. When Dash is now the way to launch programs on my box instead of menus, I want it to launch programs.

    --Lance

I'm getting very disappointed with Slashdot this past few years, and they seem to be pandering to the sensationalist. I used to come here for some real news.

It's all over the wire about the jury deliberations, mistrial, infringements. I come to Slashdot thinking I'd get the real scoop. Nope, more of same sensational stuff.

So, Groklaw has the real story, and it turns out, it's not much of a story at all.

There's all sorts of sensational web sites out there. I used to come to Slashdot for the comments, which have always been rational. Now, I'm not sure why I stop by from time to time.

Funny, I've been thinking the same thing lately. And I've been dependent on Google and Android for a while now.

Why. Google plus was the last subtle thing to set it off.

I've used Google Apps for all of my email on my domain since it came out. Works great. I've had my domain for 15 years, and it's me. I depend on Android and my Google interconnects. I use Chrome on all my boxes. Everything works well.

Plus doesn't like Google Apps for your Domain. You've got to create a new gmail account for that. Something that's not me. Something that nobody knows me as. And Chrome/Google account switching will force that to be the default account.

Multiple account switching has also changed around, and it makes this gmail account your primary account, and I've got to keep using my password to get to my regular Google Apps email in Chrome. Now, the email I've depended on for 10 years multiple times a day requires me to keep switching back to my (now) non-default domain account, if I check Google plus also.

It sound petty, but it's made me stand back and say, "Wow, I'm _really_ dependent on Google, and this can get ugly". Being an open-source kind-of-guy, that makes me nervous.

        --Lance

To me it wasn't so much the printed font, but the lack of all quotation marks which gave the physical text a stark feeling. I have both a printed copy of "The Road" and a Kindle copy, and that starkness came through in both.

My other two cents: The Kindle sucks for any reference type work. I don't like reading newspapers or reference non-fiction because jumping around is awful. This has potential of being solved soon, but now now. The K2 came with a free cookbook that's just painful to use.

However, if you have a straight-though type text which includes most fiction where formatting isn't an issue, then it's a wonderful device. Non-fiction that's mostly text and no graphs that you read through like a plain book is also not bad.

I like having several texts available to read from, and it's in my bag. I think many people have also gotten into reading classic fiction that's out of copyright and freely available. There are lots of good books out there, and I like having them all easily available to read.

    --Lance (Kindle 1 user for 2 years)

Nope, I don't work for Amazon or anybody else related. I just think they have something cool.

I don't understand why Amazon doesn't push the fact that this works well with any text or html file is beyond me. Once I realized that fact, I was sold.

That, and it's the built in data cell phone (Whispernet), which makes it that much better than its competitors. The built in web browser is almost unusable, but the store works and is fun for finding a beach read, and each kindle is assigned its own email address. There are lots of times I've put a file in an email (or just hooked up via USB), and was able to read it later somewhere.

People get hung up on the DRM and the lackluster support for PDFs, but I think there are many posters in this topic who are starting to realize that there are other reasons this is a good reader, and that hasn't always been evident in previous Kindle discussions on Slashdot.

    --Lance

I was at that conference, and while the question about high-quality video was asked, Chen pretty much said they were happy with the quality of online video they had, and were much more focused on the reach of YouTube, keeping the files small so that everyone could watch them, even those without a lot of bandwidth and in other countries.
He certainly didn't say anything about a high quality YouTube in the next three months. I think this blogger read more into the talk than what Chen said. However he implies that he talked to him directly, so I can only vouch for what was said at the conference.