"Stop looking at ze pretty gurls"
"We're married.... "
I think that's the point. Your wife supplies the commands, and more physical prompts if there is any failure to comply...
1320 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jan 2009
<QUOTE>Apple announced that they had reached an agreement with major record labels to sell all music on the iTunes Store free of DRM restrictions</QUOTE>
That may be but does the same apply to Video purchased from the apple store? Because that was what the OP was grumbling about. I cant answer it either because I don't know but I'd like to.
I was with you up to the bit where you started to feel sorry for me and called me disabled because I have no truck with any religion.
It seems to me that religion and spirituality very rarely go hand in hand, or mean the same thing. During my church going days I very rarely encountered any spiritual people in the congregation; or if they were spiritual then they hid it very deeply indeed. Not that I didn't like them but many had no apparent feeling for anything that wasn't in some other remote and invisible part of the world. Anything close by which they could smell or hear then it was just disgusting and there aught to be laws. I live in the woods on the side of a mountain and there is something very uplifting and spiritual about climbing the ridge behind my home as the sun comes up and feeling it on my face, and it has nothing to do with any church or religious organisation. Spirituality to me means seeing and feeling and appreciating the beautiful and the numinous in the world as we experience it, including all those things that religions like to proscribe such as sex and having fun, and not wishing for, or attempting to enforce, some fictional reality that will never be in human existence.
<QUOTE>Just because he found three people who were receptive doesn't mean that, in doing so, he didn't piss off a bunch of others.</QUOTE>
And it also doesn't mean that a martian passing by in a flying saucer didn't collide with a tree whilst rubbernecking to hear what he was saying, either. But until you find those hypothetical OTHERS, or the Martian, then they may as well not exist, and your hypothetical riot and lynching solution is as much of this world as are your thought processes.
RE your comment about Asia's shoddy workmanship coming home to roost.
You cant blame it all on Asia and China. Western companies sourcing over there often take a very hard line, playing one company off against another for contracts and forcing them to take short cuts and lower quality in order to be able to meet a price and land a contract (or risk going out of business). And then we blame it all on the Chinese when things go horribly wrong. If allowed to do things properly at a fair price then they will produce quality goods. Same as everywhere, really.
This is, of course, a generalisation and there are always exceptions to every rule, but I think the point stands.
Cant you buy from Amazon anyway without actually owning a Kindle, by installing the Kindle for PC app and then...<cough>..."Transferring"...</cough> them to your Sony?
Prices of hardware are finally starting to look good, though ebook prices still need some work. I suspect the publishers don't really want digital books and wouldnt mind if they simply went away, but are being forced to offer them by demand, and they will eventually sort out a working model. It just may take a little time.
But people keep reminding me
Is that thing a joke? Its even more limited than the iPad. Cant even use it as a reader unless you have all your reading materials on line somewhere.
No hot spot wherever you are? Then you're carrying round a dead lump of plastic and electrics you can only use as a tray to put your drink on. Or that's how it appears from looking at their own web site.
Next device please.
"(post a reply here if you know of a decent alternative I can use)."
MediaMonkey worked fine with our iPod before we dumped it for a Sony
http://www.mediamonkey.com/
And its free, though for auto conversion of media (say for Flac to mp3) before synch you need to purchase it. You can still manually convert stuff. Oh, it wont convert to mp3 until you buy it, but it does synch the iPod, and its much less intrusive and crap laden.
I suppose its a pragmatic choice. All MP3 players will play MP3's (hence the name), but how many of them will play OGG.s? None of ours will. Its kind of like the Ubuntu/Windows thing - program for Linux only and only a few can use it; program for windows and potentially there are gadzillions of users. They'll make more money if they sell MP3's.
You must all be posting from the UK if you think no one uses them. Here in the USA I see those things all the time. People walk round Walmart (men, women, teens, you name it) chattering away quite happily. I thought they were all talking to themselves until I spotted the little ear pieces.
Personally I don't mind them one bit. I think the Brit's cynicism about this (I AM British) is just insecurity and fear of being laughed at. I have noticed since I left Blighty that the rest of the world is considerably less stuffy about many things than I, and all my fellow natives, with their clenched buttocks, gritted teeth, and sneering laughter, are. Talk about repressed.
"...you look less of a tit reading it."
Well, that depends, really, what it is you're reading. At least with an eReader of some kind there is a measure of privacy so I wont get sniggered at if I pull out the latest Dan Brown, or something.
Of course, if I'm sitting on a bus at 8am on a miserable morning and I pull one of these iPad things from my shoulder sack (it won't fit in a pocket), well, I'll still look a bit of a tit no matter what I'm reading...er...OK, point conceded. :-P
But you "could" still look a tit too, especially if you sniff your treeware device...What is it with the smell of books that people make such a deal of it when defending them against digital versions? The only smell I ever got from a book was glue and mould and dust...cough...
They also gave up on trying to force a proprietary E-Book format since they are now moving from their own BBeB (LRF/LRX) to the open standard EPub format, and this despite some users complaints that BBeB is a superior format which they promptly move their Epub books back to after liberating them from the Adobe DRM.
Labrynthine dialogs? Well at least Windows has dialogs. My first experience with the supposedly user friendly UBUNTU was last year when I installed it in VirtualBox. No problems with the install. It went in lovely. Then I tried to install the VirtualBox additions. Insufficient rights. Fair enough, but how to get those rights. No dialogs that I could see. I had no idea what the admin account was either, if there was one, because there was no prompting to enter user details for one at the install. So what to do? Off to the forums. Snide comments, laughter, and a bit of real advice. I tried several "Solutions", none of which I could get to work. You want to know about blood pressure? After some time struggling on with something that, to be honest, offered me nothing I couldn't already do, I deleted the damn virtual disk and got on with some real work.
Dont bother offering any advice now. I tried again this year and succeeded but, jeez, what a palaver. I still have the VM on my disk but cant remember when I last cranked it up or why I would bother to again. Give me those dialogs anyday, and the massive support resource I can find on line.
Do you mean that paen to sex bringing you closer to God/the centre of life by Nine Inch Nails (Closer?)
"Help me become somebody else"?
If I AM correct you can skip the prize though - Sex in second life takes you further away from the centre of life, not closer.
If I'm not correct it was a cute story anyway.
For something with an alleged lack of market there are a lot of devices available or about to become available: Sony, Kindle, Bookeen, IRiver. Hanlin, Polymer Vision, Azbooka, Cool-er, TXTr, Nook, Spring Design Iliad, QUE,... The list goes on. See...
http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix
Would all these companies really be rushing to market for something that no one was buying?
I got my used Sony PRS505 for 220 dollars, which went on my British credit card at about 132 UKP which is pretty close to the 100 UKP point. The newer models don't really offer that much more than what I have now so I'm perfectly happy. Older/Used models do seem to be actually holding their value pretty well so there IS a market for these things already, it just wont reach its potential till prices do come down. Its still healthy though.
I know many of these aren't available in the UK but they will be (in about 600 years) :-)
<QUOTE>The Reg tells it how it is. If you don't like it, go read PC World.</QUOTE>
Nah! Ars Technica is heaps better than both. Its commenters are smarter too. Increasingly we (not the royal "we" but a bunch of us) come to the Register for some comedy but if we need a bit more depth we go see what Ars, and its commenters, have to say. Sad but true.
For a tech site the forums sure are full of crusty old luddites and reactionaries. I can just imagine you all when the first barely audible recordings were stored on those scratchy wax cylinders, and the first air craft went bouncing along the ground. Those recordings were hardly hi-fi and you couldnt really call that flight, but look at what we have done since then. You guys are so cynical and have a total lack of any imagination; its a wonder you can bother getting out of bed in the morning. The only reason you don't slash your wrists is because you just know the next life is going to be crap too.
Apologies if anyone else has already made a similar point - I got so bored and depressed by the first couple screen fulls of comments I had to fight the urge to stick my head in the microwave oven and couldnt read any further.
<QUOTE>Their diet dooms them, their hatred of other Pandas dooms them.</QUOTE>
A very appropriate comment to apply to human beings too. A diet of beer and kebabs if these forums are a reliable guide. And many of the comments one sees on the register forums, and indeed the Daily Mail forums, illustrate the second clause all too clearly.
<QUOTE>
mantits are far grosser
</QUOTE>
Grossness, as with beauty, is entirely in the eye of the beholder, and changes from season to season. Cuddly and hairy bears are in big demand in some quarters. For everyone on earth there is someone to love you, somewhere, and the internet makes finding that someone a bit easier. Some of you commenters need a bit of work though.
<QUOTE>I'm also a big fan of women not bearing their breasts all the time, this is purely because I like womens breasts and think that they are special, if they were to be about all the time then they would cease to be special (and let's face it, gravity is not a breasts best friend), the desexualisation of breasts would probably brings us closer to an asexual society but is that actually a good thing?</QUOTE>
There are many cultures/societies on earth where women go around as a matter of course with their breasts bare (despite missionaries best efforts to modestify them.) Their societies do not appear to suffer in any way and have quite as many children as they need or want. You are just thinking in the way your own society has trained you to think and that isnt necessarily a bad thing. Desexualise one thing and you just sexualise something else.
On a slightly different point; in these same societies where wome bare, the people still often adorn themselves with items of clothing and makeup to make themselves look better or more attractive, just like we do. So, if attractiveness is the aim, more really is more; unadorned really is less. The nature or extent of the adornment doesn't matter.
Nothing that human beings do as a society really does any harm to the species as a whole. Bare or not, we all go on regardless. Have fun!
It isn't only DRM causing blockage to sales, its the cost of the books.
A book I am interested in reading: "The Darkest Part of the Woods" by Ramsey Campbell.
Sony price : $12.60
Amazon prices : Kindle $5.59, Paperback $6:99, used hardback $10.00
Kindle seems to do better at this than Sony, who appear to be basing their prices more on the hardback price rather than the paperback price. I know there are bargain books at bargain prices but these never seem to be the ones I want.
I could get a good used hardback copy for less than the Sony copy, and, like piracy, used books generate no income for the author.
Surely the logic is obvious in all this; a paper book has large production and distribution costs to be covered whilst an Ebook has none beyond the proofreading and formatting stage(I know, storage and bandwidth and server costs), so the final cost could easily be significantly cheaper than the paper version without any loss of income to the author.
DRM just adds more woe to the recipe.
I'm not writing this as a complete sceptic as I own, and love, a Sony Reader and have a pile of books waiting to be read on it which is almost as large as my paper pile. But I balked at the Campbell book and will probably just read it from the library which generates no income for anyone, author or publisher.
PS Does anyone know if the collected JG Ballard short stories in EBook is available anywhere???
Just have to second that - Another book buff here, including book buff wife who also just had to have one too since we spent more time fighting over it than reading.
Ever since getting one of these fabulous devices I have become an E-Reader bore but I have to admit that until the price of the devices falls a lot, and until the price of the books and their DRMs are both reduced, then I cant see them taking off significantly in the general market, which is a shame because I absolutely adore this thing.
I'm a bit wary of fiddling with its internals though in case I somehow brick it. It kinda feels like it would feel if I contemplated home surgery on my wife's internals trying to improve her. I would be desolate if I bricked either of em.
"heck them retards can't even implement mousewheel support on listboxes.. for faster item selecting.. a feature you'll find working in windows for years and years across all apps.. just not shitfox"
I just tried V3.5 in Windows and the drop down from the address bar supports mouse wheel. The drop down from the search window supports mouse wheel. The drop down lists in web pages support mouse wheel. So what are you bitching about exactly?
<QUOTE>Go get yourself a Mac, cross over to the dark side, you'll never want to go back. Expensive, yes. But you really are getting what you pay for in terms of quality and experience.</QUOTE>
It would be nice, sure, but it isn't in my best interests to get an Apple. I have too much invested in software, bought, free, and, most of all, written by myself, to make it worth my while switching platforms. Not to mention I make a living writing Windows software. The dark side isn't really the dark side. Its just as bright there as it is here. Just a different country. We all have our favorite climates and cultures but no matter where we live we all do the same living.
The Apple/Windows/Linux/OSX/Whatever war is totally artificial and I love you all anyway :-)
I hope Apple does bring out a tablet PC and I hope its successful. Not that I would buy one but it may help to kick start a demand for the devices which will bring down the prices of such devices and drive up the specifications. I have always wanted a tablet but the prices have always seemed silly when compared with normal note books, and have always been out of range of what I had to spend at those times I was buying. If Apple is successful at this then the world and its dog will try to copy and I can only benefit. I'll still never buy an Apple though. They may be excellent quality but I still see them as fashion accessories. That isn't a comment on the machines themselves but that's the impression I get watching and looking at their commercials. It puts me right off. (As do the prices.)
<QUOTE>That one day all the boys in IT will grow up. Today, I fear, is not that day. *sighs*</QUOTE>
Much as the comments make me squirm with shame for my gender, the fact that The Register sees fit to post this in the manner they have done is doing nothing to help those IT boys to grow up. Aping tabloid news speak, no matter how firmly your tongue is stuffed in your cheek, isn't really very funny and sounds rather like the "Sport" newspapers who do it in a similar vein. You may as well just start posting daily tit pics, in a satirical manner of course.
@"I mean come on you fucktards, lighten up"
If you guys could actually be funny it might help.
If any Kindle owners who lost the books happen to be reading you can always sneak a copy from the Australian Gutenberg site:-
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100011.txt
They have both freely available, but only to people outside of the USA, though they only warn you and don't prevent you seeing it. Of course I wont tell anyone if you don't.
<QUOTE>And obviously too tech savvy to be able to spell or type in English.</QUOTE>
Ad hominem arguments are much lower on any scale than bad spelling or grammar.
Ad hominem arguments based on bad spelling and grammar are even lower than that.
Keep your Mac. Don't care if you enjoy or not, but you sound so smug I suspect you do.
"What is so special about Andy Burnham’s bed that work in his flat could only be described as "re-building {blob} beds" and "building {long blob} bed"...."
I suspect it was some bored out of its mind black blob applying drone amusing itself by thinking up ways to create innuendo possible sentences, and create a little mischief by insinuating something that probably isn't there. It likely is flower beds being referred to but, snigger, snigger...fill in the blanks yourself...
While some regular citizens share this hang up I don't believe its the majority. I think the problem lies with the rulers.
I have come to the conclusion that there is no fun in ruling people unless you get to tell them what NOT to do. Telling them what they CAN do is not so much fun; you have to tell them, nay, ORDER them to NOT do specific things.
And its no good telling them to not do something such as "Do not eat brussel sprouts" because they probably don't want to do that anyway. No, its much more satisfying to tell them not to do something that most of them do want to do; such as "Don't Look At Porn." Rulers have to justify their existence by Ruling. Its no fun otherwise.