Posts by FARfetched

Amazon Kindle flunked by college students

Kindle can do notes

I have one (if it makes you feel better, it was a prize, I didn't buy it). You hit the Menu button, pick "Add a Note or Highlight," and go from there. It has a little keyboard that you can use to enter your note. Then you can use "My Notes and Marks" (next item down in the menu) to jump back to it later on.

Having said that, I think textbooks would have to be re-thought to work better as an etextbook. If that were done, I think high schoolers would love them — with lockers too tiny to be useful these days and too little time to get to them between classes, kids around here regularly carry a 30-lb knapsack full of textbooks most of the day.

US iPhone ready to be tied down?

Now THAT'S Weird...

I could have sworn I just saw a tethering option in Settings > General > Network, with instructions for actually using it with USB or Bluetooth! This is with a plain old iPhone 3G, not jailbroken or anything. But of course I plugged it in (to try it with USB), it sync'ed, and now the option is gone??

So it seems the tethering option is there, until you try to use it. *wubba-wubba-wubba* I'm not making this up.

Consumers still want it hard

"They value [TV] more than ever as they get older"

I'm likely in the minority, but my own experience is opposite: I watched a lot of TV from age 10 to 20, then got out of the habit. At 50, I barely give it an hour a week if that.

I like to say we're in 1974 with regards to e-book readers. Think how digital calculators evolved from 1974 to 1990 and you'll get the idea.

PARIS gets her very own private enclave

How big is this thing?

In the next update, would you consider including dimensions of the glider? It has to be pretty large to carry the instrumentation, I'm guessing.

'Completely useless' Windows 3.1 hits Google's Android

Well done!

Some things, after all, don't have to be useful to be cool.

Adobe declares 'LOVE' for Apple

Meh

Adobe: Fix. Your. Crappy. Code.

Honestly, if Adobe put 1/10 of the effort into coding that they waste on whining, this article would have never been written.

Android tops iPhone in US (no thanks to the Nexus One)

How soon they forget

You mean you don't remember Jobs saying he'd be satisfied with 1% of the market?

Not sure why I'm bothering, anyone who wibbles about fart apps isn't listening anyway.

Apple demands public apology for iPhone parody

Cue Apple haters in 3… 2… 1…

Like this is IT-worthy?

Paris, because she doesn't have much to do with IT news either.

Ubuntu's Lucid Lynx: A (free) Mactastic experience

Ease of use is good

As a Mac person, I'm glad to see a Linux distro take UI issues seriously. Having said that, it doesn't *have* to be Mac-like, or even Windows-like, to be easy to use. At home, I run Xubuntu on a G4 Mac mini as a guest machine, and even my son's dim girlfriend can do what she wants with it without my help. She found the little Firefox icon up in the menu bar, and was quickly off to her MySpace page. I like not having to constantly tinker with it; I'm comfortable enough in a shell but I prefer getting stuff done to futzing around in /etc.

Canonical may have found a good way to monetize (ick what a word) their free OS with the music store and premium version of Ubuntu One — the latter is a bit pricey, as dotMac/MobileMe is pricey, but I'm sure plenty of people will decide 50GB online is worth the price.

Personally, I hope Lucid takes off. Apple has had the ease-of-use + stability combination pretty much to themselves all along, and maybe this will push them to step up their game. After wasting two evenings of my life de-infesting my sis-in-law's dozebox, I may stuff Ubuntu on her computer as a dual-boot option and see what happens. It might let me waste my time the way *I* want to waste it, anyway.