Posts by Charlie Stross

Sony e-book reader to debut in UK tomorrow

Not a palm pilot

The PRS-505 isn't a PDA.

The display is amazingly better than anything that Palm ever sold, back in the grey-scale days. It just doesn't bear comparison on any basis (resolution: 800x600 rather than 160x160, contrast ratio: astronomical).

Nor does it chew through AAA cells when you're using the backlight (what backlight? The Sony device doesn't need one, unless you still read under the covers in bed), or lose its memory if you fumble the battery swap.

I travel with a sub-notebook too, but oddly, it takes me more than 3-6 hours to read a couple of books. If you want to use a sub-notebook instead, you'd need a hand-cart loaded with spare batteries (or a portable generator and a gallon of petrol) to match the PRS-505s life.

It's quite simply a niche gadget. It does one thing only, and does it pretty well. Where it tries to do more than one thing, it's pants -- my advice is to delete the MP3 music samples it comes with, lest you accidentally nudge the volume switch and it tries to play something (which will run the battery down in well under 24 hours). But if all you want to do is read, I reckon a single charge should see you all the way through "Cryptonomicon".

The non-Windows user experience, in detail

There's a lot of FUD floating around on this discussion. I own a PRS-505 and I don't do Windows; here's my experience.

The reason for the buttons is that the PRS-505 uses an e-ink display. It's really slow -- the latency is around half a second -- so rather than a pointer-based interface it expects you to use an old-fashioned numbered-menu system to navigate between features. All the e-ink machines are like this, the Kindle included; it's the price you pay for a device with the contrast ratio of newsprint that'll run for a week between charges.

I find the PRS-505 usable, despite that. It charges over USB, and exports its internal memory (and the SD or MS cards, if either are installed) as USB mass storage devices.

Stick an RTF, ASCII, PDF, or LRF file in the right directory and the PRS-505 will display it. (LRF is Sony's proprietary-ish file format. If you're a non-Microsoftie the reason for converting RTF files to LRF is that the PRS-505 can pick up metainformation tags like author name and title from the LRF, thus making it easier to find if you've got a lot of files on your machine.)

The PRS-505 will *not* read Microsoft Word files as-is (but you can convert them to RTF using OpenOffice or, on the Mac, textutil).

The PRS-505 will display PDFs. Since the July firmware update it's supposed to support PDF reflow as well, reflowing text to fit the screen better. (I haven't tested this.)

The PRS-505 supports the newish ePub ebook format, which includes DRM support (it's not mandatory) and is promoted by Adobe. To that extent, they seem to be stepping away from their previous committment to LRF, and before that, to BBeB (which nobody else used).

If you're a Mac or Linux user, the Calibre tools (calibre.kovidgoyal.net) will let you convert a variety of ebook file formats into LRF and sync them with the PRS-505. It includes HTML conversion and web spidering, so that you can grab various magazine/news websites and stick them on your reader. The only features of the PRS-505 it *doesn't* support are DRM and access to the Sony ebook store. There's loads of content on Project Gutenberg, and a lot of free books on the internet that you can download legally; more info at www.mobileread.com.

Frequent Flyer's companion

I bought an PRS-505 on a trip stateside last year, and I've got to say, *if* you (a) read a lot and (b) travel a lot, it's a major boon. (Note that it's going to be rather less useful if the sort of stuff you read requires you to make notes in the margins; this is a basic e-reader, really aimed at the casual consumer of popular literature.)

Last month I ended up on a journey from hell (I arrived at my destination 36 hours late, via three cancelled intermediate flights and a brisk jog around Dallas-Fort Worth); the Reader kept me entertained, and after ploughing through three novels it was still showing three bars out of four on the battery indicator.

Sony's software support for non-Microsoft folks is, as usual, dire, but Mac and Linux users may want to investigate Calibre (http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/), the open source Reader management application.

Third time unlucky for Elon Musk's Falcon rocket

The usual starting trouble

It's worth noting that virtually no previous orbit-capable rocket has succeeded without a string of early failures. The R7 (Soyuz) launcher, for example, is famously reliable today ... but not back in the mid-1950s when it was under development. The Ariane IV had about twelve failures in its first eighteen launches -- then had a spotless record for the next several dozen. And so on.

Losing three in a row is disappointing but hardly unprecedented; if they get it right with #4, all will be forgiven soon enough.

EU project scans air passengers for terrorist tendencies

two thoughts

1. Sounds like someone's trolling for grant proposals. As an actual security package this simply won't fly. (Posit a 99.99% success rate. Now posit fitting this to a Boeing 737-400, with 150 seats, flying short-haul, six sectors per day. The plane's going to be carrying 900 passengers daily ... meaning there's a very high probability of a false positive <em>every</em> day. Given the rarity of actual hijackers, you'd need to make the thing better than six-nines accurate, and there's no way a face recognition system's going to do that.)

2. If they ever deploy this, I start traveling with a stick of chewing gum in my hand luggage. Personally I hate the stuff, but as an alternative to blu-tak it ain't bad ...

Wikipedia goes to court to defend defamation immunity

Not her only lawsuit ...

I believe Bauer is also suing SFWA (the Science Fiction Writers of America -- a non-profit trade body of SF and fantasy writers), and several named individuals, in the same basket of lawsuits.

Further comment would be inappropriate, but speaking purely for myself as a working science fiction writer, I hope her head explodes.

Japanese geeks offered smaller-than-Eee little laptop

Looks like a relaunch of the Kohjinsha SH1 -- which was rubbish

I had a Kohjinsha SA1 last year, to my regret. (It drank a mug of tea eventually, but that's another matter.) This looks to be a revision of the same machine -- same case, same specification, same OS -- at half the original ($1000) price.

Things you want to know before you try and buy one? The keyboard is nearly the worst I've ever used -- far inferior to the more expensive SH6/SH8 models. The screen is no better than the Eee's (and far inferior to the more expensive SH6 and SH8 models, which sport 1024x600 pixels to the SA5's 800x480).

The SH6 I replaced the SA1 with is a much more civilized machine; slow, but the screen is a delight and the keyboard doesn't feel like they've stuffed a decaying squid under it.

Verdict: assuming I called it right and this is a straight reissue of the SA1, my advice would be "don't touch this with a barge-pole". Wait for the Eee 901, or if you need the disk space and have the money go for an HP MiniNote. This one's a turkey.

RIAA chief calls for copyright filters on PCs

Computer Misuse Act

Unless I'm very much mistaken, installing such malware in the UK would leave them open to prosecution under the Computer Misuse Act (1990), viz (to quote the Act):

A person is guilty of an offence if—

(a) he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer;

(b) the access he intends to secure is unauthorised; and

(c) he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.

(2) The intent a person has to have to commit an offence under this section need not be directed at—

(a) any particular program or data;

(b) a program or data of any particular kind; or

(c) a program or data held in any particular computer.

(3) A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale or to both.

Straw: Police can bug MPs without asking Cabinet

Am I thick or ...

... What's to stop the security services from asking the police to bug a person of interest if the PoI happens to be an MP, and thus off-limits under the Wilson Doctrine?

US navy electro-cannon test successful

Pissed old hack baffled by (not very) new technology

Mach 7.5 sounds a lot more impressive than 2400 metres per second, which is what this is.

It's worth noting that modern tank guns firing APFSHS-DU penetrators routinely achieve 1600 metres per second, that tweaked APFSHS-DU has tested out to 1900 metres per second, and that it's generally agreed that it should be possible to push conventional explosive-driven projectiles to 2000 metres per second in the next generation of guns. So what they've got here is maybe a 15-20% improvement over where the state of the art is with explosive-driven guns at the same level of development.

Meanwhile, did you notice the sparks flying from the underside of the railgun? Serious arcing -- always a problem when you're throwing millions of joules around in under a millisecond -- tends to wreck railguns. And you get arcing when you mix that kind of current with air. Especially damp, salt-laden air (hello, paging the Navy: you are aware that your ships sail on top of seawater which is (a) conductive and (b) tends to splash everywhere? There's a reason naval guns on real warships come with protective caps which are only removed just before firing ...)

Railgun technology isn't new; it's been a hangar queen ever since the Nazis scratched their heads over it in the 1940s. Now DARPA have got it to work about as well as the conventional alternative, in a demo. Nothing to see here, move along ...

Boffins slashed in big-science budget blunder bloodbath

Missing the point

The Diamond synchrotron is mostly going to be used by biological and materials science researchers, not physicists or astronomers -- but those are the specialities whose budget is being dipped into to pay for the project. Ditto the other "big science" cost overruns.

What this means is: the physics/astro budget is being used to cross-subsidize other fields, in a manner that will result in 25% funding cuts to physics and astronomy over 3 years, at a time when physics in the UK is *already* in big trouble.

If this isn't fixed, then an entire generation of high energy physics specialists are going to be out of a job -- and once lost, it's very hard to rebuild that kind of academy. (Look at what happened in the USA after the Superconducting Supercollider got axed in the early 1990s ... then consider that the USA still had a whole bunch of other high-energy physics projects and didn't have a major problem recruiting and educating new physicists.)

Strict copyright laws do not always benefit authors

A writer's viewpoint

Not to put it too bluntly, these conclusions do not follow from the (reported) survey findings, because they're not comparing like with like: the British and German book markets differ in other respects than simply copyright law.

English language rights are traditionally sold in two tranches -- North American rights (US and Canada) and UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada). On a population basis alone, the UK and Commonwealth sector has a comparable number of native speakers of English to German speakers (in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). When you throw in a proportion of British authors who (like me) also sell to the US/Canada market, it should be unsurprising that the revenue stream is fatter. It's hard for non-English speaking authors to gain a toe-hold in the English language market because most English language editors aren't multilingual and won't read submissions in foreign languages (much less pony up the not inconsiderable cost of translating a book). Basically, network externalities are on the side of the English speakers.