You're a total dick and have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Considering Toyota couldn't write software for brakes I'm not surprised they're uneasy about writing autonomous driving software.

It's not a bug it's a feature.

I'm not sure how not getting laid in high school was a feature but here we are.

RAID5 distributes parity and data across all disks, having a single dedicated parity-only disk is RAID3.

Have the clients connect with ssh to your server and open a reverse port. They'll each have to pick a different port on your server.

Use something like autossh ( http://www.harding.motd.ca/aut... ) to make sure the ssh connection is always open.

Having said all that, sounds like a great security hole if your server is ever breached. Plus lots of potential privacy violations.

Marqis

Now MS has sold 11,023 tablets!

How can you start work on an operating system without a kernel?

I really can't stand the new UI. Slightly isometric, wobbling, with your character covering part of your inventory? The fonts are tiny, gun pics are tiny. Even the "manual" has the tiniest fonts ever. Would it have broken the bank to have one extra page and a 10pt font?

The previous UI was better in every way and it wasn't great.

I'm also unimpressed with the Angel. She just kinda stares at you, the previous one had much more "personality" (and better looking in my opinion). And the whole "damn, I mean drat". Um... wasn't Borderlands targeted towards an older crowd? "Damn" is barely PG13 let alone mature.

Having said that, I liked the original and I'm liking this one.

And the ability to turn off radios? Love it. Granted the two I've found weren't actually playing anything. But the radios in the first game made me want to kill. Real people.

I know the whole random guns thing is pretty much the entire point of Borderlands but it's also very frustrating. In the original I remember almost giving up because the game was so hard and then I find a new gun and the game became downright easy for the next 3 levels. So what I really want is a gun system ala race-car-driving game. Get a basic gun frame, then buy/quest upgrades to it. Rescue a gunsmith, he can tune the barrel for more accuracy, something like that. Basically, make the game a bit more deterministic and less random.

But seriously, did some intern design that the UI? An intern with a lazy eye, that
drank a bottle of hot-sauce and then took a big dump of sadness all over it?

I think you miss my point, but sure ... at this point they're not loss leaders. But it wasn't "a short while" that they were, it was several years (excepting the Wii of course). Even so, that just hammers the point home that it is worth the investment in software updates for the consoles -- the longer the console hardware lives, the more money they make, especially since virtually all of the profit is selling the games.

This is completely different than for TVs, where the vendor only makes money when they sell new hardware. Unless they start getting kickbacks from the cable company there is no incentive whatsoever to keep the TV software up to date, and significant incentive *not* to in that you will drive new purchases if the old stuff stops working. (I wonder sometimes if this is a primary reason for RAM limitations in PC designs; PCs can live a lot longer if you can stuff more RAM into them to cope with OS and application growth, but most PCs I have purchased are at RAM limits within 2 years, e.g. a PC bought in 2007 probably cannot have more than 4G RAM, a bare minimum for Win7 so that machine feels very slow even though the same hardware with 8G would be reasonably zippy.)

Back to TV firmware updates: Have you ever done a firmware update for your TV? I did once, since I bought an HDTV prior to HDCP (consider that to be a rough equivalent to buying a TV prior to standardization of an IPTV format, the situation we are in for the next 5+ years). The vendor offered it at a "discount" for those of us who bought early, it was "only" $300 to update since it required a tech visit. Compared to replacing the $3,500 TV (it was less than one year old) this was quite a bargain ... but it's still a pretty big chunk of change.

Ok, with built-in internet updates become a whole lot easier, you don't have to have a tech show up with a laptop full of proprietary software. Ideally, then, it will become a lot more cost effective for vendors to provide those updates. Unfortunately Blu-Ray provides a peek into how it will really work -- BR players have always had the ability to do consumer or even automatic firmware updates -- yet as I pointed out the BR vendors do not have a habit of releasing updates beyond a couple of years out. Why should they? The warrantee doesn't require them to support it beyond the end of the period, usually either 90 days or 1 year. If it stops working you are almost certainly going to go buy a new one (which, in fact, I did). They spend money providing you updates, they make it when you buy new stuff.

TVs are just like that and as a result I see no reason to believe that we're going to see high-function TVs go mainstream any time soon. The vendor won't want to support them long term, the consumers won't like the higher up-front prices, and the TVs will get a bad reputation within a few years as the software goes out of date and stops working. And that assumes that the software is decent quality (i.e. usable) to begin with, which is more than a little unlikely if history is any judge.

It's to the vendors' advantage to keep game consoles running as long as they can, especially these days when the consoles are loss leaders. TVs have no such monetary incentive. You'd think phones would, but Apple is one of the best at putting new software on old phones and even they tend to give it up after 3 releases (maybe 2 for iOS5, no 3GS support if rumors are to be believed).

One problem I've long had with the idea that this functionality will migrate into TVs is that traditionally TV firmware has been next to impossible to update.

IPTV protocols are numerous and evolving fast -- there is not now, nor do we really expect there to be any time soon, a hard-and-fast standard for it. If you don't have the ability to easily update the software then it will stop working within a few years.

Now, my TVs have mostly been paragons of reliability, but one thing I cannot say about the TV manufacturers is that they are any good at all at complex software. Or even the very simplest software for that matter; even with the very limited software functionality in a modern TV the configuration and display of information is almost universally lousy.

And it's not just TVs. Most of these consumer electronics guys also make phones, and look what their software looks like when they do it themselves. It just sucks.

Worse, their dedication to ongoing support of hardware that has already sold is damn near zero (there is, after all, no incentive whatsoever once the warrantee periods expire). Ever see an Android phone that cannot be upgraded to the most recent Android, even if the hardware is capable? That is not only common, it is *typical*. And that is pretty much the rule across most consumer electronics. For instance: My first Blu-Ray player had one firmware update a year or so after the model was introduced, and nothing since. The player no longer works on BR discs that use certain new copy protection schemes and there will never be a fix for that, so it became a boat anchor in just two years.

These things are only a mild annoyance for a product that costs perhaps $200. For a nice TV at $2000ish it's a huge problem. Maybe some years hence when there is a real IPTV standard it will stop mattering so much, but that is not going to happen any time soon. Until it does it will be much more cost effective to buy cheap little boxes to attach to the TV.

I can't speak for industry averages, but in 2010 my average e-book price was $8. I calculated out how much it would be for cheapest new versions in paper; ignoring shipping costs, it was about $13. I bought 87 books last year, IIRC. 87*$5 gives you the approximate amount of money I saved by buying e-books. It is quite significant, and actually 2010 was the worst year ever. 2008 e-book prices were more than $1 lower and all told I believe the savings were well over $700 (not including books I got for free).

I note that most of the "higher than paper" prices I'm seeing come from B&N. I have seen the effect on Amazon, but it's very rare ... one book in all of them I've ever purchased. It's fairly common to see differences of about a buck, though, which to me is essentially equivalent. And the difference between current hardcover and e-book prices is usually stark: Around $18 in paper, versus $10 to $12 e-book. That's huge. Back-catalog books used to be great deals but the prices have crept up over the last couple of years, though they still tend to be at least a couple of bucks cheaper and there are many deals where they're being sold for only a few dollars to try to drum up business for relatively obscure authors.

Several people here say that there's no reason to buy them if they're available in your library. I don't know about the rest of you, but library hours in my town so heavily overlap working hours as to leave only four hours per week that I could possibly visit. For a heavy reader that's untenable.

To me the value of e-books is several fold. One, I can get them whenever I want with no waiting. When you've finished your current book at 3am and still can't sleep it's great, and god help me I can't even put a price on the value of being able to have a decent book selection while stuck at the Salt Lake City airport (that bookstore BLOWS). Two, it is becoming increasingly easy to get books that are out of print, and which are difficut to find even used. Three, I can carry around a lot of books without much bulk or weight. I don't need hundreds or thousands, but I'm usually reading several books concurrently and it's nice to have all of them with me for whatever mood I happen to be in. Four, I have a personal paper book library of thousands of books. They take up a lot of space, and it has been difficult to trim (though a flood last spring got rid of five cubic yards of them). There really aren't many books I feel I must have in paper; these days I just buy those kinds of books and save the shelve space everything else used to use.

The fact that they save money, quite a lot of money, is just gravy.

I dunno about everyone else, but last time I tried turning on ipv6 I discovered that Comcast didn't route it and a bunch of the internet turned into a black hole.

I keep hearing people like yourself claiming that e-books don't have cost savings versus paper. That is just baloney. It's not even close, and it is really easy to go on Amazon and prove that to yourself. For those of you too lazy to do that, I offer some real numbers.

I have purchased literally hundreds of e-books going back to 1998, mostly fiction and science fiction. Over the last three years since the release of the Kindle I've purchased around three hundred (about twice as many as in all previous years, owing primarily to dramatically enhanced e-book availability). So let me talk about real-world e-book prices.

Back prior to the Kindle, if you could get an e-book at all, it tended to be back-catalog stuff from minor authors and small publishing houses ... and about $4-5. In cases involving major publishers they tended to demand full retail price for their books - $8 for paperback equivalents, and a whopping $20-24 for new releases (even though the new releases in paper were available for $18 at local retailers, and $14 from Amazon). Anyway, compare those to paperback prices of the era of $7-8 and you see that I was saving 40-50% over paper. I bought hardcovers for almost all new releases because it was much less expensive.

Amazon changed everything overnight. New releases were $10, and that's the price everyone thinks Amazon sold all their books for -- but they didn't. That was *only* new releases, and that $10 compared to $16 or more for paper from the cheapest sources. Back catalog stuff *never* sold for $10, it was $4-6, compared to paperback prices that were rarely less than $8. Typically you could expect to save $2-3 for an e-book version of a paperback; not big money, but as a percentage quite significant.

As catalogs expanded prices for paperback releases, particularly from the large publishers, went up a bit to $6-7, but new paperbacks were rarely less than $8 -- so you were still saving a couple of bucks per book. I read a mix of new and old stuff and in 2007 and 2008 my average e-book cost was just over $6 (there were a lot of $1-4 steals in there, even by major authors), whereas my average paper price from Amazon in the same period was $12. (That excludes shipping.) From local booksellers, $14. I saved, quite literally, more than 50% by buying e-books. Even considering the $400 cost of the Kindle I saved almost $300 on books by the end of 2008.

When Apple got into this a year ago the market changed again, and Amazon lost the ability to sell new releases for $10 from most of the major publishers. Costs went up -- to about $12. I think I spent $14 on one new release last year, the most I'd spent on a e-book in I think eight years; I haven't bought a new release in paper format for less than $18 in quite some time, and many are $20 now. Paperback books from most publishers are around $5-8 in e-book format now, with major publishers in the $8-10 range. Paper books, of course, got more expensive too -- most of them are $10 or more now from major publishers, and there have been cases where the e-book was within $1 of the cost of the paper book (but that's very unusual). I save less than I did a year ago, but I'm still saving money -- a lot of money.

Because I kept hearing all these claims that the books were now at least as expensive as paper, even though I hadn't thought that was the case, I had noticed the creep up in prices and a few weeks ago I went back and did a sanity check. I looked at my 2010 Kindle purchases. My average e-book cost (on 87 books) has gone up quite a bit since 2007. It's now just under $8, about a 30% increase. I took the opportunity to price all of those books versus Amazon's paper prices too, to see how they compare. Average price would have been just a bit over $12. This represents a 30% savings, a bit more than $4 per book. Times 87 books, that is a savings of around $350 for the year. A new 3G Kindle is $190, so even factoring in the cost of a new device (I didn't buy one in 2010) it would have been a healthy savings.

So: When someone tells you e-books are "just as expensive, if not more so" than paper, they are lying. They aren't. In fact, they're cheaper than just compensation for paper and ink would justify (that being around 15% of the cost of a paper book). The publishers might or might not be making more money from e-books than they would have from paper -- without actually seeing their accounting books, and they're not talking, you can't tell how much warehousing and returns costs them. 30%, though, doesn't seem out of line for the savings they get. For sure they are neither losing their shirt nor making a killing on e-books today. Over time the dramatically reduced risk of publishing e-books should reduce their costs pretty substantially in high-risk segments (don't print paper at all unless the book turns out to be popular), and I expect them to take that entirely as profit.

Anyway:

You don't steal books because the publishers aren't charging less, you steal them because you don't want to pay anything for them. You do save money with e-books versus new paper books -- quite a lot of money. The prices seem pretty fair to me, knowing a little about the economics of book publishing without actually having publisher books to run hard numbers.

That does not mean that I think e-books are a great deal in all cases; in fact, they're really only a good deal if you are buying new, and if you read enough to offset the cost of the device (or read on a device you had anyway, like a cellphone). They aren't much of a deal if you tend to recoup some of your cost by reselling, although in my experience that works out to pretty much a wash: I rarely net more than a few dollars on resale after all the costs are totalled up ... little enough that I do it more out of a desire to free up space in my house (and give someone else a deal) than to make money. YMMV, but to me the real value in reselling versus e-books is not economic but goodwill, allowing secondary market purchasers to save a little money.

If you are one of those people who buy almost all of their books at used book shops then sure, e-books are a raw deal. You will usually be able to beat an e-book's price, and sometimes quite significantly. On the other hand, that's waaaay less convenient. Personally I have frequented used book stores less to save money than to find books you cannot find on the shelves of first-sale retailers, and I really welcome the expansion of back-catalog e-books as a way to eliminate "out of print" availability problems. Moreover, if you happen to like the classics then e-books are the best thing to hit book buying since Gutenberg -- tens of thousands of books that are simply free for the taking, books that publishers like Penguin used to charge full paperback prices for.

On the whole, I'll take the e-books thanks. They save me money, they're vastly more convenient, the catalog on Amazon nowadays is larger than you'll find at any physical bookstore (to say nothing of the likes of the bookstore in the Salt Lake City airport, which blows), and I am not accumulating books in my house at anything like the rate I was three years ago. (I have thousands of them, although much fewer than before I lost around five cubic yards of them in a flood last spring.)

Mind you, I understand that a lot of the value of paper books is not economic. It's much nicer to curl up with your favorite book in paper, and it's nice to have someone be able to learn something about your tastes just by looking at your shelves. Now, though, I only buy and keep paper books if I know I like them ... and I look forward to the day, probably not long hence, where print-on-demand (made possible on large scale by e-books) allows me to buy quarter-bound copies of books that were never offered in that format, even when new.

The Wired iPad app does give you a way to see the breadth of the content without having to go page-by-page using a navigation bar that has images of a number of pages across it. It uses a scroll bar whereas I'd rather flick, but either way it is a fine way to browse quickly and I use that pretty regularly. I would like to be able to make the icons bigger, though, so I could get more of an idea of what's on the page ... and maybe that becomes a whole new mode.

Zinio does more or less the same thing.