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I agree. Just look at other wars such as video tape, bluray, pc. People will go where they get the most freedom. There are too many tablets out there that are incompatible. PDF does do the job, as does web format. Sure there will have to be some work done to make pdf compatible with smaller displays, and I suspect it will be done, or pdf will be replaced with something that does. There will be some sort of common format that will solve the problem. The current situation in tablets cannot exist, and the winners will be the ones that are most flexible. Just look at ITunes. Originally apple tried to tie everything down, but that did not work and they had to change. I suspect Itunes will eventually die. I know I will not use Itunes, just like I will not use non-standard formats for books. I go with pdf (i am also fine with word, rtf, etc), and anything else is not get my dollar.
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What the article ignores is that the current ePub and mobi formats works well enough for the main application - portable books. Last not least miles better than PDF.
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Maybe e-books are obsolete.
I read e-books on my phone using an open-source e-reader.
I need a reader to have a toc, remember by bookmarks per book and remember where I stopped per book. Currently browsers, pdf readers, word and text editors don't do this (I don't want to bookmark where I ended every time I put done my phone).
Maybe we'll end up with an e-reader that reads html5 together with other formats. Epub is not the only format out there. Html5 will just be another format for a reader to process.
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Somehow I feel that both the paperback and ebooks will coexist although the paperback volumes might drop further.
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The assumption here (erroneous) is that everyone a) has an e-reader of some description and b) gives a toss about the format of the item they are reading. Another fatuous prediction of a non-event.
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: they are at a hopeless competitive disadvantage compared to full-fledged websites and even the humble PDF.
Heck, I think they have always been at a hopeless competitive disadvantage with an actual book!
But then again, I'm like that crotchety lawyer on that original Star Trek episode that goes on about "Books!" Gene Roddenberry was ahead of his time in so many ways.
Marc
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The Source Filmmaker (SFM) is the movie-making tool built and used by us here at Valve to make movies inside the Source game engine. Because the SFM uses the same assets as the game, anything that exists in the game can be used in the movie, and vice versa. On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy.
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For more than a decade, synthetic biologists have promised to revolutionize the way we produce fuels, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. It turns out, however, that programming new life forms is not so easy. Now some of these same scientists are turning back to nature for inspiration. God help us; we're in the hands of engineers.
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Have some heavy-duty computations to run, but looking for a solution other than Amazon's EC2 or rolling your own supercomputer? Google has an alternative. Run your large-scale computing workloads on Linux virtual machines hosted on Google's infrastructure. I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
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The Nexus 7 is an amazing package for something that costs a penny less than $200. It feels like something that could sell for much more. It has a great screen, solid performance and a clean, clear, uncluttered version of Google's latest operating system, Jelly Bean. From a pure hardware standpoint it beats the Kindle in every way possible -- except for content. Questions... Morphology? Longevity? Incept dates?
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When you stand back from all the announcements made by Google today and increase the periphery, you start to notice that this is a company that is fighting a lot of battles on many fronts. In some places it is winning, but most places it is trench warfare. This is my codebase. There are many others like it, but this one is mine!
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Ben is surprised that the shareholders are ok with the Google mentality of giving so much away (I doubt he is. It’s just a literary device). I think it is a brilliant and terrible strategy. Let me put on my tinfoil hat for a bit. Here’s the Google business in a nutshell... Blah blah blah. You gotta believe me!
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The new Chrome for iOS is not a browser. It is a Chromelike skin over Apple's Safari, and it will be slower than Apple's Safari. As Buzzfeed says, it is "literally required to suck." What's more: by announcing this bogus "Chrome for iOS," Google shivs Android where it should be shilling it. You'd have yourself a real street-sweeper here if you put a little work into it.
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Many years ago, long before the birth of the web, there was a time when France was the happening-est place in the digital universe. What the TGV was to train travel, the Pompidou Centre to art, and the Ariane project to rocketry, in the early 1980s the Minitel was to the world of telecommunications. Thanks to this wondrous beige monitor attached to the telephone, while the rest of us were being put on hold by the bank manager or queueing for tickets at the station, the French were already shopping and travelling "online". Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.
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European Commissioner Karel De Gucht plans to ignore four ruling bodies voting to kill ACTA, and enforce it anyway. [ITworld]
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Far outside the RAI convention center and apart from Microsoft TechEd 2012 Europe, MS organized a Windows 8 workshop yesterday -- and while they didn't reveal anything new, they did put more serious effort into explaining how Windows 8 and the ARM-based Wndows RT will fit the enterprise -- with varying degrees of success. ITworld
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People expect that, as you grow older, you give up practical jobs such as programming for more noble tasks such as managing a team and acquiring funding. As a sign that I favor horizontal collaboration, I still program even though I am old. This is unusual. Do what you love. Please.
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In late 2009, I created an online persona named Pete London – a self-described JavaScript ninja – to help attract and hire the best JavaScript recruiters. While I never hired a recruiter from the experiment, I learned a ton about how to compete in today’s Silicon Valley talent war. Based upon two years of non-scientific research, here’s what you should know... The best way to hire? Find coders who can recognize talent.
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This article is mostly bullshit. The author comes of as incredibly naive; as though they just discovered that the business of hiring people is rather cut throat. Duh. If there's money to made in something, there are going to be a lot of scammers in that area; technology isn't magically immune. (And it goes both ways; most hiring managers have hired engineers who completely misrepresented their own skills and talents.)
Just like with any company, you can't just passively wait for jobs to drop in your lap. You need to do research and identify those companies who will benefit you. Many recruiters truly stink, however I've worked with several that are fantastic. I just dealt with one this week (they got me my last job and are working on getting me my next one--just this week, they got me an interview with a company that's almost impossible to get interviews at.) But that's also true of HR departments. I've dealt with (and worked for) companies that filter their resumes so heavily that it's almost impossible to get hired (or to hire someone.)
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ToneCraft lets you build music in 3D. The Y-axis represents the pitch of the tone, the X-axis represents the time and the different colors represent different instruments. The Z-axis makes it possible to layer sounds and to create whatever visual structures you like. (Note that it may only work in recent releases of Chrome.) Booshah booshah plink plink, booshah booshah plink plink...
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I ran into a really fun bug at work yesterday, where I discovered that my C program was branching down logically inconsistent code paths. After drinking another cup of coffee and firing up GDB I realized that somehow, a boolean variable in my code was simultaneously testing as both true and not true. I blame Kernighan and Ritchie.
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Yup Always blame the parents.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: I blame Kernighan and Ritchie.
They were just following orders.
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