January 2010 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: on your planet
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Jan '10

27 Jan '10

ok, here's that reply a wrote over the weekend. i didn't send it then, because i was hoping this thread would end. but i probably should have, because it might have prevented some of the unnecessary and unproductive drift on this thread. anyway, here it is, unedited, so sorry if it hits some points that were later repeated in the thread as it developed. -bowerbird ************************************************************************* walter said: > Even a broken clock is right twice a day. interesting, because i use that same expression about someone else. except i note that he is a _hyperactive_ clock, and is therefore correct about 10 times per day. except he never knows if he's right or wrong. > The bird is right when he says that > the iPhone put the the web in our pockets > in the sense that it, just like the iPod before it, > had almost next to nothing that was > new in terms of technical capabalities, > but through extremely clever packaging made those > techincal capabilities interesting to the masses. well... except that's not what i said, not what i said at all, not even close to what i said, not even on the same planet. (perhaps walter is on the same planet as david, i dunno.) there were indeed mp3 players before the ipod came about. so if you think of the ipod as an mp3 player, then you might just come to the conclusion that the ipod was "nothing new". but that would be a stupid conclusion. what the ipod did was it married the hardware to software, in the form of the itunes store, which made the _purchase_ of digital songs slick and easy, transforming the industry... the software also made it easy to rip your entire collection from the physical c.d. form to the digital ipod form, which was another vitally important piece of the puzzle that most of the other hardware companies had overlooked entirely... (and don't bother telling me that it was _possible_ to do it with other brands; the whole point is apple made it _easy_. other people aren't masochists like you, so they don't like to power through the pure pain of technology like you do.) and let us not forget that apple creates beautiful products. sure, they're overpriced. but apple is smart enough to know that overpricing can help you as much as it hurts you, _if_ you are capable of delivering the highest-quality experience, and apple is, because they actually work on that experience... apple cares about the interaction of a person with a product, and their attention to detail in this matter makes 'em special. and yes, it certainly helps that apple has a lot of money to spend on advertising. heck, they kept billboard companies alive during the first half of the last decade, they sure did... in a nutshell, apple made the mp3 player people wanted to buy. and then they did the same thing when it came to the iphone... they reworked the smart-phone _entirely_, from top to bottom. they realized that display-size was all-important, so they made the display the full phone face, relegating buttons to software... they made that display a touch-screen, and then programmed an operating system that enabled an interface based on finger touch. and once we saw how it _should_ have been done from the start, we knew it instinctively and immediately, and everything changed. to call this "clever packaging" _could_ be considered an insult, except that it's just so brain-dead _stupid_ that it becomes an indication that the person using the phrase might just be insane. or be suffering from a very high fever. (do you feel ok, walter?) it took a lot of hard work and some very intelligent engineering to make a touch interface for a smart-phone, but apple did it... and people stood in line to buy it, stood in line for _months_... and apple packed plenty of other goodies into that little package, enough so app developers could build hundreds of thousands of useful and entertaining tools, and a whole bunch of fart apps too. moreover, apple negotiated a deal with a greedy-assed carrier to get unlimited bandwidth, precisely because they knew that their offer of "the internet in your pocket" was a _sincere_ one, one that people would actually _use_, and they were looking to protect their customers from the customary carrier rape charges. yeah, sure, some phones had "internet" checked on a feature-list before the iphone came along, but none of those phones had the kind of browser that the iphone has, or gave the same experience. they were confined to this mickey-mouse "mobile web" that had mickey-mouse text menus that were reminiscent of the 1970s... meanwhile, apple invented an interface that was so intuitive that people learned it by watching 30-second television commercials. and yes, it was a good thing that apple had lots of money so they could run lots of those commercials, and run them lots of times... but believe me, if you don't have the goods to back up your ads, you'd just be throwing away your money by running those ads... apple had the goods to back up their ads. apple is often first, but being first is not important to apple... what is important to apple is that they be the one that _lasts_. -bowerbird

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Re: Holst's Planets
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Jan '10

27 Jan '10

michael said: > Noting bird did not reply to my last reply to him. not so fast there, mister... i'll get around to it... :+) and to the one you just posted, too. but i've got a girlfriend at this end, and poetry events which must be attended, and dinner, and even twitter, and digitizing a book, in a friendly feud with rfrank, so you have to wait your turn... or... go out of turn... -bowerbird

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!@! CORRECTION. . .RESEND
by Michael S. Hart 27 Jan '10

27 Jan '10

My previous try didn't seem to make it, so. . . . CORRECTION: The finally mentioned 3G, but not 4G At $499 a lot of people can afford an iPad. 16GB is our base model. For 32GB its $100 more, and for $100 more than that you get $64GB. The 3G models cost another $130. Prices seem to be from $500 to $830 at the moment. The only eBook mentioned was $15, 50% higher than the $10 price tag on most commercial releases. iTunes should work the same. All models are unlocked. No contract, prepaid, cancel any time. $15 a month for 1/4 gigabyte of total bandwidth. [You won't be downloading any movies!!!!!!!] [You might not even want too many iTunes. . . .]

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Taste & ethics with old e-books at Kindle
by Greg M. Johnson 27 Jan '10

27 Jan '10

Using an Ipod Touch, I downloaded some public domain books from the Kindle application. I was officially charged a transaction fee of "$0.00" for each one. 1) The Kindle version of the book, "Tom Swift and his Submarine" appears to have been hit by the TXT-80 virus. The lines of text wrap around in an illegible fashion just as they do with the TXT-80 format ones from PG. Fascinatingly, I just downloaded the epub format directly from PG, and it looks great! 2) I also took time to examine an ebook I'd downloaded **months ago* called, "Tales of the Fish Patrol". Knowing Chinese people and being a fan of the sea, I was really into the book by the end of Chapter One. Then I was hit with: ____________ End of this sample Kindle book. Enjoyed the sample Buy now or See details for this book in the Kindle Store ____________ The violations of taste of this project hit me like a brick. If Amazon were to have charged me $0.10 for the cost of bandwidth, I would not have blinked. But to take a public domain book, and set it up as something you're supposed to pay to see the second half, and not making it exhaustively clear to the downloader what you are getting, is major uncool. After you've got through the teaser, they provide a link telling you they want $0.85 for the full version. BUT WAIT-- The free prelude to this ebook that I had on my Kindle, AFAICS, isn't on Amazon anymore! It doesn't show up in the first 25 listings. A new attempt to download "Tales of the Fish Patrol" has all the chapters. So, the system worked! Either the marketplace or the Amazon administrators appear to have taken action to make this work less prominent. So, the "true" ebook has an *ASIN:* B000JQV2WU. The $0.85 target you're supposed to buy has an *ASIN:* B002N0V0XG and is by * Publisher:* Bunny Books, Ink. (August 26, 2009) Any insights here? -- Greg M. Johnson http://pterandon.blogspot.com

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Kindle user problem with PG's The Touchstone
by Al Haines (shaw) 27 Jan '10

27 Jan '10

A message to the Errata system (see below) reports a problem with Edith Wharton's "The Touchstone", PG #267. Do other Kindle (II) users experience the reported problem with this particular book? Any advice I can forward to the writer? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I used The Magic Catalog of Project Gutenberg E-Books (MOBI Edition) running on my Kindle II To download by wireless The Touchstone. The download seemed to be successful (ie.The Touchstone was now listed on my Home list). When I opened the book it opened to the Title page. After that I lost control of all normal Kindle functions (Next Page, Prev Page, Home, Back). I then had to reset the Kindle. I tried a second time with the same exact results. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Al

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Re: Holst's Planets
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Jan '10

27 Jan '10

joey said: > you'd have us all believe that there is > some massive influx of browsing > that was never happening before > simply because Apple released the iPhone. that's exactly what i'm saying, you're right. (which is a huge improvement, in the sense that now you're not trying to put words in my mouth.) there are some 60 million people out there with itouch/iphone hardware who now visit the web -- at least occasionally -- who did not before... don't get me wrong. the opera mini-browser was a huge accomplishment, once upon a time. it was just placed in the wrong hardware is all. (and, on the flip side, nokia had some very cool hardware, but it was plagued by uncool software, and a user-base that never attained critical mass. that's the important concept here folks, critical mass.) > Your assertions hold no water. i'm _astounded_ anyone questions this observation, since those 60 million people are darn hard to miss! indeed, joey, didn't you say your wife was one of us? > if you're AT&T, and you managed to find > a massive scapegoat for your systemic failure, > you'd jump all over that too. i see. now you admit that 60 million users constitutes a "massive" phenomenon. so we have some progress. > Even assuming that AT&T is being honest > (which is not a given by any means) at&t conceded they can't handle the traffic in n.y. city. i'm sure plenty of people in manhattan can vouch for that. > and that this isn't some marketing ploy > Apple and AT&T cooked up oh yeah, sure, it's a great "marketing ploy" to admit that you can't handle the traffic in the country's biggest city. it's the kind of thing that does wonders for a reputation. > an especially uncomfortable thought since > I'm a daily victim of that horrid monstrosity > and can personally attest that it has not gotten > any worse in the 2+ years since the introduction > of the iPhone. it hasn't gotten any better, either, which is terribly sad. especially when the reports came out that said that even though at&t is making more money than before, they haven't plowed much of it back into building up their capacity for the future. it seems that they would rather just take the money and run. fake steve jobs had a great column on this about 2-4 weeks back... > you led me to believe you were developing your ZML app > on the only computer you could afford, and it was > several years old at the time your reading comprehension skills have never impressed me. > Where's the download link for this editor/viewer? join the zml_talk group at yahoogroups, and you can find the programs in the "files" section, dated june 9, 2005... write up a thoughtful review and post it to this listserve, and then i'll send you a more recent copy if you want one. but i get the feeling you're not interested. you just wanted to hurl an insult, and you didn't know that the one you threw ("vaporware"!) had its viability demolished over 5 years ago... -bowerbird

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Re: Holst's Planets
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Jan '10

27 Jan '10

c'mon joey. time after time i try to have a decent conversation with you, and time after time you end up making me regret it... *** joey said: > So, your evidence that "no one" was using Opera > is that some handful of blogs which you've personally polled > indicated that Opera was less than 0.01% of their traffic? > Exactly which sites did you include in your survey? > What was the standard deviation? dude. don't be stupid. there are organizations that track browser statistics on a world-wide basis, and they post their results for everyone to see. this ain't rocket-science. it's easy enough to google the results. > Perhaps you mean that, in general, Opera is considered > to only hold ~2% of the overall browser market? > But that's a meaningless comparison in this context > - the mobile browser market, even with > your beloved iPhones out there in the wild for 2+ years, > the best numbers I can find indicate that iPhone browsing > is estimated a only 0.08 percent of all browsing activity worldwide. > What a sea-change indeed! at&t has come out and said that iphone browsing is bursting the seams of their network. what more evidence do we need? do you guys live in a box? > Or is it perhaps simply that YOUR social group > (assuming anyone willing socializes with you) i see. now we start the direct ad hominem process. > has finally joined the rest of the world and > started using a computer more modern > than your ancient Macintosh my ancient macintosh? i'm running a nice macbook, mac os 10.5, with a 24-inch cinema screen, dude... i'm not sure who's feeding you your information, but you might want to do some fact-checking before you embarrass yourself... > that you're using to build the vaporware ZML viewer/editor? oops... too late... you already embarrassed yourself... that "vaporware" you're talking about was up years ago. nobody seemed to care. do you think i should push it? whatever the case, you're on notice. make the conversation worthwhile, joey, or i'm gonna stop talking to you... again... -bowerbird

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Re: Holst's Planets
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Jan '10

27 Jan '10

joey said: > Bird: You appear to ignoring the approximately > 700 million devices which, since sometime in 2005, > have been able to run the Opera Mini browser, > which is a full-scale browser like Firefox, IE, > Chrome, Safari, or its own big brother, Opera. gawd, it's like talking to a wall. > I have personally been using Opera Mini > on a myriad of devices for almost 4 years now you and who else? oh yeah, those 700 million "devices". but, for some strange unknown mysterious reasons, 99.9% of the people who check their weblogs find that opera (in all its forms) registers under 1% of their visits. and that's my point, here, people, that's my whole point. very few smart-phone users were using their smart-phones to visit the web. so even if it was "possible", in some sense of the word, no matter how sharply constrained, the fact is that very few people actually made use of that "possibility". and the fact that a few of you can come here and say "i did" doesn't change the fact that very few people out there in the real world were using their smart-phones to access the web. not until the iphone came along. even now, years after apple _revolutionized_ the way that smart-phones accessed the web, the small percentage of people who own iphones access the web disproportionately, clocking in at about twice the usage, if i remember correctly. > Maybe next time, you can actually hire a professional to > do your research for you, as you so clearly > dropped the ball here. maybe next time you can actually hire a professional to come here and try to put stupid words in my mouth, because you clearly are incapable of performing the task. > Admittedly, the small screens makes using websites on these > a decidedly sub-optimal experience, but that's only marginally > less true of the iPhone or iPod touch that you seem so very fond of. and evidently -- based on the actual facts of real-word usage -- the "marginally" better iphone screen makes a world of difference. or maybe it's the touchscreen. or the radically-transformed interface. or maybe it's z _combination_ of all of these factors, and even more. and, just to keep the record straight, i'm not "so very fond of" the iphone. the screen is still too small for me, for the most part... but my _personal_ feelings are not of any real importance here... what's important is the revolution that advanced the state of the art to the point where tens of millions of people were suddenly accessing the world wide web from their phones. that made all the difference... if microsoft would've done that, i would be cheering for microsoft... if h.p. would've done it, i'd be cheering for them, and talking about how _they_ made a difference by putting the web in our pocket... so, do you "get it"? it's _not_ who put the capability in place first, putting the first cell-phone-user online. it's who _developed_ it, to the point _tens_of_millions_ of cell-phone-users went online. -bowerbird

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Re: Holst's Planets
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 26 Jan '10

26 Jan '10

michael said: > there are some browsers on phone that are ugly. > However, if you did your homework on them, > even five years ago, you could get > one that worked pretty much like > whatever you had on your other devices. i "did my homework". the so-called "web-browser" on these "smart" phones was a steaming pile of crap. moreover, the data plans offered were just _traps_ designed to snag you into a _staggering_ phone-bill. which is why nobody actually _used_ these "browsers", not for any kind of persistent day-to-day web usage... > I did. And it was a common garden variety model, > though admittedly expensive to buy new, > so I got a used one, of course. at a bargain price, i am sure, because the older owner realized the game that the phone-company was playing, and decided to opt out of the tar-baby. and you sidestepped the tar-pit by not using it as a phone, per se, so you weren't saddled with the monthly cost. smart. but definitely not typical. > I have yet to see such menus that > didn't just point/click just like the others. i'm not sure what you're saying here. if you want to see some of the sites i was talking about, i can dig 'em up for you. i guarantee they look primitive. and they had no graphics at all. not the web we all know. > Duh? > Because Apple INSISTED you buy into THEIR network. . .!!! um, that's because none of the other carriers would let steve put their phone on their networks, probably because they knew that -- with a real web-browser -- people would use a lot of bandwidth, and they weren't willing to provide it at the time, especially not at the flat rate that steve demanded. of course, in hindsight, they were stupid, because they could have buried at&t, but instead they let a 3rd-place contender remain alive. > I certainly don't know ALL the functions of my phones, > or of the iPhone. . .but as far as surfing the Internet > and downloading/reading PG eBooks, it was all just fine, > except that .zip worked best for downloading and space. i'm perfectly willing to believe you're happy with your phone. i'm perfectly willing to believe most iphone owners are happy with their phone too, and wouldn't trade it for any other phone. i'm happy with my iphone, and wouldn't trade it for any other, but i didn't buy the 3gs when it came out last summer because i didn't want to re-up for another 2-year contract, because i was hoping that by this summer at&t would lose exclusivity, and i want to ditch them. and it looks like i'm gonna get that. i'm perfectly willing to stay off the bleeding edge if it cuts me. > Not like a million other people didn't buy the same phone! except that a million people doesn't make a revolution today. but the 60-80 million iphone/ipodtouch owners certainly do, as do the 8.75 million people who bought an iphone last quarter. you can't ignore numbers like that. none of the big boys are pooh-poohing the iphone any more. they're playing catch-up. > Actually, Mr. Bird, if you go to Europe, you might be surprised at > the phones they have, and the prices, and the price to operate. i have a very good handle on what's happening around the world. and the iphone is neither "late", nor "technologically inferior"... (although the u.s.a. as a whole is dragging its feet quite badly.) -bowerbird

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Re: Holst's Planets
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 25 Jan '10

25 Jan '10

oh geez. i wrote a reply on this thread, but didn't send it, because i was hoping the thread would just die on its own. but evidently not... *** michael said: > You seem to be missing the point as well. well, there seem to be several "points" floating around. one is that _some_ phones could access the web _before_ the iphone came along. technically, that's true, if only for those technically-inclined who opted to subject themselves to the torture of tremendously inelegant, clumsy interfaces. then the iphone came along, for the rest of us, and now literally tens of millions of normal people access the web by using their iphones without dread, or even any angst, and they access the same web they get on their computers, not some hobbled "mobile" version with plain-text menus reminiscent of the 1970s. > iPhones don't account for but a few percent of all cellphones, > or even all web cellphones, or even all web/wifi/cellphones. and yet iphone users account for as much as 80% of the usage on the at&t network, enough to drive it to its knees some places. why? because steve made a web-browsing phone for the masses... which was _not_ a trivial undertaking. it's a massive achievement, one that the old guard in phones were totally incapable of doing. > As I said, I have one much older, > and I never turned it on as a phone, I just used the wifi. . . . you're not a typical user, michael. which is why i love you so... :+) *** marcello said: > The iPhone is late, technically inferior, overpriced > and locked into its vendor. it figures that marcello would say something so stupid, which is why he's in my spam folder. now if only keith stops quoting him. -bowerbird

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