Adobe Takes On Microsoft Role In E-book Market 161
ericatcw writes "Barnes & Noble, Sony and other e-book vendors may have the manufacturing muscle, but the brains directing the challenge against Amazon.com's Kindle eBook Reader is Adobe Systems. Like Microsoft, Adobe has built a formidable ecosystem of partners to whom it supplies software such as its encryption/DRM-creating Adobe Content Server. Adobe paints Amazon as being like Apple: secretive and playing badly with others. Amazon argues it just ain't so, and takes a jab, along with other critics, at Adobe's alleged open-ness."
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No more Photoshop, no more Illustrator, no more After Effects...
You know, Adobe's apps make the graphic design/post production/digital art world go round, even if we regret that it is a single company doing it. Their high end professional applications are generally pretty good (yes , overpriced, and 'upgraded' too often with pointless features, but still). I'm not sure I'd like to see them go abandonware.
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Well, there are an awful lot of struggling/semi-professional graphic designers/artists/freelancers out there. A long tail of people who I suspect make up a significant proportion of adobe's market, or potential market.
Obviously, I don't know this for sure. But when I worked in post-production I saw an endless stream of people who needed adobe products to ply their trade, who were lucky to make the cost of their software in a month. They were stuck in Adobe's (pointless) upgrade cycle because the studios the
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No, I don't think that's the case. In the media world a whole lot depends on how well you schmooze. Talent is not a ticket to money.
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No, I think we desperately need competition in the area. I have thousand of man-hours sunk into Adobe's formats, because there aren't realistic choices. It would be a massive headache to have to move to different formats in new applications that might not do a particularly good job of importing old abandonware files.
What we need is for competition to force Adobe into a position where they have to a agree to open standards for their file formats. That's what I want, not the bankruptcy of a company that I bel
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You're right that HTML5 won't be in all browsers for a damn long time, but there's a good chance lot of the trendier websites (youtube, facebook, etc.) will start ignoring IE6 pretty soon. I think it's fairly clear that what's it propping it up are corporate intranets, and a lot of sites may just give up in the browsing from work on IE6 market.
Small sites may take the leap as well. I'm thinking of stopping IE6 testing on my personal site... I'm sure a lot of other one-man shows are thinking a similar thing
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Don't count on it. Like the poster above you said, Adobe has the design tools. Flash is just the presentation layer. Even with HTML5 video tags, the developer still needs to create that video some how. The odds are pretty good that Adobe will be involved some where in the creative process.
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Maybe I'm missing something but you really don't need Adobe to output Ogg Theora and H.264 video files.
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That's true. There are other video content creation tools out there. I was just making the point that Adobe owns a large portion of the market, along with Apple and their Final Cut software. There are a lot of "content creation professionals" out there who don't know anything more than Adobe products, and those people will continue to use those products no matter what HTML5 brings to the table.
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As a long-time Palm PDA + Sunrise + Plucker user, I'm really getting a chuckle out of all this attention e-books are getting lately :-P
But I guess it's all about content distribution and control from the publishers... not a game I've really even been fond of playing, especially when it comes to entertainment. If I have enough of that kind of free time on my hands, I can spend it looking for legitimate free entertainment (or producing my own), thank you.
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There's an e-book market?
There is, though perhaps not where you live (U.S.?). I buy non-DRM'd books for $1-2 each, usually 1-2 each week (now going through the back catalog), and read them on my PRS-505.
To be fair... (Score:3, Insightful)
Adobe just provides a platform; it's up to the producers to decide what protection (if any) to place on the documents.
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Adobe just provides a platform; it's up to the producers to decide what protection (if any) to place on the documents.
If you're the TSA, then you decide that using an Adobe pdf editor to redact your documents is a good, secure idea. No one could ever figure out how to take off those redactions [88.80.16.63] (from wikileaks). Oops.
The only thing that TSA manual is missing is a good procedure for properly redacting a document.
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ePub. It works on all of the above, and all ebook readers except the Kindle. (And is the one they are talking about in the article.) It's an open format, with DRM extensions. (Adobe, here, is the main seller of DRM-encoding software for it.)
a cross platform standard format (Score:2)
There is. Epub is open and is supported by everyone except Amazon.
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PDF is pretty well supported by nearly everyone too. Even Amazon supports it (albeit with a PC-based converter in their case)
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PDF isn't an ebook format. It's an e-paper format. It gets used for ebooks fairly often, but it's not very good at it.
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The main problem with PDFs is simple: People seem to think 'pages' are a good idea for book. They aren't. The are an artifact of using a printing press, and are the best way available for paper books to be assembled.
Books are stretches of text, possibly divided into chapters. Pages are interruptions in the reading experience. Pages that aren't the same size as your reading area just interrupt your reading experience multiple times.
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Then why isn't there a "page" tag?
For ePub and for HTML, for that matter... It would be cool, you could make your site fit in one page for readers that support it. (I guess just ebook readers). It would also mean that publishers could just use HTML with a container for any images/audio/DRM they might want to curse us with.
Or you could publish your own books just by incorporating some HTML tags.
Do any ebook readers support HTML + CSS?
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Actually the Kindle 2 (non DX version) now supports PDF files natively without conversion as of a recent software update.
Unfortunately as others have mentioned, PDF is a really shitty format for ebooks. You can't reflow the contents to do things like change the font. Plain text, ePub, or mobipocket are better formats to have ebooks in.
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$300 for a device that's easier on the eyes than an LCD screen, and can store 1500 books? I think that's a perfectly reasonable price for what you get.
I would agree with you, except you still have to purchase all 1,500 books. And they are not discounted to reflect the savings of no physical production, shipping, storefront, etc.
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It still doesn't wash:
1) Your iLiad cost $700 or so, not $300
2) $7 per public domain book is rather obtainable, on average
3) A library card costs (nearly) nothing, and would help with your space issues
4) Many of these same materials are accessible online with a device you already own for other purposes
"I wanted one" is an excellent justification for your purchase. "I saved money" is probably not.
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There is a LOT of free stuff available, especially older material. Get thee to mobiread.com. Much of what's there is Gutenberg reformatted, but there's still a lot of stuff. When you tire of that, get thee to archive.org, which lists 1.8 MILLION texts online. A lot of them are PDF. The Sony 505 handles the b/w pdf ok. Chokes on color PDF.
For newer stuff, get thee to fictionwise.com. I just bought one book at what I would call a ri
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Can ebook readers display images in PDFs?
It would be nice if when you bought a paperback or hardcover, the store automagically gave you an ebook version. Would be very nice, actually... But then you could just turn around and sell the deadtree copy and keep the ebook.
Might as well just download the book and buy the printed copy if you want it too.
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I prefer paper, too, but I'm a year and a half behind reading the paper version. I put each new one on the shelf until I get time to read it, and when I get time to read it it's never where I am. Sometimes I pick a few off the shelf when I go on a trip, but then I either run out while on the trip or don't finish and forget to put the ones I didn't read back on the shelf.
The e-versi
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Imagine how much money libraries of the future could save, by sending you your book electronically. They would save a fortune in shipping books around between libraries, storing them, etc. I know, they would always have books for historical reasons, but if I could log onto my libraries web site, and request a book, and then instantly get it online, that would make me use it much more. (my current library does the first 2, and emails me when my book is in, but I still have to drive 7 miles down to the lib
Have you heard of the internet? (Score:2)
I hear there's rampant copyright violation there.
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$300 for a device that's easier on the eyes than an LCD screen, and can store 1500 books? I think that's a perfectly reasonable price for what you get.
I would agree with you, except you still have to purchase all 1,500 books. And they are not discounted to reflect the savings of no physical production, shipping, storefront, etc.
As many have already pointed out, there are plenty of public domain ebooks available from Project Gutenberg and Google Books.
Some publishers also give away free ebooks to build readership - like the Baen Free Library [baen.com].
Some libraries also lend ebooks. My local library does, and we're a pretty small town. I'd imagine that if my library is doing it, it must be fairly widespread.
Also, while most ebooks are not discounted, there are some available. I've been watching the Barnes & Noble website for a couple
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And it's more like $250 now, really. The prices are going down, slowly but surely (it used to be $350 for then-new eInk readers ~2 years ago).
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E-book needs are not all the great for everyone for sure, but their practicality is also unmatched by any other one device.
Do you know of a device that lasts days on a charge gives you access to that web content on the move, and will cost me a total of less than $400 (figure a dozen paid books, a hundred free ones) for a couple years, to acquire and use consistently.
Also these readers do let you put notes into the works also. I know I had a link to a site that gave me the design I wanted for my concrete bl
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$300 for a device that's easier on the eyes than an LCD screen, and can store 1500 books? I think that's a perfectly reasonable price for what you get.
Personally I wouldn't pay $300 for the current available models, they are (in my opinion) not good enough; but I have no doubt that a few years down the line the quality of the readers will be such that I would have no doubt paying $300 or more; maybe even a lot more. For now I am content waiting for the technology and services to improve to what I would consider an acceptable level. I still remember my first mp3 player, and my first mobile phone; large, chunky, heavy, low battery time, poor UI, and general
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For you. For me the reasonable price for this (where I would buy one) lies at $20-25. That’s right. That’s how much a dollar from me is worth to me.
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Meh, $300 isn't bad considering you get free wireless web browsing with the unit. If someone made one in color with a GPS and offered that kind of data plan, I might actually consider ditching my mobile phone company's wap browsing service.
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While I agree with you, I think you're confusing the terms "market" and "desire on your own personal part".
Amazon has, several times, run out of stock on the Kindle in its various incarnations. Barnes and Noble's Nook is currently on backorder until mid-January. Both of these facts point to a good market for e-book readers.
However, like you, I don't see enough benefit from them. Yes, the form factor would be nice, but spending $250-$300 for the right to repurchase my library in a new format and cut me of
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It'd be nice if somebody came up with a cheapish, nondestructive paperback digitizer.
If you don't mind slicing off the binding you can just get a drop scanner for ~250, but I'm a bit squeamish about that.
Hardbacks are easy, there's at least one DIY system thats pretty fast.
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I wouldn't even mind if I could buy digital forms of older books for the same price I pay for my paperbacks, which is usually between 50 cents and a dollar. I'm not talking about new releases, but stuff that's been out for a few years in mass market paperback.
But, alas, I don't see a market in used e-books starting up anytime soon.
at 400 (Score:2)
Amazon has sold bunches, so while it may not be YOUR market at these prices, there is one.
How about $90 (Score:2)
How about $90?
Yeh, it doesn't have the fancy screen, it's a bit like a late '90s PDA with a bigger screen, but I read ebooks on a late '90s PDA with a 160x160 display for several years.
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There certainly won't be a market until the prices of the readers come down. $300? You gotta be crazy.
For a heavy reader, buying a couple new books a month in e-book format instead of hardback can save $300 in a year or two.
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There certainly won't be a market until the prices of the readers come down. $300? You gotta be crazy. Even at $50 they would in any case likely never entice me completely away from the real thing.
You clearly don't travel a lot, especially internationally.
EBook readers are frigging great. I have one... while I'm totally unhappy with the quality over all of *EVERY* e-book reader out there, the benefit outweighs the problems, if only marginally. The fact is, I have a very limited amount of space to carry my things. On 8 - 14 hour flights, I can easily go through a 700 page book if not two. There is no way I can carry around 4 700 page books, at a minimum, on each flight along with all my other gear
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Kindle is 259 right now. If you read a lot of books, the thing pays for itself just in shipping (specially if you're international).
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When I can stick a reader in my back pocket, toss it on the table, leave it out on the deck overnight and have it get soaked in dew, I'll buy one.
You can do all of that now.
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Really? Which reader fits in a back pocket? And, can I sit on the bus or the train with it in my pocket?
How tough are the readers? The ones I've seen all look fairly fragile - like a simple elbow on the screen would render it useless.
Adobe (Score:2)
If Adobe manages to do as well of a job with this latest enterprise as they've done with Flash CS4, then Amazon should be handed the entire market on a platter. Flash CS4 is the single most painful, unresponsive program I've ever had the displeasure of using, and I'm shocked how the same engineers that can produce a program as high-quality as Photoshop can't manage to catch repetitive 10-20 second UI freezes in Flash during testing.
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I agree. The first change they need to make is to allow Flash to work reliably over a LAN. For software whose purpose is to create internet content, it seems a little ridiculous that their official policy is to not support any type of LAN use in any context.
If anyone has Flash installed and wants to see what I'm talking about, open up Flash and use it to create or open a FLA file on a network share. With the file open, remove access to the network share. Now marvel as it's not possible to save the file
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There are so many little bugs in Adobe's products that have remained since I first used them, I think it's pretty obvious the codebase is stagnant.
If they rewrote a significant part of Flash, I can't believe they'd leave it in its Macromedia-ish state. Its animating tools should feel like a blend of Illustrator and After Effects, not the very strange mix of vector and bitmap behaviour it has now.
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"With the file open, remove access to the network share."
I know of very few programs that don't misbehave when you yank out a whole filesystem from underneath them.
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Sure, but do you know of any other program that will not let you save an open file to local storage if that file was opened from a network share that no longer exists? We used to have DHCP leases expiring at some point in the middle of the day, so all the Flash developers would start screaming when their IP got renewed. No one else really had much of a problem when that happened, only the Flash guys. Even the most basic text editor I've got will let me save an open file anywhere I want, regardless of how
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Adobe really doesn't like rewriting things they don't absolutely have to rewrite.
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Don't worry, Adobe is making damn sure of that. Hopefully you also enjoy attending training seminars and classes, that way you won't have to use our online courseware from the comfort of your home or office.
Got to Side with Amazon on this one (Score:4, Insightful)
So Amazon thinks through a problem and designs an elegant solution, takes care of the software, hardware, and marketing.
Adobe just wants to inject their proprietary technology into a process and sit back and enjoy the royalties.
Screw Adobe. They don't even do any coding here in the US anymore.
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So Amazon thinks through a problem and designs an elegant solution, takes care of the software, hardware, and marketing ...
... and vendor lock-in. Not really any different from Adobe's proprietary DRM.
That said, I would still pick Adobe in this fight, since their win means that I can buy a (DRM'd) ebook from any of a large list of online stores, use it on a large list of readers from different manufacturers, and switch from reader to reader and from store to store as I see fit. With Amazon, I'm locked into their store and their product line.
Who cares about DRMed eBooks? (Score:2)
Been there, done that, applied the Preparation H, won't go there again.
I've still got (and read) books I bought 30-40 years ago. DRMed content is lucky to survive five years before the company decides keeping the magic servers up isn't profitable and you're unable to migrate the content to the next version of the platform... if there is one.
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Plus the DRMed versions cost about 3-4 times as much as the exact same books non-DRMed. What's up with that?
In other words, one vendor is marginally better... (Score:2)
... than one retailer, when it comes to choice.
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Aren't Kindle books shareable between any device that has the Kindle app installed?
I have a couple of Kindles and they share any books I buy (registered to the same person), although I havent tried to buy a book for the iPhone app, isn't it shared there too?
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Aren't Kindle books shareable between any device that has the Kindle app installed?
I'm not interested in non-eInk devices, and eInk ones are usually not extensible application-wise (and even if they were, I doubt Amazon would consider porting to them).
My point is that two devices that I have are already from different manufacturers, and the next ebook reader that I'll buy (likely next year) will probably be something else still - at this point I'm leaning towards Nook, but I'll have to hold it and see it with my own eyes to be sure. And my collection of books (which are all TXT or PDF) mo
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There seems to be an alternative definition of 'openness' in the corporate environment, in view of Amazon trying to defend from Adobe's accusation of 'not playing with others':
Openness: acting in concert with other vendors to screw consumers
According to this definition, Adobe is comparing itself with Microsoft who, indeed, plays quite well with others...
Fascinating...
Poor Adobe... (Score:2)
No-one will ever let them play in the same playground. Maybe it has something to do with their j2ee'esq server apps (anyone who has ever configured them knows what I'm talking about) or the fact that their server software is REALLY expensive compared to what Amazon already rolled.
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I've used several of their video server apps, and besides trying to figure out which ones you need to accomplish a task (good luck), they are a mess to install and configure.
Other than Coldfusion, which works great, installs easy, runs in j2ee, but is treated as a "not developed here" solution.
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Ahh - I've never used cold fusion really - I was thinking about their livecycle apps (which is what this ebook thing is all about) not quite 100% j2ee compatible.
Getting them running on jboss was a lesson in torture.
How so ? (Score:3, Interesting)
The story title reads: "Adobe Takes On Microsoft Role In E-book Market" yet the only reference I found on Microsoft, on both linked articles, is this:
Though Adobe may balk at the comparison, its role in the e-book market is similar to Microsoft's in the PC market: a builder of a semi-open ecosystem of partners to whom it sells publishing tools.
So, what does Microsoft have to do with both articles really ?
Adobe vs Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh yeah, because Adobe Flash sure plays nice on Mac OS X. /sarcasm
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Wait, what? There's a problem with flash on osx? How is it I've never run across it?
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Its about the content, and the price (Score:2)
Have you seen the prices for Sony Reader books? My wife wants a reader for Christmas, so she looked up some of the books she bought over the last year, and the ones she plans to buy in the next months or so. Amazon came in at about 2/3 the cost of Sony, and B&N doesn't have an ereader store (or an ereader that will ship before the biggest consumer day in the western world - nice job, guys). Since the readers are comparable in price and features, the Kindle - for all its flaws - wins out for someone who
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They have an ereader app available for several platforms (including iPhone) and a ereader store, even though their dedicated ereader device is not yet shipping.
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B&N doesn't have an ereader store (or an ereader that will ship before the biggest consumer day in the western world - nice job, guys).
Barnes & Noble has been selling ebooks on their site for quite some time now [barnesandnoble.com]. Further, most of their normal books have an indicator right on the page when they are available in ebook format.
Their ereader is available for download [barnesandnoble.com] on the iPhone/iPod Touch, Blackberry, PC, and Mac - and has been for a while.
The nook's first shipments have already gone out. Several of those shipments will be on doorsteps well before Christmas. There was plenty of opportunity, if you had already made up your mind, to pur
pssst... the drm is easily breakable (Score:2)
Please, don't make too much noise that might change my favorite ebook store's (shortcovers) mind about using a DRM format that's easy to break into something nice.
Adobe winning will kill off DRM free e-books (Score:2)
If you want a future where e-books are DRM free then you need to hope that the same thing happens with e-books as it did with music.
That is, one company having the majority of the market, not licencing their DRM solution and publishers having to resort to DRM free products if they want to sell outside of the walled garden.
Since Adobe will licence their technology to anyone who wants it, there is no incentive for the publishers to give up on DRM. Which, for e-books at least, means it'll be here to stay for a
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And what are you saying to convince us to do the same? That Amazon is overzealous about security? I think a lot of people will take this as a plus.
Re:Amazon sucks... (Score:4, Interesting)
fired without cause as part of a witch hunt on a security breach.
Unfortunately, this sentence nullifies your credibility. This is what sociopaths say when they're fired for everything. This is what all my ex-con buddies say when they can't hold down a job for more than 6 months. It's what 16 year olds say when they get fired for doing 10 minutes of work in an hour, because they were too busy texting their friends about the movie on Friday. This is what unclever people say when they tried to pull something clever, got caught, and refused to believe that someone could see through the cleverness of their crappy plans.
I'm not saying that you fit into these categories, or that you did something wrong. Rather, I'm saying, you are simply using the same wording that they ALL use, which immediately triggers off "BULLSHIT" alarms in anyone over the age of 18 who doesn't use this line -- so don't bother with ever using it. Remove that line and your post carries much greater impact.
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Yeah, and your post is an example of a statistical fallacy where from "an incompetent person is likely to use this defense" you conclude that "a person who uses this defense is likely to be incompetent". Classic.
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Yeah, and your post is an example of a statistical fallacy where from "an incompetent person is likely to use this defense" you conclude that "a person who uses this defense is likely to be incompetent". Classic.
You should ask for your money back from those speed reading classes. My conclusion is that "a person who uses this defense is likely to be treated as incompetent." Spot the difference.
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I didn't say that you committed the fallacy. But you basically stated that most readers here will commit the fallacy. So your chain of reasoning went from "incompetent people are likely to use this defense" directly to "Slashdot readers are likely to conclude that a person using this defense is incompetent".
I just wish I had that crystal ball of yours, so that I can dumb down my future posts for people who cannot reason rationally.
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Apple being "secretive and playing badly with others" is the main reason we have a mostly DRM-free music market these days. We can only hope that Amazon will be so helpfully and successfully obstinate.
Amazon's mp3 store really did the trick in moving the whole market (read: Apple) to DRM-free music.
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It's only been a few years and people are already quoting incorrect information about this...
You think Amazon just decided unilaterally to sell non-DRM'ed music? You think Apple wanted DRM'ed music?
1. Apple asked the record companies to remove DRM. The companies refused.
2. The record companies were getting more and more afraid of Apple's hold on the market. That's why they gave Amazon the authorization to sell non-DRM'ed MP3 files (not to mention compatibility problems with the huge installed base of portab
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AAC is better than MP3, but thanks for the correction about the bitrate. And at least iTunes isn't limited to four countries.
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True, but people do forget that Apple wedged the door open: Theirs was the first non-uber-draconian DRM. (And could be broken, with Apple's own default install, right at launch.) At the time, it was a major step forward, and something only Apple could have pulled off.
Once they showed that the piracy boogyman wasn't as bad as was feared, and started showing exactly how much power even that little bit of DRM got Apple, then the music companies were willing to talk to others like Amazon about going without.
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Adobe generally has the biggest, bloated software of all of them. And they have a phoney upgrade cycle that adds the least value added in the new feature dept compared to everyone.
You've clearly never used AutoCAD or dealt with AutoDesk. Adobe can't hold a candle to that racket.
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I could adjust the page size in a latex file and then run pdflatex. Aside from the difficulty of editing pdfs, is it easy to change the page size?
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What's wrong with postscript? It was made to deal with text...
It was made to deal with preformatted and layed out text. It's not reflowable.