Tweak that Kindle, Jeff !

Amazon Kindle gave me a lot of hope. I was looking forward to ever-fresh, non greying pages no matter how many times I read a book. I longed for bookmarking at the press of a button, no chopping woods for paper etc.etc. The Kindle, I was told was all that and more.

But it hardly seems to be the case.

Ok. There’s no clutter, no pile of paperbacks next to the couch. A Kindle book arrives wirelessly: it’s untouchable; it exists on a higher, purer plane. It’s earth-friendly, too, supposedly. Yes, it’s made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years. But no tree farms are harvested to make a Kindle book; no ten-ton presses turn, no ink is spilled.

Too bad it doesn’t have a little kickstand,” . “You could prop it up like a dresser mirror and read while you eat.”

I experimented with the text-to-speech feature. The robo-reader had a polite, halting, Middle European intonation, like Tom Hanks in “The Terminal,” and it was sometimes confused by periods. Once it thought “miss.” was the abbreviation of a state name: “He loved the chase, the hunt, the split-second intersection of luck and skill that allowed him to exercise his perfection, his inability to Mississippi.” I turned the machine off.

Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don’t fare so well on the little gray screen. Page numbers are gone, so indexes sometimes don’t work. Trailing endnotes are difficult to manage. (Cook books / Recipes will suck when you try a new dish to see if the outcome tallies with the intention) If you want to quote from a book you’ve bought, you have to quote by location range—e.g., the phrase “She was on the verge of the mother of all orgasms” is to be found at location range 1596-1605 in Mari Carr’s erotic romance novel “Tequila Truth.”

Read in the sun the letters began to disappear. Readers had to press Alt-G repeatedly to bring them back. I clicked Next Page as I reached the beginning of the last line, and the page flashed to black and changed before I’d read it all

The Sony Reader’s page-turning controls are better designed than the Kindle’s controls, and the Reader came out more than a year before the Kindle did; also, its screen is slightly less gray, and its typeface is better, and it can handle ePub and PDF documents without conversion,

You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.

And then you cut out the bad tobacco odor that you often get while opening books in a library.

Microsoft is too fidgety with all that cash

Now that Microsoft has backed off from $47 billion yahoo bid, it squirms and fidgets with all that cash hoard. It has to find another better way to squander the dough. So why not give it away? Not to shareholders, that's boring straight. New idea – pay people that search through Microsoft live and complete a transaction.

Despite Redmond's best efforts, Microsoft Live Search remains mired in a distant third place, behind Google and Yahoo, as the reference of choice on Web, and not content to pin its hopes for growth on increased relevance or innovation, Microsoft is resorting to the most basic of incentives: money. Today the company introduced "Live Search Cashback,"

You certainly don’t cast off Single Era Conjecture, do you…?

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I'd rather be offline inside the Dreamliner

"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore" goes French historian and novelist Andre Malraux – motivating people to take risks, innovate and grow. But it seems designers at Boeing took that *oceanic discovery* bit a trifle too seriously while working on its 787 Dreamliner. In their eagerness to go one up on competitor Airbus industrie, they chose to let nerdy passengers hook up to the Net while airborne. Nothing wrong with that feature addition, had they not been so very generous to let cyber crawlers mess with the aircraft's control and navigation systems compromising flight safety. Excerpts from the Wired article -

"An FAA document published in the Federal Register (mirrored at Cryptome.org) says, the vulnerability exists because the plane's computer systems connect the passenger network with the flight-safety, control and navigation network...."

"....Boeing spokeswoman Lori Gunter said the wording of the FAA document is misleading, and that the plane's networks don't completely connect. Gunter wouldn't go into detail about how Boeing is tackling the issue but says it is employing a combination of solutions that involves some physical separation of the networks, known as "air gaps," and software firewalls."

Buckle up, log in and crash? Enough to give nightmares... I picture Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri smiling at each other in their caves. Could they have asked for more....?

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This is one innovation I'd rather Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing not push too hard. Jim should know that the ultimate in customer service in his line of business is to deliver fail proof equipment systems that allow pilots to guide the airplane to a safe, smooth touch down on the tarmac, on all its wheels. Giving online comforts to nerdy creeps can wait. I am certainly not a fan of belly landing U-boat style adventures..... Scares the shit outta' me...!

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