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from the there's-an-app-for-that dept.
An Open Source eReader That's Free of Corporate Restrictions Is Exactly What I Want Right Now:
I get it. The Kindle and its ability to shop for and instantly buy books anywhere using wifi or Whispernet are incredibly convenient, and it’s what’s made Amazon’s hardware the obvious choice for consuming ebooks. But supporting awful companies like Amazon is getting harder and harder if you were born with a conscience, and right about now, an open source ebook reader, free of corporate restrictions, sounds like the perfect Kindle alternative.
A fully open-hardware eReader, it includes the following design specs: ARM Cortex M4 processor, 400x300 monochromatic resolution, microSD card reader, lithium-polymer rechargeable battery, audiobook-capable headphone jack, and audio-command-capable microphone.
The Open Book Project was born from a contest held by Hackaday and that encouraged hardware hackers to find innovative and practical uses for the Arduino-based Adafruit Feather development board ecosystem. The winner of that contest was the Open Book Project which has been designed and engineered from the ground up to be everything devices like the Amazon Kindle or Rakuten Kobo are not.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by barbara hudson on Friday January 31 2020, @12:51AM (4 children)
Just in the last 3 hours I've gotten 23 troll mods, a bunch of flamebait mods, etc. And you want to know something? I don't care. I'm still at karma of 45, so mod-bomb away. There are plenty of people who agree with me.
The insane cheer-leading by people because something is "open" but doesn't do the job just begs for being called retarded - or worse, pathological and delusional. Most of the people doing the cheerleading are actually running Windows secretly.
Statistically, linux on the desktop is at a 20-year low. Just look at the stats for steam - you'd figure geeks and nerds, right? More than 95% Windows, and all but 0.33% of the rest are OSX (as of the end of 2019). 1 in 300 among geeks and nerds is a far cry from the turn of the century, when many people used Linux exclusively at home and as their main OS at work.
What's succeeded is closed-off versions, like Android and Chromebooks, run by an advertising company so they can suck up even more of your data. Hardly what we were thinking of as "open" at the turn of the century.
People don't even RTFA any more - attempting to point out that a prototype phone with no sound and no dialer isn't a phone, just a broken tablet, gets you mod-bombed. The vendors keep over-hyping them as a viable commercial project "some time real soon now", so they deserve being called out, as do the people falling for the hype when that hype is clearly contradicted by a couple of decades of history of failures of such projects.
Wilful ignorance is the gift that keeps on giving and giving. Dumb projects like Ubuntu Music and Ubuntu TV (remember Ubuntu TV - hyped all to shit at trade shows until it was discovered that it wasn't really Ubuntu TV, but SammyTV, an independent project to run linux on Samsung TVs). And Vodaphone stopped trying to sell Ubuntu Phone. Since 2014, they're just members of some sort of "advisory board" directed to exploring future possibilities of using Ubuntu on a phone. In other words, a way to back away from a failed product while saving face for a couple of suits.
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(Score: 1) by ze on Friday January 31 2020, @03:07AM (1 child)
I've never even heard of Ubuntu TV, though that's not terribly surprising. I was using MythTV nearly 20 years ago already, but the TV I have now is a loaner and its only signal input is my PC.
I agree a lot of lackluster projects get disproportionate attention, but that's typical of our dumb world in general. As are lip service cheerleaders. I think we're also just so desperate for our rights to be respected by our technology that we'll encourage anything that even seems to look in that direction, even if it doesn't get us there.
As for linux usage rates... I don't track that, but my impression is of a ton more linux users now than there were 20 years ago... It still feels like its own eternal september. AFAIK stats tend to be flawed, for example most gamers who use linux are still forced to use windows for most of their gaming, and a lot of linux users simply don't game, since programming is often fun for geeks and far more gratifying. And from what I hear, steam tends to be hostile to linux users trying to play popular multiplayer games, most of which don't have native ports, and so trigger the anti-cheat bans for being run in wine. Myself, I preordered the linux version of q3a back in the day (and still have the tin box), but I can hardly get into games anymore because they just feel like too much investment into going through motions, pressing the designated levers in a rat maze. When I game at all, it's usually a friend's console and more just as a social activity than anything else. Anyway, if there are legit stats that disagree with my impression, so be it, but it's sad, and to me even strange.
Personally, I've been using linux exclusively for nearly 22 years, and I'm only wondering if a bsd or something would be better, because linux is getting ruined by its misguided efforts to appeal to ignorance. Tech culture assumes everyone else is an idiot, treats them that way, and designs everything accordingly. So everyone's used to coasting on what's handed to them instead of learning to work their own shit like we do for everything else. People manage their finances, drive on the roads with each other, file taxes, DEAL WITH FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS. They can deal with fucking abstractions and complexity, ffs. It's not like a single one of our "intuitive" interface metaphors (boxes, buttons, sliders, etc) existed in the ancestral environment.
But no, linux had to go and emulate windows and start turning to shit. At least gentoo makes it easy enough to avoid the garbagey stuff, but I worry how long that'll last with some of it infesting everything. Windows and apple are aggressively non-options already. I used to recommend apple over windows to anyone who wouldn't be bothered to learn enough for linux, but while they don't seem to regret it, I kind of do. Maybe I was just being lazy and not feeling like helping them get up to speed :(
I feel like anyone who gets at least as far as learning to customize their pointer focus model and write shell scripts ought to grow pretty intolerant of the locked-down dumbed-down crap everyone else uses. I sure as hell have; win, mac, and anything like them behave in an actively obstructive manner in a constant and continuous way to me, and ever trying to use them is like trying to pull teeth from a rabid dog, but more infuriating.
I only recently got a phone, and indeed android is offensive. Not really more than other proprietary software, but still. As I said recently elsewhere: mobile OSs and apps are the worst kind of locked-down, dumbed-down, charge-for-everything, malware-infested, user-tracking, shady load of shit I've ever been subjected to.
Still, whenever I've seen stuff like ubuntu phone, they've always clearly been half-assed efforts with no viable target market, and I've never been surprised that they always fail. TBH I don't actually believe economic systems as we know them are capable of serving anything but corruption anyway; they never deliver more value than they're forced it, I don't care which systems people debate about or who runs them or how. And in particular, trying to capitalize on freedom and openness is a tough fight at best, if not outright paradoxical. You can free slaves, or sell slaves, but you can't sell free slaves!
Anyway, tbh I'm glad I don't expect extant operating systems to prevail in any long term, it's all crap and getting worse. Machine-learning looks like the right fit for ideas and desires that've swirled through my head for decades before I knew what would enable them... I might just start working on that. /pipedreams
It is sad this site, like the rest of the internet, has suffered such a nosedive in comment and discussion quality. Up until a certain point, it was one of my favorite examples of quality discourse in a venue with anonymous posters, and I occasionally posted anonymously for years before I bothered registering, always trying to put enough effort and value in to provide a good example. I mainly registered because it seems more necessary now in order to meaningfully participate, because it's like the average level and expectation of comment quality (and stories, for that matter) dropped a few pegs across the board all at once about, what, about 3 and someodd years ago now? :(
Anyway, I'm mostly tiredly rambling. TBH I've frequently gotten the impression of you doing so as well, might help to disengage a bit? Maybe we should all take more naps. Just a thought.
(Score: 3, Funny) by barbara hudson on Friday January 31 2020, @03:33AM
I had to take it easy the last few days (broken rib from last February that never healed properly caused another pneumothorax Monday). Can you tell I'm bored? Can you? REALLY bored :-) Lots of naps to let it heal over yet again.
Canonical showed off UbuntuTV at CES in 2012 [ubuntu.com], which cost some real $$$.
this blog entry on their site is particularly embarassing in retrospect [ubuntu.com]
Didn't take long for over-hyped UbuntuTV "success" to turn to total failure. All the announced deals ... disappeared.
At the time, UbuntuOne was an online file storage and music service. That didn't work at all, so they re-positioned the name for a single sign-on service, which also failed.
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(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @07:42PM (1 child)
stfu, you ignorant whore. ubuntu touch is alive and well and running on my goddamn phone right now.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday January 31 2020, @08:36PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.