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Skimming is the least of it. Current ebooks, in their linear form, are essentially the equivalent of 19th century horse carriages with motors. "Books" need to be reimagined. While reading is and will remain a fundamentally linear activity, there is no reason why books need to be.

For example: Why is text presented flatly? Isn't that a direct consequence of the limitation of physical paper? Where are the ebooks that allow you to dynamically fold text according to hierarchical order? In a mathematical text, say, sometimes I'd like to highlight the core results; other times, I want to home in on a particular result and highlight the "path" (i.e. the "helper thms" that are needed to establish the core result). Yet other times, I'd like to see the connection between results across sections _on the page_, i.e. without paging back and forth and holding everything in short-term memory. Sometimes I want the author's comments and discussion and "connective tissue"; other times, I don't want to see anything but the structure.

Apple did a good thing, a first step with the option to generate flashcards from your highlighting and notes. This is one extremely obvious thing that ebooks were missing, although I think the implementation is not yet very good, rather clumsy in fact. Sometimes I get frustrated that people keep making ebooks as if they were still limit to the same physical constraints as paper books. The whole form and structure and interaction could be made much more malleable, such that the presentation of ideas "adapts" to your brain rather than your brain adapting to a successive, linear, "rectangular", fixed presentation and compensating for it. It's not like "ebooks" simply means adding a bit of "multimedia" like it's the 90s...
I happily trade the ability to skim for the ability to search by keyword.

The bigger problem with eBooks is that there are a lot of lazy publishers who don't bother proof-reading their ebooks, with the obvious impact on quality.

I've personally resorted to buying the physical book (the cost is the same) and then acquiring high quality "fan made" versions for use on the PC/tablet.
To nitpick, your last conclusion is incorrect: even if the code is a derivative of an existing GPL code, it doesn't inherit the GPL. They may just be in violation of someone else's copyright, but it doesn't give the rest of the world the right to copy their code. It's theirs to license whichever way they see fit. Now, in practice, the easiest way out of infringing on GPL code is to make your own code GPL as well, but it's the author's choice, not the community's.
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Have you tried making half the content free, and the other half unlockable? The majority of the top grossing apps use in app purchases.
But if I repeatedly press "next page", my Kindle doesn't do a full refresh on each turn. It's actually redraws the pages quickly enough to be skimmable.
Wow, what an elegant and simple to use app. It feels a tiny bit sluggish though (or may be its just my firebug pulling me down)
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Good point. I can see how a big user base would help you develop a better product in this industry.

Regarding 'cost of free users', I was thinking of support costs. Even though a user does not pay for the product, they still expect to get help when they run into trouble. And if they don't get help, that could wash away some of the goodwill they might otherwise feel.

Also, bandwidth costs for downloads.
I was under the impression that universities were institutions that distributed knowledge, not entrepreneurial skill factories.

FYI, many schools have had entrepreneurial programs for years (maybe even decades in some cases.) These aren't new, maybe more popular today, but certainly not new.
Very nice job. The only thing is that it I had to click the text name of the effect to turn the effect off. That was a bit confusing at first.
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Yes, I'm getting that now too. Just saw this and updated the post:

http://wordpress.org/news/2009/07/themes-are-gpl-too/

"PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required."
One of the best freemium products I use is github. This discussion made me wonder if they are profitable... (the answer is yes) I dug up this old HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3593980

Other than the "powered by rackspace" in the footer, it's blessedly ad free.
I wonder if you can ride the free push into solid reviews, feedback and a better product that folks will pay .99 for?

Clearly "usage" plays some sort of role in rank, so i think it's good to get a large base of users and then be paid. or something like that.
Well at least they're returning the funds.
What's your conversion rate of free users to paid users?
We don't have a PR firm, but would appreciate the specific examples so we can improve: https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html
I've found that wearing gym shorts makes my opt-out pat-down go much more smoothly.
The one time I was on the bad end of a phone call with a record industry lawyer (I was 21 at the time), I recorded the call. I had heard of previous encounters with this particular PR lady that involved lots of bullying and bullshit, so once the conference call between the lawyer, the PR flack, and myself began, I announced that "For the protection of all parties involved, I am recording this conversation."

It was like I had cast a spell. Everything got VERY professional. By the end of the call, I had schooled said lawyer on fair use and the DMCA - which was at the time still very new - and after the call wrapped, that was the end of the thinly-veiled legal threats.

I didn't even need a lawyer, but I had enough free time to do ample research on related laws, and was very confident that I was completely in the right. I was nervous as hell on the phone, but felt like THE MAN when I got off that call.
There has been no PR firm involved as far as I know, it is being spread by fans and advertising efforts by the founder. In my experience the results are almost always more relevant than google's, especially the 0-click info. I use DDG mostly for programming-related queries, but also normal searching. I have been using it for 99% of my searching for over a year now. There is also a rather large and devoted user base, partly due to the fact that community interaction from the team has been excellent (in my experience).
Wow, fascinating ideas. It'd be amazing to have a textbook that had "adaptive abstraction levels" that let you read only the parts you needed detail on in detail, while tying the rest together in a high-level model that made it more useful; and had several different models into which the data fit, letting you read through the same material in the logical order of each model.
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I appreciate the support, but I actually believe that literature in general, and Shakespeare in particular are important enough to be studied for their own sake. We are the stewards of our cultural heritage, and it is our place to keep it going. Knowing about and thinking about books makes people better in other ways than just giving them skills and tools to apply to other problems. Good art enriches life and humanity.

And having some common points, like all studying Shakespeare, is good because it means we can all talk and think about it together.

Studying the humanities is not necessary for a person to learn to think. I didn't mean to imply that. But studying the humanities can certainly help in that direction, and should be done anyway.
See, and I'd be fine with:

1. $6000/year, OR
2. link-back, OR
3. If neither of these options are chosen within 3 months,
we will disable the service on our end.

The $6k/year price is a bit steep, but that's their prerogative. Similarly, they are well within their rights to disable the service after reasonable notice. They may even be within their rights to sue, but suing clients (or even threatening to) is not the way to Win Friends and Influence People.
Also, once you experience a Florida winter you will always laugh at people who say they "love the seasons ".

If you decide to move there feel free to email me any Orlando specific questions.
Hope this trend picks up!
Nope. It's the era of success by marketing and luck, as it always has been and always will be.

Engineering is, as usual, pretty much irrelevant to success. That includes UX.
I was thinking it would be cool (well, it might only work for me...) to have a "skim" mode on e-readers which let skip, say, 8 pages at a time - but the screen would be horizontally split into 8 sections to show the text from each of the 8 pages.

I only need to see a snippet of text to remind me "oh yeah, it was around here somewhere..." I should whip up a proof-of-concept to test it, I guess.
I heard from the kindle gen 4 announcement that the processor rate has influence on the refreshing speed.
We're going to do that next. Right now we have "courses" which are inapp purchases, but not a portion of the "main course." That's what we will try next: first two chapters free, next five for $1.99.
First, I am as much of an RM fanboy as you can get. I have used RM for a couple years now, and often recommend it to others. RM 3 has been great and keeps me highly efficient (I came from a .net world where I used R# a lot).

So I see RM 4 came out today. Normally with any software I rely on for my day to day work, I wait at least a couple weeks before upgrading. However, against better judgement I start the download and install it.

Now I'm screwed.

700% CPU spikes on project open. Then it hangs, completely unresponsive, chewing up 100% CPU. I went to lunch and upon my return I see it's no longer using 100% CPU but it's still hung.

My scenario, Ubuntu 11.10, i7, 8gb ram.

YMMV, but I'd wait if I were you.

P.S. Anyone from jetbrains, feel free to contact me. I love the product and am confident this is a release day issue that you will get resolved quickly.

Update

I found that opening a smaller project would work, but that the initial (largish) project would not load. After allocating 4gb of ram to RM, it finally opened.

edit this file to do the same: RM_path/bin/rubymine64.vmoptions

I went with these for settings:

-Xms512m
-Xmx4096m
-XX:MaxPermSize=700m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=128m
-ea
I work like this usually. Most I do Python, PHP, Javascript, and database work. I spend the vast majority of my day in iTerm or a web browser. Sometimes I wish I set up something more "integrated" but grep ends up being good enough.

When I worked in Java, I used Eclipse and hated it. Programming felt like filling out a contract.

When I worked in Common Lisp, I used Emacs and in combination with either Slime or Allegro environments. These were ideal to me. It got out of your way, but it had enough power and introspection into the code so that it could find almost anything (function/class defs, etc.) The debugger was also really good.
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From my observations:

The wording of many articles seems to be the result of a carefully applied 'truce' between long-standing edit warriors. Once applied, they tend to unite using terms like 'stable' or 'consensus'. These editors do effectively have "seniority" on that article and the ability to reject changes.

Then a random newcomer bumbles in and unwittingly disturbs the balance, and everyone unites against him. This is what I suspect happened to the author of the piece more so than goofing his citations.
Juniper Networks seems to agree to some extent on that claim:

http://www.juniper.net/us/en/security/

They cite lax submission process, lack of code signing, and review process.

Sure it's a bit-self serving, but I don't imagine they're that far off in their assessment.
I don't know how viable is to launch a satellite to deorbit another. If the janitor satellite could attach itself to a couple dozen other satellites, then it would be a much better option, bu they would have to be in similar orbits for that to work (or you would have to maneuver an increasingly large dead mass).
It is their business and prerogative to charge for access to the widget.

Instead of saying "please stop using our service or start paying" (or face legal consequences), they should have said "please start paying or your widget won't work any more".

That they use legal threats instead of an on/off switch to block access says something about their competence.
..how? Betascapes logo offers an optical illusion showing a third dimension. Betakit uses colour as an indicator to the different news sections that they offer.

If anything, EGEA cosmetics has a similar logo to betascape http://logopond.com/gallery/detail/65824
Completely agree; #3 being the key difference between a more appropriate response and the one they got.
You've listed four people under "Other people to CC".

May I ask what role those people have? Why is it a good idea to email them?
Ah cool,
This is the history of our company and tech in a nutshell. A bootstrapped win.
I read a lot of math too and the points you raise are good ones. I bought a Kindle DX in hopes of jettisoning a large part of my hardcopy math library; thanks to TeX, a huge swath of math literature is available by PDF (most of it free, if you have university access). I guess I wasn't prepared for how cumbersome it would be. Flipping back 10 pages to check a lemma takes, well, 10 seconds. It really detracts from the study experience.

That said, if I may play devil's advocate for a second, another way to look at the linear structure imposed by print is as a useful constraint for conveying thoughts in an effective manner. Every once in a while, I come across a "classic", math or otherwise, where the author has put so much thought into structuring her argument that I don't need to flip around. Invariably I absorb more from these rare gems than I would from a sort of hypertext arrangement, simply because somebody thought hard about the best way to learn the material.

It's funny you mention Apple because this strikes me as a very Apple thing to do--impose something on its users which initially seems quite cumbersome (one-button mouse, no floppy, one-button cell phone, no CD/DVD, hell the whole HIG), but actually turns out to be a clever mechanism for enhancing usability.
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This, incidentally, is the reason why gay men never stop having sex...

Except that gay men do stop having sex for long enough to have careers as thespians, musicians, software executives, etc ad nauseum.

This undermines the whole point of the article.
And what percentage would – like me – delete their account as soon as you send them a plaintext temp password?

You're living in the past if you think this is an acceptable practice. I don't care how trivial your web service is, if you're throwing my password around willy-nilly, I don't want you.
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How are either of those false? The iPod/iPhone/iPad doesn't have a radio, and the App Store still has guidelines against pornography.
I think that one important thing to keep in mind is that user experience is much more than just the interface of the product.

Sometimes, a simple shift in metaphor i.e. Hipmunk's gantt chart is enough to substantially improve the UX, but sometimes it requires an entirely new product strategy to do something revolutionary. Consider Amazon Prime. Is the user interface particularly pretty? No, but the experience of using the service truly is revolutionary, and so far no other retailers can match it because the experience is only made possible by supply chain management and distribution that Amazon has in place.

The iPhone UX was revolutionary because it challenged the entire model of interaction between user and phone. The experience of using an iPhone is the sum total of an astounding number of innovations, only some of which have to do with the UI. Consider the hardware innovations from the glass screen to the proximity sensor, to the hi-res screen in the iPhone 4 that no one expected or anticipated. Then there is the ecosystem aspect, which required not only a fundamental re-thinking about how both users and developers would interact with technology, but also massive distribution which was already in place through iTunes. Of course, the multi-touch interface, and the laser focus on developing quality software for email, messaging, phone, and music, played a huge role in overall UX, but they would not have been possible without the other innovations.

I guess it really all just goes back to the fact that design is how it works, not how it looks, which requires a deep understanding of the problem and needs of the customer, not just the ability to arrange pixels in a pretty pattern on the screen.
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Since moving to the Boston area in the mid 90s, I have never seen an employment agreement or contract with a non-compete clause lasting after employment ends.

YMMV, but you should also be reading and negotiating these things.
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this. I love florida and usually spend a month or two in the winter there. I am not impressed with the people, coming back to boston is a breath of a fresh air. I can move my startup there full time but I don't primarily because of how out of place I feel most of the time (and its too darn hot in the summer)
The DDG !Bang feature is the reason I like to use DDG. I have it as my default search engine in Chrome and I can search just about anything without having to first load a site, enter my query, and click search. I just pop open a tab and write one simple, concise query. Using DDG as sort of a "search portal" is where I find the most value.

For reference, the !Bang list is very large. http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
It's really tough to switch search engines when Google's results are so good the majority of the time. The crux of the problem is that you have to choose. It's more arduous to navigate to a different search engine than it is to repeatedly tweak your query until you get the results you want.

You really shouldn't have to choose search engines though. It'd be great to have the option of seeing results from multiple search engines on the same query, maybe in like split frames, it'd save so much time. I should get started on writing a Chrome extension.
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Even if there is, I'm guessing it would be hard to tell at a glance whether the machine was calibrated by someone with a physics degree or someone who'd be delivering pizzas if it weren't for the growth of the security industry.
I'm reading lots of Scandinavian crime fiction (in translation to English) at the moment.

I have no idea how to pronounce any of the names, so some kind of link from the written name to an audio clip would be useful.

Also, it'd be nice to have some "translator's notes". Perhaps there's some nice phrases in the original that just don't translate well; or some idiom that doesn't have an exact English version.

Sure I can just use a computer and browser and a search engine, but it'd be nicer if it was built in.
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There are advantages and disadvantages to this but as they aren't based in San Francisco they will probably remain more objective.
It's actually pretty disheartening how few e-reader-native e-books there are these days. Most of the e-books I read are simply reformatted paper books. The better ones -- and, anecdotally, I'd say these represent 5% of the e-books I own -- have hyperlinked chapters. It's pretty clear that the big publishers are still treating e-book editions as afterthoughts.

No doubt this will change. E-book consumption is rising rapidly, and it's abundantly clear that the e-reader/tablet/etc. is the future of the industry. But right now, the e-book is still in its infancy, and publishers haven't yet shifted their priorities in its favor.
Horribly designed sites can dominate old markets too. Amazon is the perfect example of why design doesn't matter. Likewise Craigslist and eBay... the list goes on and on. It's all about marketing and luck.
This happened to me when PHPStorm 3 came out, after awhile of having it open, it started to run normal. It's like it had to index all the projects and settings again.
It's interesting to see Bootstrap is slowly turning into what jQuery UI was always supposed to be.
Lets not discuss UX as if it's some well defined term.

Hipmunk is an innovation in user interface design or information design, not something that sprung out of what is normally considered a UX process.

The user experience is everything from how it's designed, to how well it's programmed. It's everything and therefore it's nothing.

It's an industry term not a skill as such.
Looks promising. Trying to alter the workflow of people wanting specific content they can both get illegally and legally.

If in the warning there are direct links to the exact same content on the legal services this could start a wave of more and more people using the legal sites. Since it's that easy to switch.
While I'm glad to see this, I still think he's missing the point. The part where he asks people not to steal his stuff is unnecessary. Of course this will be passed around by friends and pirated on P2P networks. But: the pirates don't count, his customers do. If there's one pirate, how much money do you make? $0. It there are 1,000,000 pirates, how much? Still $0. So don't sweat the pirates. This new system is good because it gives the producers control, and a much more direct relationship with their fans. It's really got nothing to do with levels of piracy.
A. They don't need to remember any password. They're creating it for the first time.

B. Minimum password length/complexity. It's not hard to do.

I can't believe you're actually arguing that creating a new password is less secure than using an auto-generated password that was sent via email. I hope you are just confused...
You are considering the inverse of the matter. The post is about a high quality app being featured. My comment was intended to say that it shouldn't be surprising when a quality app is featured.
Yup, the novelty will wear off over time, just like the "pre-ordering of PC games" space after Minecraft was released.

Minecraft was a huge hit with that model, the others less so.
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Also to add to #3: The NDB C++ API doesn't use raw SQL queries either (it uses a lower lever of abstraction for accessing the database), so it avoids the overhead of having to parse SQL queries. Most production systems and third-party libraries use SQL queries.