Doooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmm.
In the latest sign of trouble in the planet’s chemistry, the number of oxygen-starved “dead zones” in coastal waters around the world has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s, killing fish, crustaceans and massive amounts of marine life at the base of the food chain, according to a study released today.
[From Number of Ocean 'Dead Zones' Doubling Every Decade - washingtonpost.com]
So I have one of the Sony e-book readers, and despite it’s various limitations, I like it. It was a first model, but it let me ditch every public domain book from my collection, and let me carry a small device instead of several boxes when I moved.
Sony’s second version of the reader, the PRS-505, has some cool things that my old model doesn’t. It’s siginifigantly snappier (I played with one at the Sony Store the other day), and it also reflows PDF files. So even though it’s a notebook sized PDF, the Sony will render it readable on it’s much smaller screen. As opposed to the older model, which just shows you shrunken version of a notebook sized page that’s unreadable. It also supports DRM laden PDF, and though I would never buy a DRM’d pdf, I would be able to check out from the library online. This would be kinda cool.
Sony, out of apparent respect for the people who jumped in to be the early adopters on the first model, is now offering to cut the price for the new one by a third if you trade in your old PRS-500. Granted, I’m happy with my reader, and I’m more likely to spend the money on a second-hand iPhone (not for phone service, but as my portable uber-device), but I still wanna give props. Sony, it’s not often, but you’ve done something cool. I salute you.
It’s gonna be an amazing world if you have to grow your own food next door, and you commute to work on a bicycle, but your best friends are still Long Tail anime fanatics from Buenos Aires that you met on Facebook.
[From Globalization death watch | Beyond the Beyond from Wired.com]
Comments Off