Wired

Today I’ve read on Wired that Kindle App has been updated with ability to read comics. Yay! I’ve said, or rather thought, and updated it immediately. And indeed Panel View works great. Reading is pretty smooth. But there is one glitch. I can only read on my phone or in Cloud Reader. No option for tablet. At first I’ve thought that it’s just about my device. But no, some titles, like A Game of Thrones, can be downloaded to tablet. But majority, read - the ones I care about, have only two options mentioned before. So I’m a little bit disappointed, but at least there is some movement in the right direction. And I don’t know if Amazon is doing it because they want to push sales of Kindle Fire, or it’s just publishers will (however I don’t think so), but it really sucks. Oh well, if somebody doesn’t want my money I’ll go elsewhere.

Today I’ve read about Financial Times launching their HTML5 based app (instead one for iPad only) to deliver their content. Good move as it means access for more people. But it’s not what I want to write about today. I wish Wired would do the same. I love this magazine, however to buy it in shop here (Europe) it costs around 12$ per issue, international subscription is better, but still it’s 75$ a year. They have iPad app with annual subscription for 20$, which is acceptable, but you must have iPad. And I don’t want to have iPad! I hope that they would follow Financial Times soon, possible profits should be best incentive. We’ll see.

Another day and another article against netbooks on wired.com. This time it’s much better than last time, but still. I believe expectations of the author are too big. You’ll never have fool comfort with such small device, and I would definitively not even think of writing a book on netbook. However I believe it’s quite cool to serf the net with it, if your websites have more pictures than text. Other accusation is that keyboard is cramped. Well, what do you expect from something so small, again. People, change your attitude. If something is meant to be only a little more than a Pocket PC (at least it’s mine point of view) then don’t expect it to be something else.

This is the title of an article from wired.com, which happens to be my favorite magazine. But this particular article is trash for me. Mainly it’s about how netbooks (like Asus EEE PC) are vulnerable for network attacks, because they’re have no security built-in. Author says that most of such computers have no antivirus installed (but how many notebooks or PCs have?) or users are simply turning them off (antivirus apps), because netbooks have too low performance to handle normal apps and antivirus at the same time (what a bullshit). Of course there is Symantec mentioned (commercial?), and I can agree that most of netbooks would not handle Symantec heavy security package. But even my Core 2 Duo regular laptop with 2GB of RAM had problems with Symantec. And it looks like Symantec knew well about the problem, because they’ve returned me money spent on Norton 360 without even asking why. But please, there are better security apps than Symantec and they don’t need such powerful hardware. Second thing if somebody is so stupid to turn off his firewall and antivirus, well, he deserves what he would get.