Google Books is paying

Google would pay $125 million to settle two copyright lawsuits where his book-scanning efforts were compromised by the Association of American Publishers.

The new agreement will allow Google to show a 20% of each scanned bookto the users without paying anything. The full text could also be available for a certain price. This could be a good measure but thinking on technical or scientific books I wonder if this 20% is a big big mistake.

The NYT explains that Google plans to take 37 percent of the revenue, leaving 63 percent for publishers and authors.

Sony eBook Reader PRS-505 (part 2)

After being with the Sony PRS-505 e-book reader for a couple of months and testing it with different contents (books, articles, blogs)., the final conclusions are:

• e-Ink tech is on his first steps;
• Color is a must have for our market (e-Ink is still B&W);
• Lack of interactivity is a big problem;
• Battery in the Sony reader is amazing (10 days in active mode)
• As a simple reader is very good, but don t ask for more. Very simple solutions could be created for this reader, but this is not our interest right now (iPhone solutions are).
• Music player integrated is awful (horrible sound quality)
• A technology to allow reformatting texts is needed (so you are allowed to increase text size).
• iREX should be my next Laboratory Toy.

A good reason to change to Mac

A research company has determined that using Mac in a business environment is better than using Windows PCs from two points of view: time and money. That means, changing to Mac is a logical move if we want to increase efficiency and generate internal cost savings.

Nucleus Research has been doing a study in a company with 1700 employees.
Mac and Pcs are both used in this same company and after the analysis, Nucleus reported two important issues:

1) Macs have 33 per cent fewer problems than Windows PCs in a business environment;
2) Mac trouble tickets are closed 30% quicker.

Conclusions are obvious: people using Mac could have 33% more time to be efficient and, if they have problems with their Macs, they can go back to work much quickly than PC users.

That seems to be a very good reason to change to Mac

They know too much

How many web sites have you visited lately? How many forms have you completed with your data?

We use the net intensely and our searches for information include giving our data to a wide variety of companies. People know their data is used just for the purposes described in the Privacy terms and conditions of each web. And, commonly, those provisions are tolerable and adequate if look at them carefully.

The problem starts when you don t remember where your data is stored and want to recover some privacy. Many people I know fill forms from many different projects every week. Even if they are systematic in saving their web surfing history, it s very easy to fail to remember all services in where they are considered customers or users.

But the problem is much more complex.

When a person needs to decrease (or even eliminate) his exposure in the net, he is facing an enormous and extremely intricate problem. He probably can get in touch with the companies to erase his personal data from their registers, and this is not complicate. Where suffering begins is because he also has to contact the big search engines in order to delete the traces they store (without his permission). That is a genuine problem.

Who has ever expressly accepted the use of his data (in the most comprehensive and wide definition of this concept) stored by the search engines?

See also this article from New York Times.

Amazon S3 - Not a real backup service

Backing up your information is not always as safe as we suppose. Amazon offers a service called Simple Storage Service (S3). It is an inexpensive solution for those who have to backup several files and want to use the Internet for this.

In just a few hours, I had my 4 Gb backup uploaded with Jungledisk to S3 and being updated every 15 minutes. I just made one mistake: to encrypt the data with the secret key Amazon provides to you.

I enjoyed this service till I had a little problem with my Mac and then: chaos, I lost all information stored.

Yes, my hard drive was suddenly dead (something related to the main index of it) and all information in it was lost. But I had my S3 backup so, presumably, I had nothing to worry about. Wrong concept fellows!

I reinstalled everything in my computer including Jungledisk to recover all my data back to the disk. The problem was I had lost the secret key given by Amazon and had to generate another one to access my backup files. Since then, accessing those files was impossible due to a different encrypting key (which is absolutely normal). I contacted Amazon S3 support to recover the lost key in order to recover all my files but SURPRISE! they do not backup this information at all so the answer was: We are sorry but all your information is positively gone forever.

I ceased the service immediately and recommend my friends, at least, to save the Key in five different places just in case something happens to their computers, because Amazon does not backup.

Personal ambitions

I have read in a Spanish newspaper that Spanish teenagers would like to be civil employees or employees at a big department store.

This article does not seem to be important except by the fact that we consider those jobs tedious, monotonous and easy. Those occupations drive people to just comply with their assignments and work in automatic mode.

If this is so (of course there can be exceptions), it makes me think that this generation has a limited ambition or, worse, does not have any at all. It seems to me that values are changing.

To see that this is happening not only in the professional but in the personnel field also makes me feel sad. Many years ago I was coordinating, with some colleagues and friends, a university sports club. We used to have more than 1300 associates. Every year, we made competitions between faculties or within our own faculty and the participation was surpassed year after year. Months ago I was again in my beloved Faculty of Law and the club of sports had disappeared. Competitions do not exist anymore and the last census of associates shows twenty people.

If in the professional field we do not want to ambition too much, I can understand that (certainly, thats not me). But from the personal perspective, people without ambitions and motivations that help and drive them to improve their lives, I simply cannot understand. Unfortunately, this is happening with teenagers in Spain.

TECH - Where does information go ?

I use to read The Economist and Fast Company magazines when I'm waiting at the airport or flying. A few days ago I was reading some articles in those jornals and I realized that they are small pieces of text. Nothing compared to the traditional articles we could found, for example, in traditional legal journals. In fact, articles (in the broadest meaning of the word) are changing from full lenght studies of a reality, idea or thought, to a sort of fast and short commentaries compiling as much information as possible.

The same thing happens with articles published in the newspapers: we have an increasing number of texts and they become shorter and shorter.

Make a test: go to a library, read a newspaper from the 60's and count the total number of articles. Now do the same with a recent newspaper and you will obtain a much higher number of works. Where does the information go ?

Do you think we accumulate more thoughts and ideas and the small pieces of text we are receiveing from the publishers are just updates of those things? or, is information changing its structure and presentation to allow us understand a much more complex world?

I really don't know but the increasing number of communications/informations and the increasing number of sources (blogs, podcasts) are making us short-text-readers. What will be the consequences of this fact?

Mac - Apple Support cannot help

A few months ago I bought one of the iPod games: Zuma. It's a quite nice game you can play several times without being bored.....and a bit addictive. I put the game in my iPod but forgot to make a copy of the original download.

Four weeks ago, I changed my Macbook Pro Core Duo to a Core 2 Duo and transfered all information to the new laptop. The problems start there. In the first actualization of my iPod I had a problem with the Zuma game. An error message recommended a new clear installation of the original game. The problem was I did erase the original installation (the big mistake) and then asked iTunes Store to give me a copy of the game.

Unfortunately, the Support Desk told me that thay cannot give me anything and that the only solution for my problem was to buy again the software. Even if there is a problem with the original download software (it can be corrupted) Apple do not take any responsability once you've paid for it.

My advice: download several times your iPod games to different drives so you can use one of the copies in case you got problems.