This is not intended to start a pro-Apple/anti-Apple flame war. I am one of those people who likes both Apple and Google, which I realize is like supporting both the Israelis and the Palestinians, or liking both Art Garfunkel and Solomon Burke.
Anyway, like many people in math, and, I suspect other academic areas, I have hundreds of copies of books in djvu format, and it’s been my life dreams to carry a few of the classics with me at all times. Now, finally, there is a decent djvu reader for the iPad, called Stanza. Transferring the books is a little slow and it doesn’t support searches yet, but the formatting and readability are off the charts. For me, it’s game-changer for tablet computers.
The Grand Panjandrum
Ooooohhhh … so what books have you loaded?
Dave
Lol, I like both Apple and the PC.
Though Apple’s dev policies for the iPhone suck.
dmsilev
Stanza is actually available for the iPad? I’m a bit surprised, really, since the company that wrote it got bought by Amazon a while back, and I sort of assumed that bits and pieces of Stanza were just going to be borged by Kindle.app.
dms
arguingwithsignposts
I was not aware this was the case. Consider me among your tribe. I always thought it was Apple/Microsoft or Apple/Adobe.
dmsilev
@arguingwithsignposts: Apple/Adobe is so last month. Now it’s Apple/Google, or iOS/Android if you prefer.
It’s just like junior high, except with multibillion dollar corporations instead of cheerleaders.
dms
sal
Finally it’s available? The iPad’s been out for what, a month? Why, it should be implantable by now!
DougJ
@The Grand Panjandrum:
Serre’s Lectures on the Mordell-Weil Group, Hartshorne’s Algebraic Geometry, Spivak’s Calculus (for teaching), Altman-Kleiman’s Introduction To Grothendieck Duality Theory and a bunch of books about model theory, none of which necessarily qualify as classics, but I am trying to learn the material for various reasons.
scav
@dmsilev:
junior high, oh, isn’t that where we just left politics, with the cool kids arguing over whats the proper embroidered patch to have on their polo shirts and just who sits next to who at the lunch table?
MikeJ
@DougJ:
Models don’t go out with math geeks.
ruemara
Not sure why apple/google is like Israel/Palestine.
Dude, it’s just tech. Congrats on getting your reader.
scav
@MikeJ:
That’s Model practice.
ETA: And “just tech” cedes nothing to the Bloody Balkans or the Middle East.
mistermix
On that topic, do any of the Mac people here know if iOS 4 supports some kind of filesystem? I did see that it supported multitasking, but haven’t heard whether the file functionality was beefed up.
Kirk Spencer
Something I’ve noticed is that the really desirable pieces of software either migrate or are effectively duplicated across the winbox/apple divide.
FWIW, I think the iPad and its winBox competitors are here to stay, and will gradually become common use items. What they lack and will gradually get will be:
– voice interface. See Nuance’s programs. (if’n I were in the industry I’d be making a serious offer to Nuance: I pay 5-10% but put it on EVERY computer I make, exclusive for two years. That makes a massive increase in Nuance’s gross, and it makes my computers the ones that “hear and obey.”
– far less overt smart terminal process, using clouds or connection to dedicated larger processors as appropriate without making it obvious to the user.
– indirect transfer capability. This is here, iPad doesn’t include it. My personal expectation is the SDXC (2 TB at 100MB/sec max capability, current production 32GB @ 60MB/sec.) For comparison, the nominal read speed for a 7200 rpm internal hard drive is ~70MB/sec, though rates of 1.6GB/sec are available if you’re willing to pay the price. Sometimes users will want to transfer data without interconnecting their devices.
– Display options. Everybody’s going to see major improvements in display quality over the next couple of years. There will be a constant tension between portability and ease of viewing (larger displays), for which the working solution is the ability to switch easily between both.
I have this suspicion we’ll see what amount to industry standard docking stations that allow connection from our portable to the local larger display/increased processor/wired 9for privacy and speed) connection.
By the way, I’m basing all this on science fiction memes. Excluding neuro connections — thought controlled computers — the above are what everyone seems to want/expect.
Daddy-O
Call me culturally illiterate, but…
…Solomon Burke…?
Otherwise, I’m with you on Apple and Google.
Bill E Pilgrim
@dmsilev: Stanza is what I was using on the iPhone also before I realized that you could just download a Kindle app.
By the way, I also just discovered the Kindle software for the PC (I find these things slowly) and it’s great. This way I can download whatever I want and read it on the PC and put off deciding about an iPad while I see how the first model shakes out and what they improve in the second.
Steeplejack
Off topic, but could we have a World Cup open thread? It’s blazing across the big-ass TV even as I post.
Tattoosydney
@Steeplejack:
Oh, so this.
burnspbesq
@MikeJ:
Perhaps, but math geeks can fantasize about math geek Danica McKellar.
Bill E Pilgrim
I’ve always wondered, does the djvu reader render everything without vowels?
Frmts Lst Thrm, Chptr tw
PurpleGirl
OT: DougJ: Can you recommend a text for a math phobe to learn calculus? When I was in college, way back when at NYU, they used Morris Klein’s Calculus: An Intuitive Approach. (Klein was a professor in the School of Education’s Mathematics Department.) I dropped out of calculus and dropped out of my chemistry major. I’ve always wanted to retry learning calculus. (When I worked as a mathematics typist at NYU’s Courant Institute most professors thought I understood their mathematics because I made their work look so good on the page. I finally told one professor, “If I understood PDEs would I be typing them or would I be in school for mathematics.”)
PurpleGirl
@Bill E Pilgrim: You mean it disemvowels everything? As the moderators at Making Light do to jerks in comment fights.
JonJ
PurpleGirl: My wife the mathematician recommends “Anton, the old one.” I guess she means Howard Anton’s “Calculus.” But definitely not the new one, she says.
mds
@DougJ:
Various nefarious reasons, you mean. Gad, I basically recognize algebraic geometry and calculus in that list. Can you believe that I once had a scheme to specialize in mathematical physics, because I wanted to make a bundle? I eventually learned that I was in the wrong category.
Hang on, aren’t you one of the bloggers who’s in Roch-cha-cha? And you’re an academic? As a URMC grad, this makes me snoopy.
Also, why a request for a World Cup open thread? Didn’t the Blackhawks already win? :-P
Bill E Pilgrim
@PurpleGirl: Oh do they? I’ve never heard of that, sounds like fun.
Well, djvu stands for déjà vu, is my understanding. So just had always wondered.
The Other Chuck
Enjoy it for as long as you are permitted to run it.
I’m normally the last person to go rallying around the Free Software flag, but what can I say, Apple turned me into a raving partisan.
DaddyJ
@Bill E Pilgrim: On the iPhone, I actually prefer Stanza’s user interface to Kindle’s. I particularly like the ability to look up dictionary definition for a word.
And I’ll back DougJ up on being bemused by the idea that you have to hate either Apple or Google. I like both. I’ll start to hate one or the other when they do something comparable to tying a web browser inextricably into an operating system just to lock up the market.
I don’t think either company is that evil/stupid.
Barry
@PurpleGirl: Try ‘Calculus for Dummies’. I looked at it last year, and the first couple of pages might have kept me from flunking it the first time I took it.
CalD
Why can’t we all just get along? I’ve spent roughly equal parts of my computing career cussing pretty much every hardware/software platform out there. I use a Mac by day and Windows boxes by night and will venture into Linuxland when necessary. I am fairly conversant with all of the above and they all have their relative strengths, but they all suck in some way or another. The question of which is best really comes down to a matter of which one sucks least in whatever area you need most for it to work to accomplish a given task. There are no absolutes.
JWC
RE Google, I do some research on medical cases on my home computer, and use Google every day. I have tried some of the other search engines, and they don’t hold a candle to Google. Not even close.
I would love to have an I Pad, just for fun, and to read books on. But I’m waiting for a while, since it would be a frivilous purchase.
DougJ
@PurpleGirl:
Spivak if you are hardcore. Harvard calc for a kinder gentler approach.
Martin
I just wish I could get some people to take up the MathML effort in WebKit. That’s a real glaring omission for WebKit browsers, and will be felt heavily on the iPad rather soon I think.
PurpleGirl
@Bill E Pilgrim: When a commenter responds in troll mode and the moderator decides she/he doesn’t care for the comment, instead of deleting it, she/he leaves the comment up but removes the vowels. Anyone who wants to read it still can and respond if they want to. There have been long threads where fights ensued with the trolls or rude person being disemvoweled. One fight, the troll was insisting that he was being hacked by Making Light. It was quite funny.
Jay in Oregon
@mistermix:
They have Folders so you can group related apps under a common icon instead of using the pages of apps.
But no, no access to the filesystem that I’m aware of.
mds
@DougJ:
Is Moise still considered good? Though that’s probably difficult to get hold of anyway, unless there’s a reprinting available.
PurpleGirl
DougJ, Barry and JonJ: Thank you for the recommendations.
Fred Fnord
Just to comment on the Google/Apple thing:
Practically everyone at Google uses at least one Apple product. (iPhone, Mac, or both. The people not using Macs are using Linux machines, but there are significantly fewer of them.) A number of people on the Android team use iPhones.
Everyone at Apple uses Google products. The chances of Bing making any significant inroads into Apple are essentially zero. Everyone at Apple uses Google maps. I know of over a dozen people at Apple who use Google voice.
Everyone at Apple likes Google stuff. Everyone at Google likes Apple stuff. Sometimes Google and Apple, as companies, clash a bit. Sometimes they don’t. There is no war here.
Apple vs. Microsoft? War. Apple vs. Adobe? Apple never forgave Adobe for trying to hasten their demise back in 1997 (and boy were they trying, pressuring desktop publishing people, one of the last big Apple sectors back then, to abandon Apple for MS and publicly talking about how glad they were going to be to not have to do cross-platform development.)
But Apple and Google? Jeez, they’re practically brothers. They even have similar types of obnoxious excesses: Apple wants to control what you can do on their devices, and Google wants to record everything you ever do for marketing purposes.
—fred
Matt
@Martin:
Hear, hear. To be fair, a number of mathml rendering bugs have been left to fester even in Firefox. I’m told MathJax may be the ultimate solution.
Nylund
I think calculus would be a lot more popular if Newton’s name had stuck. “The Science of Fluxions” sounds way more fun.
cleek
@PurpleGirl:
just so everybody knows (because it’s very important that everyone knows!) my pie filters all include disemvowelling capability- they were disemvowellers first, in fact. inspired by Making Light, of course.
mds
@cleek:
It’s true, PurpleGirl. M. cleek’s script is a floor wax and a dessert topping. And it’s available for Balloon Juice with mds predefined in it, since that’s the only explanation for why “I once had a scheme to specialize in mathematical physics, because I wanted to make a bundle” wasn’t met with widespread acclaim. That’s mathematical humor gold right there. Yup, the pie filter is the only possible explanation. Which is why you can’t read this comment, either.
Oh, and if you have access to a university library, see if they have a copy of Moise’s “Calculus,” 2nd edition.
Matt
@mds:
I laughed, at least.
licensed to kill time
I have no idea what a djvu reader even is. I read this at first as a “deja vu reader”, which would be pretty awesome. Wait, come to think of it, I have one of those in my head. Haven’t I read this somewhere before?
Ruckus
@MikeJ:
Models don’t go out with math geeks.
Wrong kind of models. But you knew that.
I was thinking model trains for DougJ, but it could have been airplanes..
vaux-rien
Solomon Burke is an old soul singer, pretty awesome, he did a country album a few years ago which was decent. I didn’t get the Burke/Garfunkel reference but Google reveals that it’s from High Fidelity, although I think the movie changed it to Marvin Gaye, because “…Solomon Burke…?”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ymmn54MfQEs
I’ve had no trouble liking both, Garfunkel’s solo stuff is soft as hell but he rules on the high harmonies.
I still have a soft spot for Apple but I’m not going to buy another iPhone OS device unless they allow some normal file access and open up the hardware at least a little bit (I want a stereo line-in on the dock connector that doesn’t cost a fortune and works across apps, I could make my own but they really, really don’t want me too). It seems like since they took Breakout off the iPod the spirit of Woz has disappeared. Android doesn’t have any hardware I want yet but my hopes are definitely in that direction.
Sarah in Brooklyn
i use stanza on my iphone – i like it better than the kindle app
Katie
I use Stanza, Calibre, and Kindle apps between my pc, mac, and iphone. Of all of them I like the Kindle app best.
I borrowed a friends Ipad last weekend and am unimpressed. I really wanted to like it, but it fell short on so many levels that there’s no way I’d buy one.
Rebecca
@PurpleGirl:
For a lot of people, problems w/ pre-calc complicate the situation. Unfortunately I’ve never met a pre-calc book that didn’t suck, but wikipedia is awesome for math!
a scheme… to make a bundle… I feel like Side-Show-Bob after stepping on his 23 rake. Why do mathematicians love arcane puns? Why?